I used to follow he Xbox 360 hacking scene and the number of things these guys did would blow your mind away. Most notable when Microsoft increased the size of their games from the standard 7.5gb to something like 8gb. There were no 8gb DVD’s on market where you could burn the games. Initially hackers truncated the games and it worked for a bit with unnecessary buffer data removed but Microsoft got wise to this and found out how to detect it and banned a bunch of people using truncated games. What happened next was amazing. Hackers found a way to flash the DVD burner drive of certain models to actually burn 8gb on. 7.5gb disc! The outside edge of the disc is actually not entirely used the disc writing software would leave it alone I believe reason being it is inconsistent in quality at the very edge and you may get a bad write if you use it. Well hackers didn’t care if you may get a bad write you may also get a good one. They hacked certain DVD drives I believe the one I ended up buying was a lite-on drive with certain firmware. I then flashed its firmware and was now able to write on the outer edge of the disc doing the previously impossible. That is only one scene form the Xbox hacking days I fondly remember. Genius if you ask me.
I always thought the best cat and mouse example was the Xbox 360 drive firmware angle tests.
The drive would report via some “secure” firmware if the disc passed detection or not. So the hackers made a firmware that reported good on a failure, ways to flash the drives over SATA, etc.
But either Microsoft was very clever or the hackers made a mistake… the drive would report the angle of the disc during certain movements. It would do some operation and report it went from 20degrees to 223 degrees. Well, the hackers and MS disagreed on an angle integer rollover.
The original drive would report 0-359degrees, but the hacked drive rolled over different and reported 0-360degrees or vice versa, I don’t remember. So iirc, MS listened for awhile, if a drive ever reported 360 degrees or whatever the wrong indication was, MS added it to a list.
One day, the drop the hammer banned the lot of them. It took the hackers awhile to figure out how they were getting caught. In the meantime, I now had an Offline-Only 360.
