And now we have a working permanent softmod. The Xbox 360 hacking scene is basically complete at this point.

I was in the Xbox 360 scene back in the day before JTAG hacks existed -- modding savegames, getting a devkit, and building my own private homebrew. For the most part I left the scene around 2013.

The softmod had me seeing what the status quo is and things are... not great.

17 years since the JTAG hack and just as of a couple days ago someone finally vibecoded a non-proprietary SDK. The scene by and large to the masses (or at least, the loudest group) mostly associates homebrew with "stealth" servers aka servers your console connects to which assist in bypassing Xbox LIVE challenges that detect modified consoles. The servers provide mod menus (trainers, basically) for various games and the ability to use older dashboards.

The kicker is the custom servers are not required, code for bypassing challenges leaked ages ago, and people still pay for stealth server access! I can't even imagine who is still playing Xbox 360 titles on Xbox LIVE except people with modded consoles at this point.

Hacking the console is complete. But the state of the scene is a bit sad.

At least now we can vibecode the missing bits of the ecosystem (I say this as I'm literally reverse engineering and reimplementing the devkit debug monitor).