YHK - yet another hacker news clone

No it's not. For starters the recently released softmod does not work on all Xbox 360 revisions.

You can just throw it on the filesystem and the console will accept it. I believe it would require a system update to add the executable to a revocation list, which Microsoft is unlikely to do. It's not the only method of achieving initial code execution either.

I just started digging into hacking 360s this week, and I'm blown away by how simple it is once you cobble together some files from a few github repos...

>You can try to use the exploit with a SSD if you choose, however, for optimal boot times and reliability it's recommended to use a mechanical HDD instead

is also very amusing to read

It doesn't suck, but it certainly isn't the best and I've always found the Playstation stans' insistence on it being the greatest possible design to be hilarious because we know exactly how it came to be.

The SNES controller is pretty universally agreed to be great and has more or less defined the standard layout for digital gamepads since then. Given the history between Sony and Microsoft I don't think anyone disputes that the original digital PSX pad is basically a legally-distinct evolution of the SNES pad, made mostly better other than the then-patent-encumbered D-pad. It's a top tier digital input device and allowed for a very easy transition for 2D franchises established on the SNES.

When the N64 however it became immediately clear that 3D gameplay really benefitted from analog inputs, and Sony was caught with their pants down having barely even launched a full size analog joystick at that point. The Dual Analog was quickly put together by slapping two analog sticks on to the standard PSX gamepad in the least disruptive way possible, which was a perfectly fine solution for the time but absolutely not the way to get the best analog controls.

Then they freaking stuck with it instead of designing a controller optimized primarily for 3D play. To this day the Playstation platform has a controller that is derived from one of the best 2D digital gamepads ever to exist but where 3D analog support remains more or less bolted on to the bottom.

Again, it's not terrible, but I find it hilarious how many people insist it's peak controller design overall when it's more of a historical accident.

If I'm playing SNES emulators, I reach for my PS3 gamepad. If I'm playing 3D games, I reach for my Xbox One gamepad. I only ever play 3D games with PS controllers when they're exclusive to PS platforms that aren't yet emulated

You would need a juicy target, easy to procure for cheap for the effort to make sense.

It's probably doable, though I suspect that more recent models are probably better protected against that sort of attack. These are performance-oriented chips though, not security-oriented, so they probably make a few compromises. They may also use chiplets with a more secure "secure element", I have no idea (though you still need to communicate with it).

I don't think I've seen anyone attempt it, so it may be that they haven't specifically hardened their designs against these attacks.

Then comes the question of practicality: would you solder a "modchip" to your GPU? It may even be hard to reach the correct spot without interfering with cooling.

I would bet that this is doable with the same setup as the RP2350 hack, but that requires drilling into the specific chip that you are targeting, so great, but not very useful: there probably aren't many secrets to extract, you could decrypt the BIOS (I thought these were just signed with asymmetric keys?) and try to find an exploit in the code there, I guess. But this specific technique is not useful for putting your own firmware then using the chip.

Anyway, it's probably doable to glitch the power supply of some mid-to-late 2010s nvidia GPUs to have it accept custom BIOSes, though graphics card are specifically designed to keep the power supply stable, so you would have to desolder a lot of capacitors (and reconnect them after startup is finished?).

To put it bluntly: yes. The upside is that people stick around for a long time, so you get to know your coworkers, and people treat each other nicely.

> If those employees were uneasy was part of that driven by lack of opportunities for their skill set?

Definitely. Sometimes people are unhappy with their job but they don't want to move. So they either stick with a job they don't like, or get out of the GPU niche. Nowadays more people work remotely, so there is more mobility than there used to be, but you still have a very short list of places where you realistically want to work at, so people rarely burn any bridges.

> I'd imagine this is a niche where everyone knows each other no?

Yeah, it is a pretty small world. People are usually hired straight out of college, or they are poached from a competitor.

There is a lot of specialized knowledge, so it takes years for people to really be productive. I left AMD/Qualcomm after nine years and I was finally beginning to understand how that GPU worked. I then spent five years at NVidia and left frustrated with how little I had managed to learn about that behemoth. They are immensely complex systems.

> I wonder if this legacy would allow easier decomps of Xbox 360 software to run on Adreno GPUs?

Oh, such a good question! Let me think.

I don't know how much of the hardware was exposed in the XBox 360. If it was all standard DirecX, then the underlying hardware won't matter (modulo performance). But if they exposed some of the internal quirks, such as the aforementioned GMem, that could be easier to emulate on hardware of the same family. But only if that new hardware also exposes those hardware features, which is not a given.