Console-Resistance

My friends at www.dcemu.co.uk have posted an update on how homebrew is going now on the established current generation consoles.

Well, I remember seeing something called the "State of Homebrew as of August 2007" on DCEmu before I joined.

Since a lot has changed in the homebrew world, why not post another update?

MICROSOFT XBOX 360:

So far, there is not really any easy way to boot unsigned code on the Xbox 360, however, Team Xecuter of Xbox 1 fame, has been working at hacking the Xbox 360 for awhile now, and at one time promised us that they would hopefully succeed in finding a good exploit by 2008.
As of right now, there are two methods of booting homebrew on the Xbox 360.

Method #1 - Join the XNA club and develop or try out free homebrew games.

Method #2 - Use the shader-exploit in Peter Jackson’s King Kong: The Video Game discovered by the Wii60 team. This method, however, is nowadays out of the reach of many, as it only worked between updates 4532 and 4548 (which is Halloween 2006 - November 2006). This also required a serial cable and your Xbox 360 to be modded to boot a special version of the King Kong game. But if you did everything properly, you could boot Linux (I’ve seen uBuntu working on youtube)!

NINTENDO WII:

As of right now, the Nintendo Wii is the only seventh generation console that has been hacked and is able to boot unsigned code. The Wii scene is right now beating the PSP scene and has a lot of good homebrew here and on the way, like a homebrew Nintendo 64 emulator (and apparently Sega CD emulation).

As of right now there are a few methods of running homebrew/unsigned code on the Nintendo Wii.

Method #1 (recommended) - Use the Twilight Hack exploit in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.
All you do is put it on an SD card, copy it to your Wii, boot Twilight Princess, load the game, move around, and it crashes the game due to some sort of buffer overflow, which results in the ability to boot unsigned code, from where you can install the Homebrew Channel.

Method #2 - Use the more modernized version of SD Media Launcher and boot Gamecube Homebrew.
This used to be the popular method of playing Homebrew on the Wii, but has since become obsolete thanks to the Twilight Hack.

SONY PLAYSTATION 3:

As of now, PS3 comes in 4th Place, behind the PSP, Wii, and DS and ahead of the Xbox 360. As of right now, there are 2 methods of booting homebrew on the Playstation 3.

Method #1 - The PS3 is able to run homebrew on Linux, with fullspeed NES, Super Nintendo, and Sega Genesis/Megadrive emulation. Sadly, there’s a limit, as Sony made it so you cant really use all the power PS3 offers in Linux mode (I believe it has something to do with the GPU and not being able to use all cell cores).

Method #2 - With the 20GB (American/Japanese), US 60GB, EU 60GB, and 80GB PS3s, you are able to boot PS2 homebrew. Even though the PS2 wasnt very popular in the homebrew world, it still has NES (FCEUltra PS2), Sega Genesis/Megadrive (PGEN), and a decent SNES Emulator (SNES-Station).

In March of 2008, Dragula96, a respected PSP coder, posted a video on YouTube showing a Hello World Exploit. This means that we might actually see some good things in terms of homebrew down the road for the PS3.

To read more on the rest of them go here

Joystiq have posted up a bingo card for predictions of each of the big press conferences, filled with some likely (and some not-so-likely) predictions for what each of the big three console makers intends to announce at arguably the biggest trade shows of the year.

First up to bat is Sony (special thanks to PS3 and PSP Fanboy), whose Tuesday conference we hope sheds some new light on Home, the next Heavenly Sword and perhaps some new PSP functionality. Click on each of the slides above for more information about our predictions. Sony’s E3 press conference is scheduled for next Tuesday at 10:00 am PT (that’s 1:00 pm Joystiq Time / ET). As always, we’ll be liveblogging the event, so you can play along in real-time with us.

Stay tuned for more press conference bingo cards in the days leading up to the conference.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz has posted that Sony has confirmed that PS3 firmware update 2.41 is now available for download.

Last week Sony was forced to withdraw update 2.4 following technical issues on the day of release.

In a post on the US PlayStation blog, PSN boss Eric Lempel has stated the update was recalled "because, for a limited number of users, the XMB wouldn’t display after the update was installed".
The problem has been fixed, according to Lempel. "We want to extend our apologies to the PlayStation community for any inconvenience," he wrote.

The update brings XMB and Trophy features to the PlayStation 3.

Nyko technologies the premier gaming peripherals manufacture, has revealed details for its upcoming media hub for the PS3.

The hub adds three USB sockets and a media card reader that supports SD cards and memory sticks.
The extra USB ports will allow three extra devices such as flash drives, psp, mp3 players and additional controllers.
The hub draws its power from the PS3 so doesnt require any additional modifications.

“we found that many of our customers who purchased the popular 40 GB version of the PS3, which has less USB ports and no media reader, were looking for an affordable solution to expand these features”, said chris arbogast, director of marketing at nyko.

Source nyko

The first in-game footage XMB has been demostrated on a firmware 2.40 PS3.
As you can see the clock and date displayed in the upper right, and a quick tap of the Playstation button you can get the google search bar and the ability to play and control your own music stored on the harddrive in-game.

You can get more info and the video here
source

The different years of consoles have shown an evolution in gaming at home, originally powered by the arcade industry trying to reproduce the same popular games, each generation of console has offered something new to the gamer.
The Atari 2600 offered colour graphics and varied games, and had many of the popular arcade games, the Nintendo NES had even greater colours and better sound and had started to bring the arcade experience home, plus made consoles a household name “he’s playing his Nintendo”.

The 16bit generation brought with it bigger games cd sound and amazing graphic abilities using purpose graphic chips, and for the first time a system that let you play the same arcade game at home, the neogeo was released, however with games costing into the hundreds it wasnt cheap, but went on to release its final game snk vs capcom which was ported to the 128bit consoles.

The 32bit generation brought the gap even closer to the arcades with Playstation and saturn hardware in popular arcade games, meanwhile the controllers brought lightguns stearing wheels, analogue controls and rumble, to create a more entertaining experience.

At this point the arcade had hardware almost identical to its home counterpart, with the dawn of the 128bit generation brought the sega naomi and dreamcast, with the dreamcast being the first to achive this, and became a major selling point when the console had launched, being able to see and play the game first in the arcade then get to play the near identical game later at home a few months later was certainly an exiciting prospect, and with a vms not only did the memory card turn into a portable game, but allowed you to take it to the same arcades and show off your skills in public…well it could of.
But this generation of consoles brought online play to the mass’s, offering a far greater audience then ever before and allowing downloads to increase the longertivity of a game, this generation of consoles had certainly been the biggest leap for your average gamer, with games now in their gigabytes it offered epics and cinematic experiences.
But what about the controllers.
Analogue was now standard but clever technolgy allowed voice reconition, video cameras that let you be in the game, and all sorts of other controllers from fishing to buzzers!?
Oh and did i mention samba de amigo?
A game that had great praise from nintendo which allowed detection of where the sambas where positioned, and a party game that even the non gamer could have a go at.
Sadly it was on a doomed console, and sega as a console manufacter had ended.

Which brings us onto the current generation, a generation of consoles that started with nintendo hyping the wii by talking about the controller!
A controller that could detect its possition…
Wait didnt samba de amigo do that?

The wii had certainly changed how people play games, no longer could you just sit in front of the tv with a joypad in your hands, now if you had to hit something you had to hit it using the wiimote to effect the action on screen.
So long to getting obese by playing to many games, though doing other injury’s to yourself had increased if you were to over do it!
Online play now standard and greatly improved has meant solo gaming and arcades a thing of the past.
With the advent of high definition tv, games have never looked so good either with ps3 and xbox 360 outputting their games at hd.

But whats next for gaming, we certainly have got lots to look forward to in playing games in other ways never thought possible, but with companys such as sony aiming to premote the multimedia capabilitys of their consoles it seems the future might not be gaming related after all..