Hackosis

Geeks love getting the most out of their gaming consoles. I hope you would agree that the Xbox 360 is the best gaming console on the market. I recently purchased an Xbox 360 so I have been looking into what I can do (I know, kinda late). With that being said, I would like to share my top 10 hack finds so far.

1. Turn your Xbox 360 into a Laptop - Like soldering? Engadget takes us through the steps of turning your Xbox 360 into a portable laptop. How. Cool. Is. That.
2. Flashing the DVD firmware to play game backups - If you have owned your Xbox 360 for some time it is possible to flash the firmware on the DVD drive to play game backups (your own backups of course ;)). WARNING - This could ban you from Xbox Live!
3. Play online without Xbox Live for Free - By using Xlink Kai you can play multiplayer LAN games online for free! MS has put a 30ms ping limit on the Xbox 360, so be sure to close all other internet apps before playing. Check out the wiki for more details.
4. Use Your Laptop as a free Xbox Wi-Fi Adapter and save $80 - Use internet connection sharing to wire your Xbox 360 to the internet instead of buying the $80 adapter.
5. DIY Xbox 360 Wifi Adapter - If you don’t want a cord from your Xbox 360 hanging out of your laptop all the time you can always follow Geeks Are Sexy’s guide to a DIY Xbox 360 Wifi adapter.
6. Stream Netflix Movies - By using vmcNetFlix you can watch all your favorite movies from your Netflix subscription.
7. Use your own HDMI cable and save $40 - Chad shows us how to fit the A/V adapter into the Xbox 360 while using your own HDMI cable instead of buying the $40 official Microsoft cable.
8. Turn your Xbox A/V cable into a VGA Cable for $7 - Once again, Engadget to the rescue with DIY instructions on how to turn your standard Xbox 360 A/V cable into a VGA cable on the cheap.
9. Mod your Case - There are limitless ways you can customize your Xbox 360 case. To start you off you can paint the face plate and the controller.
10. Surf the web - If you have Windows Media Center Editon you can surf the web from the comfort of your Xbox 360. Note that this is limited functionality only - no typing, no sound, etc. Basically just a screen shot from your PC (Good enough for pr0n).

Hopefully you ran into something new and there is still more to discover with your Xbox 360. With such an interesting machine to tweak, no wonder everyone has out-done themselves on hacking/modding the Xbox 360.

Have a hack or mod that we didn’t cover? Let us know in the comments.

NOTE: See the previous posts about Vyatta.

The Vyatta open source routing platform is built upon XORP, the eXtensible Open Router Platform, and uses templates to execute commands that are entered into the xorpsh, also know as the Vyatta CLI, much like other routing platforms.

For example, when entering show system memory in the Vyatta CLI (xorpsh), the system actually executes free -ot. The Linux free command displays the system memory information and the -ot switch enables the ‘totals’ and ‘buffer adjusted’ lines. The output is displayed in kilobytes by default. There is so much RAM in computers today, that it makes more sense to display the output in megabytes with the -m switch; free -m.

Changing How ’show system memory’ executes:

NOTE: Don’t forget to backup before making changes to these important files!

1. Login as root.
2. Go to the template directory:
   cd /opt/vyatta/share/xorp/templates
3. Find the free command:
   # grep free *.cmds
   rl_misc.cmds: %command: “free -ot” %help: “Show system memory usage”;
4. See that it’s in the file rl_misc.cmds. Change it from “-ot” to “-m” with sed:
   cp rl_misc.cmds rl_misc.cmds.bak
   sed -i ’s/free -ot/free -m/’ rl_misc.cmds
5. Try it:
   xorpsh
   Welcome to Vyatta on vDUT
   > show system memory
   total used free shared buffers cached
   Mem: 250 190 59 0 23 96
   -/+ buffers/cache: 70 179
   Swap: 0 0 0

This not only applies to the show system memory command, but for all other Vyatta CLI commands as well. Thanks to Stig on the Vyatta-Users mailing list for the hacking tips. If you have any more Vyatta hacks, please email them to me, or leave a comment.