The State of Homebrew on 7th Generation Consoles

July 9th, 2008, 12:46 Posted By: Eviltaco64

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.

SONY PSP:



The PSP has probably had the biggest homebrew scene so far. Starting in 2005 with an exploit in Wipeout Pure, which viewed HTML in a browser. Hackers used this to find the Address of the UMD Drive, and found out that the PSP's executable file was EBOOT.PBP.
Since then, there has been custom firmware, PSP phone (official and homebrew), numerous applications (like iRShell and PSPTube), and not to mention Fullspeed PS1 emulation and decent N64 emulation.
As of July 9, 2008, the PSP scene is still going strong. Although not as strong as it was in 2006 and 2007, it is still getting many homebrew releases everyday.

There are several methods of booting homebrew on the PSP, but I will discuss the more popular ones.

Method #1 - For firmwares up to Official Firmware 3.50, there are numerous exploits. Starting at Firmware 3.03, you needed the unpatched Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories. Firmware 3.11 and 3.50 use an exploit in the unpatched version of Lumines. All of these exploits will downgrade you to Firmware 1.50 and are for use only on the PSP-1000 model.

Method #2 (Recommended) - The Pandora Battery.
Not only can it downgrade your PSP-1000 to 1.50 (from where you can go onto Custom Firmware) and your Slim PSP to 3.XX/4.XX Custom Firmware, but it can also be used to unbrick your previously damaged PSP. This tool also works on all the official firmware updates so far, and reception has been universally positive.

NINTENDO DS:



Booting Homebrew on the Nintendo DS requires no exploitation whatsoever. All you need to do is buy a Homebrew Flash Cart (for the GBA or DS, depending on what you want to work with). The DS also has some amazing homebrew, especially for it being underpowered compared to the Sony PSP, with fullspeed NES, SNES, and Genesis emulators and many neat and unique homebrew games to go with the already very good Commercial DS library.

Who knows where we'll be by July of 2009? Think of all that's happened in late 2007 and 2008.
Will Nintendo lock down on homebrew like Sony due to Virtual Console games being pirated?
Will Strmnnrmn come back? Will we be playing Gamecube on the Xbox 360? Time will tell.

That concludes my article. I hope you enjoyed it!

Written By: Eviltaco64