Modder finishes a nine-year Xbox 360 hack with a $4 Raspberry Pi Pico

[Kev94]

A Scottish hacker has finally finished an Xbox 360 modding project he started nine years ago, using a tiny microcontroller that costs about four dollars. Tom's Hardware's Bruno Ferreira reports that Joshua Kennedy bought a Matrix Coolrunner modchip back in 2017 but shelved the project

The method he used is the famous reset glitch exploit from 2011. It sends a signal timed to within nanoseconds to the processor's reset pin, which causes the CPU to mis-execute an instruction. That tiny error is enough to bypass Microsoft's cryptographic checks and run unsigned code

Kennedy used a Raspberry Pi Pico, costing around four pounds or dollars, to do the heavy lifting. He dumped the console's NAND flash memory with a tool called PicoFlasher, then used timing files created by a modder known as Octal450, which are different for each hardware revision. He flashed them to the Coolrunner using the same Pico

The project comes just a week after the release of PeerPressure, a persistent soft mod for the Xbox 360. The console scene is clearly still active, years after Microsoft stopped making the hardware

It is a lovely story of persistence, and a reminder of how cheap and capable microcontrollers have become. Tools that once needed expensive programmers now cost less than a coffee. Retro console hacking has never been more accessible

Have you ever modded a console? And why does the Xbox 360 scene stay so active?

Modder finishes nine-year Xbox 360 voltage glitch mod with a $4 microcontroller, cracks the console open - tiny microcontroller dumps NAND and flashes timing files to bypass CPU cryptographywww.tomshardware.com