I've been meaning to write something quick about the state of console hacking, but kept getting sidetracked. Might as well do it now, before the news gets completely stale:

Xbox 360
Xplorer360 was released a little over a week ago. The app lets folks read and write to the Xbox 360's hard drive — but don't get too excited. The hard drive isn't encrypted, it's just in a mildly exotic format. This is a useful tool, but not a breakthrough in and of itself.

In other Xbox news, the "kiosk disc" was disabled by the latest Xbox Live update. You might remember me talking about it before — the disc was electronically distributed to retailers for them to play in display units. But recipients were expected to burn the disc image to a DVD-R, bypassing the console's usual prohibition on playing writeable media — this made it an intriguing means by which hackers could potentially inject their own code. The executable files were still encrypted, but the media assets (an in particular, Flash files) weren't and could be replaced. All of this looked like a promising, if less-than-surefire way to find an exploit on the 360. Sadly, that avenue is now closed for anyone with an up-to-date system.

Nintendo DS
But although the news for the 360 crowd isn't as encouraging as it might have first seemed, owners of the Nintendo DS now have more capabilities than they used to. Via BoingBoing I learned of the PassMe, a slick add-on for the DS. But BB got their facts slightly wrong — the PassMe isn't the only thing you need to hack up a DS.

Actually, all the PassMe does is transparently pass traffic back and forth to a genuine DS game (necessary because of the platform's encryption) — with one exception. When it sees a specific instruction — one that tells the DS to begin executing at an address corresponding to the beginning of the DS cartridge — it rewrites it, telling the console to go to the Gameboy slot instead... in which you presumably have a writeable flash cartridge (aka "flash cart") onto which you've loaded your hacked applications.

There are a lot of flash carts available for the Gameboy Advance, and they're all roughly compatible with the DS. But if you want to play "commercial backups" (aka pirated DS games), you'll need to use one of two specific brands, and you'll need to use some custom hacked ROMs that have been released by a group called Golden Sun. You can find details on all of this here.

So, sadly, the cost of modding your GBA isn't as cheap as the $20 PassMe, despite what BoingBoing thought. You also need one of those two brands of flash cart, which will run you another $125-150. For once, piracy doesn't come cheap.

And hey, while I'm at it...

PSP
It's cracked yet again. I can't afford a PSP, and don't really want one, so I haven't been tracking this particularly carefully. But last I checked, you can run homebrew apps, emulators and commercial backups on all firmware revisions.