Your Xbox 360 can run homebrew apps!

With the advent of an exploit kind of thing called Bad Update, any Xbox 360 can run software that you want. Sadly there isn’t much homebrew and this isn’t a permanent hack. So, why not test what you can run by using a PS1 emulator?

The first steps are complicated but it involves running a game and then a sort of file interjects itself into the game when you boot it up. However this file, even though it does work and gets through the security layer or whatever, is still based on a race condition so it could work first try or it could not until a couple attempts at least within the span of 20 minute sessions

Yeah, it could take multiple sessions for it to finally click together. After running it you can do almost anything but installing stuff or changing major parts of the console. However, what if you just want to play an old game? Well I found an old PS1 homebrew emulator for the 360. It may have been a little bit odd to use but it worked.

There it is. Metal Gear Solid running on the Xbox 360. Sadly, the Xbox 360 is not pictured but since you could just try it yourself, and this would be weird to lie about, I assume you believe me when I say this is a real picture of the console running a PS1 emulator by using the BadUpdate exploit. It’s actually running great in fact. For a small PowerPC based console, you would think performance would just be okay or bad but the experience was quite fun. No glitchy video or audio artifacts.

I hope you found this kind of thing cool. Just something I learned and tried, maybe it inspires you to do something with these old consoles which might just be sitting around collecting pieces of dust. For example, the 3DS, especially the “new” ones are actually quite powerful and unlike the Xbox 360, they have a suite of very cool homebrew apps and games. There’s also quite a few operating systems meant for or including a version for PowerPC CPUs. Projects like these bring life into devices that were otherwise cut off from support.