Hacking the Xbox

12
Hacking the Xbox: An Introduction to Reverse Engineering
it out of the box – the green circuit board, the shiny chips, and all the
colorful resistors and capacitors. I wanted to play with it! Curious as I was
about the Apple II, I was not allowed to touch the motherboard. Of
course, this meant that whenever my parents weren’t looking, I was taking
the chips out of their sockets on the motherboard and doing silly things
like putting them in backwards to see what would happen.
After nearly destroying the computer a few times, my parents bought me
a 200-in-1 electronics experimenter kit from Radio Shack and my first
electronics book, Getting Started in Electronics, by Forrest Mims, III. These
were a great introduction to electronics for me, as they satisfied my desire
to play with circuits and components. My uncle also gave me his old copy
of the Art of Electronics by Horowitz and Hill, along with a couple of
books about microprocessors. I subscribed to Byte magazine, which back
in the day included regular columns about hardware projects, complete
with schematics and pictures.
Eventually, I developed enough of a sense of electronics to begin
understanding the schematics and the ROM listings included in the Apple
II user manuals. (I still believe that computers should ship with full
schematics and source code.) By the eighth grade, I had developed just
enough understanding to be able to build my own add-in card for the
Apple II. The card had a General Instruments SPO-256 speech synthesizer
that I had purchased from Radio Shack. I also added an analog to
digital converter to my Apple II and wrote an application that turned my
Apple II into a talking voltmeter. I continued to build hardware, and
before I was admitted to MIT I had built my own working embedded
computer using an 80188 microprocessor.
During my undergraduate years at MIT, I dodged the drudgery of
schoolwork by building fun little projects, such as a remote controlled
light switch and music-responsive party lights for my fraternity, ZBT. It
was during these years that I was first introduced to affordable
prototyping services and PCB CAD tools, such as those discussed in
Appendix C, “Getting Into PCB Layout.”
The rise of circuit board fabrication services to fit a college student’s
budget is a landmark event for hardware hackers. Finally, the wire-wrap
tool can be put away, and surface-mount components and complex
circuits are within the reach of everyday hobbyists.
Over the years, I have made a point of writing up my projects on my
webpage (http://www.xenatera.com/bunnie) so that everyone can
benefit from my experiences. Many of my projects are available with
schematics, Gerber files and source code, although some of my more
recent projects have been consulting jobs so I unfortunately cannot share
those results with the world.
While I have your attention, I would like to set one thing straight. I did
not get my PhD thesis at MIT for hacking the Xbox. Hacking the Xbox
was actually a diversion from my thesis that was tangentially related, but
not central to my thesis topic.