The Xbox 360 was a staple of my childhood. If I look back on my gaming experiences growing up, I really only departed from PC gaming when I played anything Nintendo, and when I got my Xbox 360. It was such a great console, and a lot of its library still holds up well today, but it's capable of so much more now than it was back in 2005.

Today, the Xbox 360 is a homebrew beast, capable of running backup copies of native Xbox games, emulation, and even Linux. While we're still a little ways away from a true softmod, you can still achieve this using nothing but a couple of USB flash drives, which is an incredible feat, even some 20 years after the console was initially released.

The Xbox 360 was a tough nut to crack

Microsoft stepped up console security big time

I picked a classic, "fat" model off of Ebay for about $30, and while it wasn't the same black "Elite" model that I first got when I was a kid, I still got blasted with nostalgia when I plugged it in and turned it on for the first time. I also picked up a refurbished controller that was in immaculate condition, and paid more than one probably should for an old controller, but it was worth it. The console worked just fine as-is, could fire up games just fine, and had a 30 GB HDD included, but I wanted to do a lot more with it.

For a long time, the only way one could exploit the Xbox 360 to run unsigned code for homebrew was to perform either a JTAG exploit, which took advantage of the GPU's JTAG port, or what was known as RGH, or Reset Glitch Hack. Both methods required a hard mod, which meant soldering components onto the Xbox 360's motherboard. RGH is the preferred method among most modders today, as the JTAG exploit was patched by Microsoft shortly after it was discovered, and was responsible for one of the largest Xbox Live ban waves in history, with an estimated 1 million consoles affected.

While I could perform the RGH exploit on my console, there's a much easier, less invasive way to run homebrew on this Xbox.

The soft mod revolution

A really cool feat

The last few months have been pretty incredible for the Xbox 360 homebrew scene. Earlier this year, console hacker Grimdoomer released an exploit called "Bad Update", which essentially took advantage of a race condition in the Xbox update code to enable a non-persistent exploited state. This meant that you could, in theory, run the exploit, and it would be active for as long as your console was on. As soon as the console loses power, one will have to perform the exploit again.

This also required the use of one of two games: Rock Band Blitz or Tony Hawk's American Wasteland, both of which have vulnerabilities in their save game data. Save game data has historically been very prevalent as an attack vector for console modding, and in this case, these two games are the only two known to be exploitable in this manner. Running the exploit could take up to 20 minutes to run, and had about a 40% success rate, but this was improved upon in later iterations of the exploit.

This same type of exploit was then refined by shutterbug2000 in the form of "ABadAvatar", which took advantage of the profile system on the console instead of save game data, completely removing the need for either Rock Band Blitz or Tony Hawk's American Wasteland. With this method, the exploit could be run on system boot, and in my experience, has about a 90% success rate, and only takes a few minutes.

After the exploit successfully triggers, the console can then run a series of patches that enable it to run basically anything you want. In my case, I used XeUnshackle by Byrom90, but you can also use FreeMyXe for this as well. From there, I was free to run essentially anything I wanted on my 360. After dumping my console's NAND and making a backup of it, I went to town.

The Xbox 360 is still incredibly capable

Preserve old, online-only games, emulation, and even Linux

Much of the reason for homebrew on game consoles is for game preservation, and many of the games that were once accessible via the Xbox 360 Store are no longer available due to its closure in 2024. Many XBLA (Xbox Live Arcade) titles would otherwise be lost to time if it weren't for the efforts of Xbox enthusiasts to create avenues to preserve these games through homebrew. There were many games I purchased (on my mom's credit card) that would be completely lost to time if nobody went through the trouble of backing them up.

Emulation also works incredibly well on the 360. I got some classic Nintendo 64 games running quite well through an emulator, running completely on the console itself. Running classics from my own collection like Banjo Kazooie and Donkey Kong 64 on an Xbox of all things was kind of surreal.

And finally, with this sort of access to the Xbox 360's hardware, you can run Linux, and Linux means freedom. I didn't manage to get it working past the initial boot phase, but this is probably due to the version I was using rather than a problem with the console itself. The possibilities are pretty much endless, though. I could turn it into a NAS, a media server, an archive for all my retro games; essentially anything a computer can be.

The Xbox 360 in 2025 is amazing

Console security is fascinating to me, and I loved tinkering with an old and chunky piece of gaming history, one that hits close to home. Those enthusiasts who have spent their time digging (or drilling) into the console's security truly have my gratitude, as it's allowed me to find a new use for a console that would otherwise collect dust.