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JTAG 'Hacking' the Original Xbox in 2023

Released in November 2001, the original Xbox was Microsoft’s first venture into the game console industry. With its hardware closely resembling a cheap but v...

While there is little else to be gained from new methods to dump or bypass secret ROM today, the ability to hardware debug the Xbox CPU would still provide unrivaled introspection to further study and preserve the rich history of the platform. In order to remove all hardware ambiguity, I decided it would be best to design a CPU interposer PCB to cleanly breakout the JTAG signals, adapting from Intel’s specifications to rebuild an ITP port. Having released TRST# via the interposer, satisfied SMC security challenges with an arduino, and dumped secret ROM using JTAG… they hid one last trick to bind an abnormal CPU startup with a forced reset from MCPX a few seconds after boot.

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