Cygnos360 Sample: High-Res Pictures Posted by XanTium | February 5 22:04 EST | News Category: Xbox360

We received a sample of the Cygnos360 from Team Cygnos. It's a chip that allows you to have more than one kernel on your Xbox 360. For now it's mostly interesting for people who have the knowledge and tools to get their Xbox 360 CPU key (with an Infectus chip for example) and own a Xbox 360 console with kernel 4532/4548 (Hypervisor exploit) or below or own a non-HDMI Xbox360 and the tools required to perform the downgrade exploit. The chip allows you to switch between the latest MS kernel (play games, LIVE) and your "exploitable kernel" (boot linux) or a kernel with modified keyvault parameters (like change game region for example). For now ... here are some pictures of the sample already. Click for high-res! Official Site: http://www.cygnos360.com Buy Now: divineo.com

FIRST HAHA. Sorry it's the purple haze talking...

Sick, this is progress. I really don't care about dual booting i wanna flash my nand with a completely custom kernal... install dashboards, games homebrew on the hdd. I got patience.. and LOVE for the talented people involved in all this. thank you.

How complete is the linux that you can run with this?
Can you run linux XBMC for example?

This is for the 360, not Xbox 1

Anyways, i have recived a sample of this from my boss, and installed it on my xbox 360.
It's pretty awesome, but this reqires you to lift the CE pin on the NAND, which is a pain in the arse. There's a easier way to do this, i'll post up a few pics once this is released

How does this chip store the new lockdown value in the exploitable kernel if you have a dashboard update?

Remember Microsoft check that a fuse has blown before the upgrade will complete meaning the exploitable flash image on this chip will need to be updated each and every time a new dash version is installed.

Have they thought of this in their design?

I believe he was asking about running linux on the 360 and then running XMBC on linux. To answer his question linux on the 360 does not have audio and has very basic video support.

Pretty useless apart from changing the region if you ask me

I believe its pretty convenient. i want to try to use it for protecting "dirty data" to go back to MS.

my idea is to use it on a new console, not for using any lunix or region code change (which is cool but that is currently not possible on the HDMI consoles) but for ban-prevention.


since it also fits into the new ones mechanically, you can clone your NAND and then use the NAND on the Cygnos chip when you play backups (offline). the data which can reveal that youre using backups is then stored on the secondary NAND (in the secdata.bin and maybe somewhere else). so when you turn off your console, then switch to the original NAND, boot up and go on live none of that data would be visible to M$ because it is on the NAND thats mechanically off.

Are you guys going to show us a install video or some pics of the install? I would like to see this thing in action.

Um, yeah, I know it isn't for XBOX1, there is a linux version of XBMC, my question was how complete is the linux that you can run on the 360 via the exploit.
i.e. what linux apps can you run etc. is there any point?
If you could run a linux build of XBMC then the 360 becomes somewhat useful, if not then it is interesting but too limiting to be of much use having a linux distro that can't tun anything much.
As I said I have no idea if that is the case, hence the question.

Thanks mist4fun for the answer...

Chocolate teapot.

I hung onto a 4753 Core for eons and the lack of x360 Linux progress sealed its fate.

You probably won't ever be able to run a build of XBMC on the 360, even if Linux on the 360 progresses to the point where it's very robust. Here's why:

XBMC is and has always been built only for the x86 architecture. The Xbox1 shares the x86 architecture with most common PCs, which is why it was relatively easy for team-XBMC to port XBMC to the x86 versions of Ubuntu Linux, Windows NT, and Mac OS X. These OSs only run on computers based on the x86 architecture.

The 360 is on the PowerPC (PPC) architecture, as is the PS3, and as are older Macs (pre-Intel). The versions of Ubuntu Linux or Debian or Mac OS X that run on PPC and x86 may look the same, but under the hood they're very different animals, because the architectures are quite different and not cross-compatible for more than very simple programs. (Mac OS X does accomplish backwards compatibility to PPC through an emulation layer, sort of the opposite of how the 360 runs Xbox1 games. But in both cases there is a serious tax on speed.)

To port XBMC or any app as complex as XBMC from x86 to PPC would be quite an undertaking, and it's not something anyone on team-XBMC plans to do anytime soon.

The official thread on the XBMC forums:
http://xbmc.org/forum/showthread.php?t=40236

mmh, cant they make a kernel that would run with XNA created code?

From what I read, they said this chip allows you to dual boot a pal/us combo. Does the same apply if I wanted a US/Jap system?

Since MS now requires you to have r6t3 installed for dash updates, an efuse is 'blown' with each dash update. Everytime you accept a new update from live, your lockdown version counter increases by 1. So, when it increases, your dash/kernel on this chip will no longer boot. You will have to modify your lockdown version on your kernel on the chip and reflash it using an infectus (or other programmer).


Of course. The HUGE note in this original post is that you MUST HAVE YOUR CPU KEY. If you dont, this chip is useless to you.

Caster.

That's pretty cool.
I wonder if this means we'll eventually start to see some homebrew for the 360 trickling through.
Better then the homebrew drought we've seen lately.
I'd love it if someone ported Mame to the 360 for example.
Yeah XBMC with the grunt of a 360 under the hood would be nice, but as someone said the 360 is quite different to the xbox1. I wonder though they'd both be written in C++? Wouldn't you just need a compiler for the 360?

I'll make this as clear as I possibly can for this and future similar questions.

THIS IS NOT A MODCHIP FOR THE 360.

In no way does this crack the heavy encryption that MS adopted for the 360.

Until this is achieved, you're not going to see ANY homebrew on the 360.

This chip is to run 2 different official kernels from the one box, without needing to reflash each time.

[/quote]
QUOTE(kcsims @ Feb 7 2009, 02:38 AM)
From what I read, they said this chip allows you to dual boot a pal/us combo. Does the same apply if I wanted a US/Jap system?

[quote name='caster420' date='Feb 7 2009, 02:52 PM' post='4429702']
Of course. The HUGE note in this original post is that you MUST HAVE YOUR CPU KEY. If you dont, this chip is useless to you.

Please excuse my complete ignorance on this, but can you point me to more information on this? I have a US launch system, so I'm not really sure which CPU/kernel/etc I have. If someone can just give me a pointer in the right direction to research. Thanks.

Homebrew will more likely be a pipe dream for us. Xbox360 has been out for at least 3 years without any success to break it's protection. You can thank your ex heroes like Bunny for this. We gotta live with the fact that is is a fucked up multimedia solution, just meant for games. I long to the glory days we had with Xbox1, but it doesn't look bright at all in the tunnel I am afraid.

i think one of the reasons why this exploit hasnt seen any new developments for a long time is because many people upgraded their consoles regularly and we lost the ability to execute it.

the exploit was only really public after Microsoft had allready "fixed" it. there were not many consoles that could be upgraded to 4532 and a downgrade was not possible anymore for a while.

now we could start to make it again more practical to get consoles with an additional kernel for teasing the exploit. i think there will not be any exploit in any of the future kernels that come out now. we have to peak the ones from the starting year. i looked up some websites and to me it seems that there are at least 10 million, if not 12 million consoles out there which CAN be downgraded. even if 30% died RROD and have replacement boards, that would still leave us with A LOT of downgradable consoles that we can play with. we have to get more people onto xboxes with exploitable kernel, otherwise we wont see any other exploit.

thats what i think

A cracked or alternate firmware is needed. Now who wants to start?