Hacking the Xbox: An Introduction to Reverse Engineering

Hacking the Xbox: An Introduction to Reverse Engineering, 9781593270292 (1593270291), No Starch Press, 2003

This--this being the attitude encapsulated in Andrew "bunnie" Huang's Hacking the Xbox--is why a lot of people got into the computer industry in the first place. These people liked taking things apart and figuring out how they worked, then making them serve purposes they weren't originally designed for and sharing the new discoveries with others of like mind. Sure, Huang's book is about how to how to turn Microsoft's game console into a high-performance, general-purpose personal computer with a small price tag, and it contains lots of details about the how the heavily advertised gizmo is put together. But you can get the technical material on the Web. What's valuable about Huang's work is that he communicates the pure joy of taking the Xbox apart, figuring out how it works--despite its many designed-in anti-hacking features--and making it do new things. This book reads like the journal of a seventeenth-century voyage of discovery.

Showing Xbox owners how to increase the value and utility of their system, Hacking the Xbox features step-by-step tutorials on hardware modification that teach basic hacking techniques as well as essential reverse engineering skills. Full discussions of the Xbox security mechanisms and other advanced hacking topics are here, along with practical pointers from hacking gear resources to soldering techniques. The book also covers the social and political implications of hacking and profiles the humans behind the hacks in candid interviews.

About the Author

Andrew "bunnie" Huang has a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from MIT. He runs Xenatera LLC, a technology development and consulting firm specializing in the design and prototyping of electronic systems, as well as reverse engineering.

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