Homebrew

What made the Xbox be different from the other gaming consoles?

And so the Xbox community saw the appearance of commercial modchips, many more pirate game release groups, and more people interested in continuing to hack the hardware. But what really made the Xbox different from the other gaming consoles was that it was the first console ever to introduce a hard disk and a PC-like structure. So once the Xbox was hacked, a whole new dimension, completely different from what other previously hacked gaming consoles had ever offered, appeared: Homebrew. Homebrew is the term used for home-made software that can run on the Xbox. This is what made the Xbox hacking scene so unique because people with different interests started to make applications for the Xbox that turned it into more than a gaming machine. Emulators for old consoles like the NES, SNES, Game Boy, Nintendo64, Virtual Boy, Atari7800X, Sega Genesis, Playstation 1, and many others. Applications to make the DVD in the Xbox Region Free were among the first ones to pop up. Then came the incredible Media Players, which allowed you to convert your Xbox into a Media Center: you could play any imaginable media format (mp3, avi, mov, jpg, mpeg, etc…) stored either in the Xbox hard drive or on a server.

The Xbox Media Center Player, homebrew software run directly on a Microsoft Xbox. It permits you to see or hear any type of digital media, along to call other programs, check the weather, and many other things.

This really sparked the scene, as hundreds of people started working on different projects that would interest them. Xbox-Scene.com would report on either new or updated software every single day, sometimes multiply times a day. But the website had to be really careful in order to prevent its shutdown: it would provide information on every piece of software developed or updated, but it would only post links to download the software of those that were coded using completely legal methods (i.e. no Microsoft code). See an example of a news article posted that is: Legal. Illegal. Furthermore, as the legality question started to heat up and the community became bigger, Xbox-Scene had to be extremely cautious: providing people with enough information as to keep the community growing, but not being able to disclose the location for such files deemed “illegal” by Microsoft. Look at the ending statement of this news post. And this is why a second, perhaps more important yet at the same time more underground, community was formed in the IRC space. IRC works like an online chat and everything is much more open: files were shared on servers hosted by many different people and information was easily available. Both virtual communities shared members, but people behaved different in each of them; sort of like a little boy that doesn’t curse in front of his parents but is the meanest kid in the playground.

Along with the homebrew software frenzy came the greatest fear of game developers: the unauthorized reproduction and distribution on the net of their games. Many dedicated their time to making software to rip games and then transfer them to the Xbox. With the hacking advances came the option of installing bigger hard disks on the Xbox. Xboxes’ hard drives weren’t only full with movies and other media but also with games. Xbox “modders” ” (term used to define those who modify their systems) could download games from the Internet and send them to their Xbox using one of the many different pieces of software developed by community members. Complete Xbox games were shared primarily on newsgroups, torrents, and IRC’s Fileservers most commonly known as fserves. Pirate game release groups started emerging at an incredible rate and they competed with each other to see who could release more games at a faster rate and make unreleased titles available on the net.

On to The Players