ModChat

Xbox-Scene's Modfest returns for the second time! Participate in some friendly competition, maybe win some prizes, and help the community with some innovations all in one go! Aside from that announcement, RXDK gets some more love with its own Neighborhood release spanning across all major operating systems. Clone Hero gets a homebrew port to the Xbox 360, and even more love for the sake of customization comes with a really helpful Aurora skin making guide. Even the Xbox One and Series get some coverage here with the open source release of the ASPECT2 PCB! It isn't all Xbox centric news around here though, especially with the release of Y2JB for PS5. The GameCube also gets some love thanks to the release of Cubiboot. Finally, 'tis the season for spooky games, and why not celebrate it with an integrated randomizer for the classic Castlevania: Symphony of the Night?

Tons of scenes heating up this month as the weather cools down! We discuss a new update to the modified original Xbox backwards compatibility files for the Xbox 360, now with individual games being able to be configured with additional fixes. Insignia Live gives us an awesome progress update regarding support for EA titles and a bit about the Xbox 360 side of house. Speaking of the Xbox 360, we get two major pieces of news! One being the release of ABadAvatar, a new entrypoint for Bad Update that no longer requires any game to load it. SSD support is now available for all consoles, including totally stock retail systems! Anyone wanting to know about BadWDSD gets a taste of what the developers have been cooking up in the background for the last few months. The PS5 gets a bit of love with Kstuff being updated to work up to 9.60, with more to come it seems! The Switch has a few projects highlighted for it, along with the Pokémon mini handheld of all things, and an awesome preservation accomplishment has been achieved for the arcade build of Soul Calibur 2!

Only a single topic being covered for this episode, but this was big enough to warrant a quick ModChat to discuss the excitement around this announcement. Grimdoomer has accomplished the impossible and achieved yet another milestone in the world of game console reverse engineering by showing evidence of a real softmod! No RGH, no JTAG, no Bad Update. Seeing is believing, so see for yourself!

Starting off this month with PicoLoader being released for the GameCube, an open-source project which utilizes the power of a Raspberry Pi Pico and intercepts the DVD drive to quickly load a piece of homebrew such as Swiss. We also see some awesome releases for the PS4, allowing for some pretty quick and stable jailbreaks up to firmware 12.02! DIY Game Boy cartridges, custom soundtracks for the original Xbox, and the dramatic improvements to Bad Update on Xbox 360 all get some highlights in this episode. Oh, and we could start saying the Switch can handle optical media, more on that at the end.

Starting off with some Switch 2 news this month, the same month the Switch 2 released! We discuss a Day 1 Userland ROP Chain demonstrated on the Switch 2, the bans using MiG Flash cartridges, the beginnings of a microSD Express adapter, and get clarification on how far SciresM will support the Switch 2's homebrew scene. In Xbox centric news, rumors regarding an Xbox Classics program are clarified, along with a program similar to Cheat Engine being ported to the Xbox 360, and some awesome patches are shown to run the original Xbox's Dashboard at native 720p! Every model of the PS2 can now officially take on a Memory Card based entrypoint thanks to the release of ProtoPwn. PSP users get some love with BatterySteve to help with some aging and misleading batteries out there.

A ton of awesome releases and advancements in this month's ModChat! First comes the release of the Lapse Kernel Exploit for both PS4 12.02 and PS5 10.05 firmwares. BadHTAB for the PS3 evolves into BadWDSD, a separate but better and more exciting development for PS3 owners allowing further access now on Super Slim variants! The original Xbox revision 1.6 gets a huge development as well, now with the ability to reflash the on-board BIOS for the first time. We touch up on some Switch news for the first time in a while, with a new Atmosphere CFW update for the latest Switch firmware, but not all good news when we discuss the EULA changes. However, some reverse engineering efforts towards the WaveBird receiver, Mario Party 4, Mario Kart 64, and even Dinosaur Planet have all released this month!

A whole lot has happened since the last episode of ModChat, and there's still been a few topics not covered within this episode! For the ones we do go into, the first is covering some major progress on the PlayStation Home revival project Home Laboratory, which is now available by default on the XMB for the latest PS3HEN and Evilnat CFW users on PS3! The PS3 also gets some renewed Hypervisor related interest in the form of BadHTAB, which is based on old HTAB related work from geohot and has been worked on here again in 2025. The Xbox 360 side of house gets more love, with Sonic Unleashed being ported to PC thanks to XenonRecomp, both of which have been released. The OG Xbox gets a fancy new payload in the form of Skeleton Key which serves as a Swiss Army Knife for stock OG Xbox users to run and quickly have several powerful tools available on their screen with minimal effort. Finally, a new FATXplorer tool releases in the form of XDON, allowing for easy Xbox and Xbox 360 drive mounting over a network.

At last the long awaited Xbox 360 Hypervisor exploit shown by Grimdoomer has arrived in the form of Bad Update! This means that unsigned code can be run on any Xbox 360 up to Kernel/Dashboard 17559 using only a USB drive and the NTSC version of Tony Hawk's American Wasteland. This does not require any other modifications to be done to the hardware and can be performed on an unopened and unmodified console, making this the first software-only exploit available for the latest system software version! As this episode will only be focused on Bad Update, we walk through where this started from Tony Hawk's Pro Strcpy, read through a couple of blog posts Grimdoomer made leading up to the release, and of course we set up and try Bad Update for ourselves before giving some final thoughts.

Some great new functionality being added to consoles old, new, and even a whole new FOSS based handheld to check out! The wpa2psp plugin for PSP was released and took off, allowing most PSP consoles to get back onto modern WiFi networks again. The PS Vita gets some more love with a couple more ports, one for Carmageddon and another being the Ultimate Spiderman game on Android. We even go to the library on this episode thanks to the Video Game History Foundation's launch of a digital library! PS5's JAR Loader gets updated as we now see read and write access on firmwares up to 7.61! A newer minimalist type setup for a PlayStation ODE is shown thanks to PicoStation's recent updates allowing for better compatibility across the PS1's library. After the pleasant surprise of Grand Theft Auto 3 being ported to the Dreamcast, we're in for another surprise seeing the beginnings of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City being ported over! A whole new system you can build from scratch, the Game Bub, is a project we check out being a handheld FPGA console compatible with the Game Boy family of games. Finally, we take a look at... McDonald's India API security? Yeah, I won't explain that one, just give it a listen and a laugh.

A Dreamcastic (or maybe Dreamtastic?) episode of ModChat starting off 2025 with some awesome ports for Sega's last console! We talk about the recent Grand Theft Auto III port being released in an open-alpha test, the DOOM 64 port, and even the beginning of a port of Xash3D for Half-Life! PC players also got an AWESOME port of Star Fox 64 in the form of Starship. Evilnat has been working hard on his custom firmware for PS3 which has results in the final release for 4.91.2, officially being out of beta! If you needed more DOOM, you can now have more DOOM, this time around in a PDF! Finally, we talk about how a recent Nintendo service announcement might have been the greatest advertisement Pretendo could have ever asked for.