FreeBSD on Xbox 360

M

MauroEldritch

Hi.

I bought an Xbox 360 a month ago. It's a modded one with FreeStyle Mod, RGH (Reset Glitch Hack) and LTE 3.0. (Don't know if related, but I'd better list this)

I would like to get FreeBSD running on it, I've dug a lot on forums and even tried to boot with our FreeBSD/Xbox release (The one from Springer/Schouten), but my Xbox boots normally and recognizes the disc as "Linux". Trying to access it fails back to the menu screen (dashboard) telling me that in order to run original discs, I must connect to Xbox Live.

It's obviously I missed some steps, or I'm doing something wrong.

I have no problem on resetting back to factory settings if needed.

My second question is, if I could still use the Xbox for playing, and FreeBSD both simultaneously.

As always, thanks in advance and any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
 
As always, thanks @sossego. You always show up with a nice and fast answer!

Then, I keep my former question: Is there any documentation or material to get some light upon installing FreeBSD on Xbox? Aside from the normal googling results one should easily get. Or at least, some advice you or someone else could give me :)
 
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I have just bumped into this and it is all outdated. So my question is, can a current FreeBSD Release (13.1 or 12.3) be installed on an Xbox 360? And if yes, it should be for PowerPC, right?
 
"… such as … and …, … PlayStation 3 and … Xbox 360, of which the latter two both use 64-bit processors. …" – <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC#Breakup_of_AIM>

So, I guess, powerpc64 (64-bit PowerPC big-endian), Tier 2 at <https://www.freebsd.org/platforms/#_supported_platforms>.

From <https://wiki.freebsd.org/powerpc>: "… Playstation 3 (powerpc64 only, starting with FreeBSD 9.0) …", no mention of 360, and <http://www.freebsd.org/platforms/ppc.html> is described as stale.

I'm interested because I saw a 360 for £20 in my local charity shop yesterday. Probably sold by now, maybe I should have snapped it up.

rene@ worked with an XBox 360 in 2008, has not been seen here since 2010.

sossego said:
http://www.free60.org/Main_Page
Click to expand...

From <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free60#Development>: "… only a small proportion of Xbox 360s are currently able to execute unsigned code, …". Is that relevant to FreeBSD?
 
I'd not bother, not worth even trying. The hardware specs on the Raspberry Pi 3, which you can get for £20 on ebay, far exceed the Xbox 360, without any of the cracking involved.

£20 is too much for a 360. I bought two for £5 back in 2021. You can probably get an Xbox One fairly cheaply these days too, but booting anything other than the Xbox operating system is pretty much impossible.
 
Thank you for that input comparing it with a Raspberry Pi 3, which I happen to have. I run it with Raspios 12, because FreeBSD unfortunately does not support sound, wifi and gpu hardware acceleration. A real pity, because FreeBSD really runs smooth on a Raspberry Pi 3.
 
PS3 Linux is more viable, but that only has 256MB of RAM, and the Linux kernel has to be quite an old version otherwise it won't boot. The PS3 is probably still worth more serving its original intended purpose than trying to squeeze Fedora 12 onto it, but that's just my opinion.
 
Not just your opinion. I think it's absolutely useless to run any OS on a device that only has 256 MB of RAM. What I wonder is how it is / was possible to run graphically quite sophisticated games like the PS3 games on a machine that only has that little amount of RAM? That would not be possible on a PC, I think.
So does the OS on a Playstation not load itself into the RAM like on a PC or something like that?
And, talking about those games, does anybody have any experience with PS3 emulation? Because there is also this port emulators/rpcs3 for FreeBSD and apparently, the game ROMs are downloadable?
 
cabriofahrer said:
Not just your opinion. I think it's absolutely useless to run any OS on a device that only has 256 MB of RAM. What I wonder is how it is / was possible to run graphically quite sophisticated games like the PS3 games on a machine that only has that little amount of RAM? That would not be possible on a PC, I think.
So does the OS on a Playstation not load itself into the RAM like on a PC or something like that?
And, talking about those games, does anybody have any experience with PS3 emulation? Because there is also this port emulatoirs/rpcs3 for FreeBSD and apparently, the game ROMs are downloadable?
Click to expand...
No personal experience with PS3 emulation.

Honestly I don't know how they did it back in the day. I was going to say that it was probably more efficient as the games might have been 32-bit, but both the PS3 and Xbox 360 are PPC64 which, as far as I know, didn't support backwards compatibility to 32-bit. This is the same scenaro today though, I have a new Dell XPS gaming laptop running Windows 11. It can play Cyberpunk 2077 and Starfield in 4K at over 60 FPS, but it times out due to memory constraints when I try to query a MySQL database table with four rows in it. It's really bad. Old timers would say it's because "GUI and bloatware" but the game and graphical rendering is also GUI.
 
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