What seemed to be impossible, meaning hacking into an Xbox 360 and running "unnatural" apps on it, has recently proven not to be so impossible after all. Shader files from the King Kong game (Xbox 360 version of course) are practically the equivalent of the GTA LCS exploit that allowed hacking into the PSP system to do things against the poor handheld's will.

Using the files from King Kong, a hacker (anonymous for the time being) was able to run an unsigned, homebrew application for the first time on the system, thus opening a new range of possibilities for using the system. You remember my article about how to put your old Xbox to good use, don't you? I'm giving myself too much credit, I know, but just in case you have read it, there are some good tips to make a more useful object out of the old system.

Now, given that this King Kong hack uses the editable shaders from the game, why wouldn't it not work on the old Xbox as well? With another game that has editable shaders, of course. I'm not saying it should, but I couldn't see any indication on why it wouldn't. Anyway, the job requires extra skills, other than the regular soldering and pressing the start button once or twice, so it would be best if you'd just leave it to the pros. At least for the time being, until it passes all the tests and burns down all the 360s tried on unsuccessfully.

The hack will require the King Kong game, a modified DVD firmware or disc-swap, to connect the serial port on the Xbox 360, compile the code from sources and if you have a kernel below 4532/4548, you can upgrade to 4532 using the burnable HD-DVD software update called HD_DVD_10-2006.zip. That's it!