Business 2.0: Hacking the Xbox

“It is not too difficult to imagine the ultimate digital
entertainment appliance: something with the versatility and storage
capacity of a PC, but connected to your TV and stereo so that you
can enjoy all of your digital photos, music, and videos from the
comfort of your living room. And all for less than $200. Pipe
dream? Such an appliance already exists. It’s called the Xbox. But
these features are not available from Microsoft. Rather, they’re
the work of a group of enterprising open-source hackers who are
showing Microsoft what the Xbox’s full potential truly is.

“The Xbox, of course, is Microsoft’s popular but money-losing
videogame machine. It comes with a small 8-gigabyte hard drive, RCA
jacks to connect it to a TV, an Ethernet networking port, and other
PC-like components. It’s sold as a videogame console, but it can
also double as a DVD player. Still, the Xbox can be so much
more.

“That’s where the Xbox hackers come in. Apparently, most of them
modify the console in order to play bootleg games or those classic
games (Centipede, for example) made for older systems such as
Atari. Other hackers have loaded Xbox consoles with the Linux
operating system (you have to love the irony of that) and clustered
them together in cheap server farms. But the most interesting Xbox
hacks transform it into a digital media center, enabling it to
share files with regular PCs, display digital photos, or play
digital music and video files…”

Complete
Story