Modder finishes nine-year Xbox 360 voltage glitch mod with a $4 microcontroller, cracks the console open

Back in my day, it took substantial dedicated hardware to pull off these shenanigans.

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To get the elephant out of the room, yes, just last week the PeerPressure Xbox 360 persistent soft-mod was released . But we're here to talk signals and wires. The aforementioned reset exploit involves sending a teeny weeny tiny signal directly into the CPU's reset pin. You'd think this would do what it says on the label, but what happens instead is that the CPU executes the current instruction incorrectly .

Naturally, someone figured out how to leverage that to run any code on the CPU, thus completely bypassing Microsoft's impressive and frankly rather effective layers of cryptography within the console. Sending said signal for an effective hack, though, requires spectacularly precise timing with a resolution down to nanoseconds, and glitch-chips may even require several attempts to get a successful "latch."

Joshua Kennedy, a Scottish hacker, bought a Matrix Coolrunner Rev D modchip board back in 2017 to hack his console this way, but it required soldering wires, NAND, and programmers, and patience. He once tried rolling his own programmers using an old PC's parallel port (a common substitute), but never got the project off the ground and shelved the idea.

Fast-forward to 2026, and a new tool presented itself: the highly successful Raspberry Pi Pico, a highly capable microcontroller-on-a-stick, whose price starts at all of $4. Armed with this, he started the procedure. He connected the Pi Pico to the NAND interface header on the console to be able to dump the console's NAND flash firmware — a task easily accomplished with just some wiring and the PicoFlasher utility. Although the post doesn't mention it, Kennedy likely took the NAND data, patched it with XeLL, and reuploaded it.

Original Sony PlayStation 2 security chip ‘broken wide open’ after 26 years

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Reference reading

• https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/retro-gaming/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
• https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/retro-gaming/modder-finishes-nine-year-xbox-360-voltage-glitch-mod-with-a-usd4-microcontroller-cracks-the-console-open-tiny-microcontroller-dumps-nand-and-flashes-timing-files-to-bypass-cpu-cryptography#main
• https://www.tomshardware.com/membership

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