4:23 Clarification : Game Journalists/Websites also had access to PartnerNet to test/review games before launch. Usually under Embargo/NDA 9:57 Correction : title is Sonic The Hedgehog 4 Episode 1 not Sonic Episode 4
No worries, we don't acknowledge Sonic 4. Episode 1 or 2. That's just another one of Sega's mulligans. Maybe when Christian Whitehead and Headcannon decide to fix it and put proper Sega Saturn-style pixel graphics and fix the level design, then we can acknowledge the 2D-Sonic-Game-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named.
One of the few channels that always brings new information to the table and it's damn well put together and perfectly explained ... The very definition of interesting.
I worked as a tester on a XBLA game in 2007. I would spend my breaks going through Partnernet to see what was new. Got to see some very interesting things. Even back in 2007 though, developers were doing things to prevent people from seeing what their game was. There were quite a few titles with codenames on there (ours included), and some things you downloaded didn't work, crashed or needed some combination of buttons to start. The best part though was being able to create unlimited gamertags. Myself and the other testers would try to make the grossest/stupidest gamertags the profanity filter would allow.
The unprecedented access absolutely blows my mind to this day. Even without leaks, just crazy to think that any development company with PNET access could see and play whatever pre-release content any other company was working on. Big thanks for the credit, my dude! May the 4th be with you!
@@ChucksSEADnDEAD It also involves actually receiving the items and processing them lol. But if underpaid recycling center people run across these... good luck. I'm surprised that MS didn't have them sent to a dedicated secure facility, or even better, require more account stuff to be checked prior to gaining access. seems lazy.
Hey, I work for one of those recycling companies. Yeah. It's amazing what we just throw away. Every time I see a bin full of server fans being thrown out, i cringe. Damn things are like $35 each new. Nidec ultraflos and SAN ACEs... We're under contract to destroy every storage device. I still have a bin of 10gbit NICs I've been collecting for the last couple years. Can't understand why people don't buy this stuff on ebay, it's so cheap, there's just nobody talking about it for regular people to search for it...
@@SLLabsKamilion I remember peaking in a Target Electronic Recycling Bin one day and the first thing I saw is an iPod (the ones with a clickwheel). I asked the manager if I could pick some stuff out or dumpster dive and sadly they said that anything that goes in the bin belongs to the recycling company they contracted.
The source wasn't just recycling centers and such. Every time a game studio shut down more of these systems would appear on the market. When EA Chicago shut down I ended up with 4 devkits each with unreleased copy's of games that never saw the light of day. I still have these unreleased EA games. One such example was the Unreleased Marvel Fighting game that got leaked once I sold one of these kits to somebody else.
@@NethTech So you say the guy who bought it released them, but you are just letting the games rot? Why tell people something so stupid? If you had them, you would release them. Thus you have nothing.
when i worked at a car dealership, we had to break all the parts that were changed in warranty, parts that were already not working or malfunctioning had to be hammered and photographed before sending them back to the factory, wth was microsoft thinking
Would just like to correct one little thing: When you say that there was no consequence to developers downloading competitor's games, this was only true for a short time. Microsoft quickly caught on and infringing game devs soon began receiving e-mails containing the list of IPs (along with time, date, and other identifiable info) and the list of games accessed, with a firm notice to take the necessary action to make it stop or face repercussions. A few testers were fired over this at the company I worked for at the time.
Actually this was way deeper with the leaks coming from direct access to many of the developers servers, besides the mentioned Partnernet leaks. Darknet Diaries made an excellent two-part podcast with the complete history including interviews. Highly recommended.
it will make sure the devs give it all... because you're constantly under pressure because you may find out that every ego shooter works better than yours for example. so if you want to stay in the race, you have to make your game better than the other devs, and so do they.
As other informed individuals have said, it didn't work that way, but the security was still weak, basically security-by-obscurity. A game could be made private but you could still scrape through the service by generating gameIDs bypassing the normal way of accessing PartnerNet.
@@azalinprime in another comment i had the idea that the devs could password protect their projects, if they were allowed to do so. you may be still able to view the game data, but you wouldn't get past the first screen of the application. but my thoughts at the beginning of this chain here seems more plausible
Unfortunately, the good majority of the statements made from 7:40 onward are not entirely true. This isn't the whole story, and game developers weren't able to access each other's builds. These builds were set to private. Since the majority of these arcade and debug builds came from myself and two others, I would be more than happy to correct this story. You could modify the the gameID in generated container packages from the SDK to a private gameID, and then use that ID to access the private repository in the MS store on PNet. By default, game releases were set to hidden and couldn't be obtained without this method, and a later method. Also a good chunk of items also came from a less popular known network environment called INet. These IDs were crawled using the partnernet/Inet store URLs obtained from xboxwattson and then later made into an autocrawler tool. At no point were these builds meant to be visible at any time to other developers. As for Microsoft bricking devkits, this was really never confirmed. What was confirmed is a person by the name of SonicISO uploaded recoveries that wiped the NAND, and released "leaks" that contained remote activation brick code in an attempt to sell more devkits. I had published a tutorial on Assembler games on how to protect from this type of bricking and fuse manipulation.
Well i was sure that xenon or xeon did it. Actally im not sure if 9298 wiped nand or just modified it. I try this recovery on one of dev kits but disconected resistor. Nothing happend just updated console. What i believe really happend was burn of efuses. Thats why nothing happend when i had resistor disconected. But true is that most of ppl from x underground and assemblergames ruin it. Building containers using sdk is a part of the story, it only helps with games. Some dlc like i wrote in comments also needed title update to work (mafia 2 dlc) which were not present on partnernet. So later many developers become smarter and share dlc but share title update between workers via ftp/email etc... testers were able to transfer them via sdk. Btw: what was your nick on assemblergames?
"Microsoft shut down the service for a week to solve the issue" Ok, so they made it so developers only had access to their games instead of allowing access to literally everything by default? "They banned some more consoles"
If anybody is interested in more of the behind-the-scenes work on this, there's a fantastic 2 part podcast called Xbox Underground by Darknet Diaries, where the host, Jack Rhysider, actually interviews the hackers that utilized PartnerNet, the leakers who leaked the games and even a guy who worked at the recyling plant where they discovered these trashed DevKits! It's fantastic and I really urge you to check it out, it genuinely blew my mind!
I'm finding it funny, back in 2005 when Microsoft was notorious for having insecure software, that the Xbox 360 was the one that was hardest to break into.
They didn't have insecure software (at least by 2005 anyway), it was the most widely deployed OS in the hands of mostly nubcakes. Most widely deployed means it's the most probed for exploits and then the nubcakes don't know how to secure their own PCs in many cases.
Everything is jailbroken in Russia. I'm starting to think Russians don't even bother to make their own accounts. Any time one of my accounts has been breached over the last 20 years it's been some russian dude that took the effort to change my profile picture and name and shit
They were consoles nobody should have been using in the first place. They never remote bricked any retail boards and just banned those from Live instead.
@@CorneliusTalmadge That's kind of irrelevant to my point. I was refering to a measure Nintendo would use to stop hackers from using homebrewed switches.
@@claytongray7656 Nintendo has never and would never remote brick a console. It's illegal to do that to a regular consumer. Their EULA is not a legal contract and they can be sued for doing so.
This was a fun reminder of the 360/ps3 dev days. I miss game development. Partnernet was wild. On the cod games, we did worldwide testing, so the builds got around all over to other devs, eventually we made a test plan that included all ATVI studios worldwide. This meant a the studios in la, we'd have to be fully staffed from 11:30pm-130pm the next day to allow for the worldwide testing.
LOL when will manufacturers learn that recycling plants are staffed by minimum wage workers who are always looking for shit to sell. Let's put our proprietary info in the hands of someone making $12 an hour.
@@Gorilla_Jones not needed, I am happy that with that "small" amount I still have a better life than 5+ billion people. And honestly? I have "everything" (not talking about yachts and so on)
This is actually quite beautiful in a way. Old development kits sent to what was intended to be their eternal resting places, being brought back to life as these stitched abominations to benefit their new masters before their second life inevitably ended with a red ring. Amazing and sad. Rest in RIP, old Xbox 360 devkits.
I worked as QC for The Sims 3 on Xbox 360/PS3, after the project was done we used PartnerNet to download SuperMeatBoy, Outrun online and quake. Good times.
I imagine being 13 or so in 2005 and being lucky enough to own one. That would've been sick. Just download every game that comes out including early alphas, betas, test builds, DLC, etc. The money I would've saved and the games I would've gotten to play that I never got around to.
This explains how I saw so much about Xbox 360 piracy and leaks online back when PS3 had nothing like that going on. I got a used 360 Elite in 2010 and searching online I was amazed to find stuff like pirateable Live Arcade games and the DVD firmware mod which I managed to install with the most ghetto setup ever after a long battle where more than once I thought I had permanently screwed things up. Not sure if Microsoft was just naive to make the system work like this, while Sony seemed way more experienced and strict with basic security of the whole console ecosystem, but it brought a lot of interesting gaming-related things to the eyes of a bit larger public.
Man i love the 360 videos. Reminds me of when I was seeing all of this unfold. I've had so many different demo kits, test kits, full xdks, xna consoles, regular consoles with rgloader, all so much fun to play around with.
I love your channel MVG. You live and breathe what the gaming scene is really about. I used some of your emulators back on the original xbox back in the day and thought it awesome that you've got a channel dedicated to all this stuff now with such interesting stories. Keep up the awesome work :)
I love these gaming history episodes! The research you put into these really shows and I appreciate getting to learn about the history of the industry.
An outdated Xbox 360 refused to connect to Xbox Live until you updated the firmware, I guess PartnerNet was the same and they used that to intentionally push a broken firmware update on these units...
By the way you could also connect to PartnerNet with just a regular jtag/rgh running RGLoader, you just had to have to have the right files/structure to not only connect to the right network but to get that dashboard to work at all.
So I think that's how the 360 version (yet only released for one day in Japan) of Crimson Dragon leaked. The game is officially only available on Xbox One.
For anyone interested in the complete story check out the darknet diaries podcast episodes 45 and 46. The story is super interesting on how this all got started.
Darknet Diaries has an episode on his podcast about his exact subject. He interviews a few of the ppl involved. Very Interesting. I recommend everyone take a listen. I believe the episodes are name 'The Xbox Underground" or something like that Edit: HERE IS LINKS darknetdiaries.com/episode/45/
I really enjoy your channel and all the research, history, facts, and tutorials you do. I recently found your channel and have binge watched pretty much all your videos while I've been stuck in the house waiting for these world events to pass. Thanks! On another note: I can't wait for the Switch Lite to be cracked. I have a Pokemon edition sitting in the box waiting for ways I can get all my retro game backups playing on it.
This is a great video, and if people want a deep dive into the hackers and repercussions of the hacks, I highly recommend the XBox Underground Darknet Diaries on the subject. It deals with heavier stuff though.
I can highly recommend these episodes, they go more into detail about what happened and I think some of the things should have been incorporated into this MVG video as well darknetdiaries.com/episode/45/ darknetdiaries.com/episode/46/
Y'all should check out Darknet Diaries' two-parter "Xbox Underground" for extended listening on this topic!! It gets pretty dark but it pretty much explains in detail everything thats being talked about here by the hacking group themselves
With all the landfill boards being resurrected & so many leaks, I'm genuinely surprised that the XBLA remake of GoldenEye hasn't appeared in the wild. On the PartnerNet it was known as 'bean', with a Perfect Dark Zero Joanna icon. See 08:30.
There’s a two episode series telling the story of the guys who did many of the leaks, including interviews, on the Darknet diary podcast. Highly recommend. Episodes are titled Xbox underground.
I listen to a podcast that talks in depth about this subject in episode 45 called "Darknet Diaries" they have two episodes about this subject. it goes into great detail into how they acquired the dev kits
Please go check the episodes 45 and 46 of the Darknet Diaries podcast about this stuff, it's about the kids who got some of the first dekits and hacked into an enormous amount of companies thanks to it, they literally stole Xbox one source code years before release. It's an insane tale with everything, hacking, police, suicide and crime, please check it out everybody!
@@adam1984pl piranha looks cool, i'll check it out, thanks. : ) but i'm pretty sure it's not that, this was a sort of indie game around the late 2000s, i think it was cross-platform and had over the top opengl effects and am awesome trippy electro soundtrack. i have an idea.
Browsing PartnerNet became a part of my morning coffee at my first QA job. Oh, I do miss it so. Some XBLA developers began requiring a password to their games, so you couldn't get to the main menu without knowing a button sequence; I seem to remember Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet doing this.
It seems to me that if the 360 would have been more reliable, and PartnerNet had ANY sort of security this wouldn't have happened. Crazy that partners had access to literally every other devs stuff on there too.
Awesome stuff, wish i had access to that back then. Flashed my 360 in 2012 but could only play burnt discs. Was still awesome to get games days or even a week early from xboxpirate. Sadly my flashed xbox froze during a system update then had red ring, i blame the update, was no co incidence. XB1 has been abysmal, no hacks, everything's boring now compared to dreamcast-360/ps3 era
I remember actually connecting my dvd drive to the PC to flash the firmware when that first came out! Later XNA became available for consumers to run their own code on a retailkit (100$ I believe were the only costs to that), which is when I bought an Elite in order to do gamedev on it. Great memories to that period of gaming
I remember what a hassle the dvd media id flash was. Make a logic probe from a nokia cellphone serial cable to extract the keys. prat about cycling the power and jamming the disk tray half open whilst shoving the probes on tiny contacts and pressing keys on the pc all at once. It was really fussy on what i/o card the pc had and the software was pretty unstable. After much faffing about you still had to get expensive duel layer dvd-r disks and mess around with header files before burning. Then it gets banned from xbox live and all you can do with it is play offline copied disks. No launchers or homebrew iirc. With second hand games only a few quid more than the blank dvds it really wasnt worth doing in hindsight tbh. Ps3 on the other hand was amazing once exploited.
Yeah, XNA was a $99/yr subscription. Bummed they never just unlocked the software when they phased out the 360. Now I've got all these hobby projects I can no longer run on my 360, as XNA Game Studio Connect can't find a subscription. Odd, because they _did_ change the dev unlock for Windows Phone 7 to become permanent when they'd decided to phase it out in favor of Windows Phone 8
@@halofreak1990 pretty sure I used xna for free back in the day, might have used a keygen or wangled a student licence by lying but I definitely didn't pay for it. Messed around with it for a while then never touched it again lol
@@meetoo594 "pretty sure I used xna for free back in the day" It only required that $99 subscription if you wanted to debug on the Xbox360 or when you wanted to publish a finished XNA game to the store. Developing on PC was always free of charge. And yes, you could get into the program with a student license, if you qualified for one.
@@halofreak1990 ahh that explains it. I must have obtained a student licence, which was quite easy iirc as I had all the 360 debugging stuff activated. Used to fake being a student at multiple institutions round the world to get free stuff back in the day. I'm betting it's a lot harder to get away with nowadays.
Ah partner net. For a period (gh metallica era) you could pretty much just look at whatever any other studio had in submission and download and play it if you had access. Lots of pre-submits of music games with different actual setlists going on back in the day. There were "was there a leak" emails every single day.
I highly recommend listening to darknet diaries Xbox underground series. He interviewed the guys behind the whole breach and covered the whole story behind Xbox 360 and partnernet, as well as some other interesting stuff.
The main purpose of partnernet at activison , was to get crash data during MP testing. For the lead testers, and the devs the kits were hooked up to PC and running on emulation, with 30-70 regular test kits on the same server. There was a tool in partnernet that allowed you to get assertion data(crash dump files) from any of the kits connected. At Konami it was the arcade game remakes (tmnt, hcu, xmen, etc) the real bitch with all this, is you ended up having to install and reinstall different updates and versions of the xbox os about 9 times a day because the dev branches and test branches weren't shared, and we got our builds issued on disk only. Even for the partner net stuff we just had a fake file on Pnet, and the real files loaded from a burned disk, because Konami is a japanese company, and is very strict on everything.
Reminds me of one of the big publishers that shipped us some dev kits we needed urgently. They didn't bother to wipe them before having them sent to us so we had dev versions of another studios game. Big licenced IP that got us all very excited to see. Of course I'm sure no one shared the info but I know a few lunch times were wasted playing another studios game.
If i could date one channel on youtube.... This would be it Don't tell my fiancee, she may get jealous lol But in all seriousness, this has honestly become my favorite channel over the past year since i have been a subscriber... Not since OG angry video game nerd have i been so excited for a certain day of the week because it means "Monday is a new episode of MVG", keep up the good work my friend... Love what you do, and appreciate you a ton
ha 1:33 I just played one of my random out of 12,000 morning games on my OG Xbox w CoinOPS, and it was that and that exact boss before its eaten! Salamander 2 baby!
Oh my... This video gives me flashbacks to when I flashed the Xbox drives of my friends and my own drive. I was kcuky enough to have a BenQ drive in my. 360, so flashing it was a breeze. But the friends hat Lite-On drives, so you needed a probe. Of course because I was young and dumb I was WAY to overzealous and said I could flash drives, no problem. My buddies obviously also wanted flashed drives, as when we were in school, we didn't have any money. Long story short, I bricked their drives, and they don't trust me with computer stuff anymore :D now we all bought jtags for a steal so everything's good. Anyway, thanks for uploading this video and jogging my memory!
4:23 Clarification : Game Journalists/Websites also had access to PartnerNet to test/review games before launch. Usually under Embargo/NDA
9:57 Correction : title is Sonic The Hedgehog 4 Episode 1 not Sonic Episode 4
No worries, we don't acknowledge Sonic 4. Episode 1 or 2. That's just another one of Sega's mulligans.
Maybe when Christian Whitehead and Headcannon decide to fix it and put proper Sega Saturn-style pixel graphics and fix the level design, then we can acknowledge the 2D-Sonic-Game-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named.
just remake kthe video
You forgot to pin this... or it was unpinned when you edited it.
Marco I find episode 1 bad but episode 2 to be a serviceable game.
@@MarcoGPUtuber In my book, Sonic Mania is the real Sonic 4.
This channel is a hidden gem on RUclips. The amount of unique amazing content is mind blowing.
Fully agree!
One of the few channels that always brings new information to the table and it's damn well put together and perfectly explained ... The very definition of interesting.
I have been binge watching this channel Because of this quarantine.
Moski Doski this is one of the very few channels I can sit back and binge watch all day.
And it’s only made better knowing that I’ve been enjoying some of his homebrew work for years.
I worked as a tester on a XBLA game in 2007. I would spend my breaks going through Partnernet to see what was new. Got to see some very interesting things. Even back in 2007 though, developers were doing things to prevent people from seeing what their game was. There were quite a few titles with codenames on there (ours included), and some things you downloaded didn't work, crashed or needed some combination of buttons to start.
The best part though was being able to create unlimited gamertags. Myself and the other testers would try to make the grossest/stupidest gamertags the profanity filter would allow.
The unprecedented access absolutely blows my mind to this day. Even without leaks, just crazy to think that any development company with PNET access could see and play whatever pre-release content any other company was working on. Big thanks for the credit, my dude! May the 4th be with you!
Two legends talking to each other
“Only for partners only”
The department for redundancy department is pleased.
So basically, if MS had just bought a couple of drill presses, all of that could have been avoided.
Karl Tanner of Gin Alley thats not how you recycle.
@@PumpedSmartass recycling something usually involves the physical destruction of the items.
@@ChucksSEADnDEAD It also involves actually receiving the items and processing them lol. But if underpaid recycling center people run across these... good luck.
I'm surprised that MS didn't have them sent to a dedicated secure facility, or even better, require more account stuff to be checked prior to gaining access. seems lazy.
@@colinstu sure, I'm only pointing out that going ham on hard drives wouldn't make the materials impossible to recycle.
@@PumpedSmartass I snap the platters on my hard drives or drill press my old mother boards, still get recycled.
Imagine your biggest security flaw being a dumpster
More common than you would expect, that!
Hey, I work for one of those recycling companies. Yeah. It's amazing what we just throw away. Every time I see a bin full of server fans being thrown out, i cringe. Damn things are like $35 each new. Nidec ultraflos and SAN ACEs... We're under contract to destroy every storage device. I still have a bin of 10gbit NICs I've been collecting for the last couple years. Can't understand why people don't buy this stuff on ebay, it's so cheap, there's just nobody talking about it for regular people to search for it...
@@SLLabsKamilion I remember peaking in a Target Electronic Recycling Bin one day and the first thing I saw is an iPod (the ones with a clickwheel). I asked the manager if I could pick some stuff out or dumpster dive and sadly they said that anything that goes in the bin belongs to the recycling company they contracted.
Never seen Hackers?
@@Poorgeniu5that’s like saying it belongs to a landfill as most recycling companies never do as much as they could .
The source wasn't just recycling centers and such. Every time a game studio shut down more of these systems would appear on the market. When EA Chicago shut down I ended up with 4 devkits each with unreleased copy's of games that never saw the light of day. I still have these unreleased EA games. One such example was the Unreleased Marvel Fighting game that got leaked once I sold one of these kits to somebody else.
What other unreleased games were on them?
@referral madness ruclips.net/video/2603K0dR6Bk/видео.html Take a look, that channel covers alittle bit about the build I had.
@@NethTech So you say the guy who bought it released them, but you are just letting the games rot? Why tell people something so stupid? If you had them, you would release them. Thus you have nothing.
@@_PatrickO He probably doesn't want to risk getting sued by EA
@@hughjanus2935 lol, just stop with garbage, it is trivial to dump stuff online anonymously and this was an abandoned project to begin with.
when i worked at a car dealership, we had to break all the parts that were changed in warranty, parts that were already not working or malfunctioning had to be hammered and photographed before sending them back to the factory, wth was microsoft thinking
Especially a company that involves computers lol
Must have been a great car brand you guys worked for.
microsoft going cheap
I would like to be the guy that hammers down transmissions
@@claudiobizama5603 lol i never had to hammer those, but i get the hate
That's sounds at start.. When you know the next 13 minutes will be marvelous.
Would just like to correct one little thing: When you say that there was no consequence to developers downloading competitor's games, this was only true for a short time. Microsoft quickly caught on and infringing game devs soon began receiving e-mails containing the list of IPs (along with time, date, and other identifiable info) and the list of games accessed, with a firm notice to take the necessary action to make it stop or face repercussions. A few testers were fired over this at the company I worked for at the time.
Actually this was way deeper with the leaks coming from direct access to many of the developers servers, besides the mentioned Partnernet leaks. Darknet Diaries made an excellent two-part podcast with the complete history including interviews. Highly recommended.
Never knew about Partnernet - allowing your competition to get a look at your own work? Wow. What an absolute mess!
it will make sure the devs give it all... because you're constantly under pressure because you may find out that every ego shooter works better than yours for example. so if you want to stay in the race, you have to make your game better than the other devs, and so do they.
This isn't true... Read my other reply in this thread
As other informed individuals have said, it didn't work that way, but the security was still weak, basically security-by-obscurity. A game could be made private but you could still scrape through the service by generating gameIDs bypassing the normal way of accessing PartnerNet.
@@azalinprime in another comment i had the idea that the devs could password protect their projects, if they were allowed to do so. you may be still able to view the game data, but you wouldn't get past the first screen of the application.
but my thoughts at the beginning of this chain here seems more plausible
Thoughts on the Wii source code leak? I know a lot of people are excited that it might lead to a method to recover bricked Wiis.
Sounds like a legal nightmare
*@dungeonseeker*
Hold on i have a bricked wii, does that mean.....
How would a Wii get bricked in the first place?
@@Sanrasxz screwing something up when trying to softmod it or other various reasons
Unfortunately, the good majority of the statements made from 7:40 onward are not entirely true. This isn't the whole story, and game developers weren't able to access each other's builds. These builds were set to private. Since the majority of these arcade and debug builds came from myself and two others, I would be more than happy to correct this story. You could modify the the gameID in generated container packages from the SDK to a private gameID, and then use that ID to access the private repository in the MS store on PNet. By default, game releases were set to hidden and couldn't be obtained without this method, and a later method. Also a good chunk of items also came from a less popular known network environment called INet. These IDs were crawled using the partnernet/Inet store URLs obtained from xboxwattson and then later made into an autocrawler tool.
At no point were these builds meant to be visible at any time to other developers. As for Microsoft bricking devkits, this was really never confirmed. What was confirmed is a person by the name of SonicISO uploaded recoveries that wiped the NAND, and released "leaks" that contained remote activation brick code in an attempt to sell more devkits. I had published a tutorial on Assembler games on how to protect from this type of bricking and fuse manipulation.
Yea Baldy low key shills playstation he will do whatever it takes to slander Xbox as he's not a real American
@@LRP-e1m This modern vintage used to have cotnract for Sony so ofc he is gonna shill Out For sony.
Well i was sure that xenon or xeon did it. Actally im not sure if 9298 wiped nand or just modified it. I try this recovery on one of dev kits but disconected resistor. Nothing happend just updated console. What i believe really happend was burn of efuses. Thats why nothing happend when i had resistor disconected. But true is that most of ppl from x underground and assemblergames ruin it. Building containers using sdk is a part of the story, it only helps with games. Some dlc like i wrote in comments also needed title update to work (mafia 2 dlc) which were not present on partnernet. So later many developers become smarter and share dlc but share title update between workers via ftp/email etc... testers were able to transfer them via sdk. Btw: what was your nick on assemblergames?
@@Dabman1988 lllsondowlll
@@JesseFleming1990 i remember U from assemblergames ;)
"Microsoft shut down the service for a week to solve the issue"
Ok, so they made it so developers only had access to their games instead of allowing access to literally everything by default?
"They banned some more consoles"
They rushed to beat Sony.
This isn't true... None of that "viewable by default" was true. Read my other reply in this thread
Sure. Lots of leaks. I also hope lots of preserved games that would have not otherwise seen the light of day.
THIS
If anybody is interested in more of the behind-the-scenes work on this, there's a fantastic 2 part podcast called Xbox Underground by Darknet Diaries, where the host, Jack Rhysider, actually interviews the hackers that utilized PartnerNet, the leakers who leaked the games and even a guy who worked at the recyling plant where they discovered these trashed DevKits! It's fantastic and I really urge you to check it out, it genuinely blew my mind!
What MVG doesnt tell you, is that HE was the leaker!
I was thinking that as well when he was showing the banned console haha.
Ya, this man knows way more...
Monday. MVG time. I love it! Cheers mate, keep up the excellent info on hacking/cracking/phreaking!
Hey take a look on the huge Nintendo wii souce code leak, absolutely crazy.
Nintendo is going scorched Earth on those Vids.
Can you please send me the link?
@@TheEpicFace007 i dont have the link for download it, im actually searching too.
@@ByeWorld ok thanks
it's been confirmed already that no Wii source code was leaked
twitter.com/marcan42/status/1258076270308425728?s=20
I'm finding it funny, back in 2005 when Microsoft was notorious for having insecure software, that the Xbox 360 was the one that was hardest to break into.
They didn't have insecure software (at least by 2005 anyway), it was the most widely deployed OS in the hands of mostly nubcakes. Most widely deployed means it's the most probed for exploits and then the nubcakes don't know how to secure their own PCs in many cases.
@@unitedfools3493 That's right, but to the layman, it was insecure. I think you can be notorious for something without it actually being true.
Maybe because the profitable part of Xbox was selling the games to make the OS relevant instead of the OS itself.
Different threat-model and pre-TCI-software
Marco says something stupid and tries to backtrack. Nice try.
hahahah nearly 80% of second hand xbox360 in Russia in jailbroken, xbox360 was heavily pirated in Russia
In China, too😂
Everything is jailbroken in Russia. I'm starting to think Russians don't even bother to make their own accounts. Any time one of my accounts has been breached over the last 20 years it's been some russian dude that took the effort to change my profile picture and name and shit
@@Sentientmad9mthis is why I couldn’t play battlefield 4 😂
Remote bricking your consoles?
That sounds like something Nintendo would do.
They were consoles nobody should have been using in the first place. They never remote bricked any retail boards and just banned those from Live instead.
They were still Microsoft's consoles.
@@CorneliusTalmadge That's kind of irrelevant to my point. I was refering to a measure Nintendo would use to stop hackers from using homebrewed switches.
@@claytongray7656 Nintendo has never and would never remote brick a console. It's illegal to do that to a regular consumer. Their EULA is not a legal contract and they can be sued for doing so.
@@redwidow1358 Nintendo getting sued? Yeah right. They win virtually every court case they fight in. And your point was taken out of context.
This was a fun reminder of the 360/ps3 dev days. I miss game development. Partnernet was wild. On the cod games, we did worldwide testing, so the builds got around all over to other devs, eventually we made a test plan that included all ATVI studios worldwide. This meant a the studios in la, we'd have to be fully staffed from 11:30pm-130pm the next day to allow for the worldwide testing.
LOL when will manufacturers learn that recycling plants are staffed by minimum wage workers who are always looking for shit to sell. Let's put our proprietary info in the hands of someone making $12 an hour.
wow, I earn a bit less than that :D
@@nattila7713 my condolences.
@@Gorilla_Jones not needed, I am happy that with that "small" amount I still have a better life than 5+ billion people. And honestly? I have "everything" (not talking about yachts and so on)
@@nattila7713 good for you. *Thumbs up
yep
This is actually quite beautiful in a way. Old development kits sent to what was intended to be their eternal resting places, being brought back to life as these stitched abominations to benefit their new masters before their second life inevitably ended with a red ring. Amazing and sad. Rest in RIP, old Xbox 360 devkits.
I worked as QC for The Sims 3 on Xbox 360/PS3, after the project was done we used PartnerNet to download SuperMeatBoy, Outrun online and quake. Good times.
I imagine being 13 or so in 2005 and being lucky enough to own one. That would've been sick. Just download every game that comes out including early alphas, betas, test builds, DLC, etc. The money I would've saved and the games I would've gotten to play that I never got around to.
Alright, I give in. I can't keep searching and waited on baited breath to find one of your videos, I'm subscribing.
Love your content.
This explains how I saw so much about Xbox 360 piracy and leaks online back when PS3 had nothing like that going on. I got a used 360 Elite in 2010 and searching online I was amazed to find stuff like pirateable Live Arcade games and the DVD firmware mod which I managed to install with the most ghetto setup ever after a long battle where more than once I thought I had permanently screwed things up.
Not sure if Microsoft was just naive to make the system work like this, while Sony seemed way more experienced and strict with basic security of the whole console ecosystem, but it brought a lot of interesting gaming-related things to the eyes of a bit larger public.
Man i love the 360 videos. Reminds me of when I was seeing all of this unfold. I've had so many different demo kits, test kits, full xdks, xna consoles, regular consoles with rgloader, all so much fun to play around with.
I love your channel MVG. You live and breathe what the gaming scene is really about. I used some of your emulators back on the original xbox back in the day and thought it awesome that you've got a channel dedicated to all this stuff now with such interesting stories. Keep up the awesome work :)
At 8:33 'Bean' is the 2007 Goldeneye remaster in plain sight
Upload 8 minutes ago. Never been this early for a video. A fresh MVG video is a great way to start the week
I love these gaming history episodes! The research you put into these really shows and I appreciate getting to learn about the history of the industry.
Excellent documentary with awesome information, mostly forgotten by the community. Greetings from Spain!
Does anyone have any information on how they did the remote bricking?
i would love to see a video about this :o
This is my theory. They just updated the BIOS to brick via update.
An outdated Xbox 360 refused to connect to Xbox Live until you updated the firmware, I guess PartnerNet was the same and they used that to intentionally push a broken firmware update on these units...
@@mbc07 Partnernet never had a kernel version requirement.
@Tomáš Urych I've read that restoring the firmware doesn't help, that's why I'm interested. Sadly there is very little information out there.
By the way you could also connect to PartnerNet with just a regular jtag/rgh running RGLoader, you just had to have to have the right files/structure to not only connect to the right network but to get that dashboard to work at all.
So I think that's how the 360 version (yet only released for one day in Japan) of Crimson Dragon leaked. The game is officially only available on Xbox One.
Man I really hope you cover the nintendo source leak, you present the info in such an amazing format
Dude MVG, your content is just so damn consistent. I actually experience a release of dopamine when I see you uploaded another video.
For anyone interested in the complete story check out the darknet diaries podcast episodes 45 and 46. The story is super interesting on how this all got started.
Darknet Diaries has an episode on his podcast about his exact subject. He interviews a few of the ppl involved. Very Interesting. I recommend everyone take a listen.
I believe the episodes are name 'The Xbox Underground" or something like that
Edit: HERE IS LINKS darknetdiaries.com/episode/45/
I think it's a 2 part episode. 1st account stories about the guys that took this too far
Came here to say this. Great info about Xbox.
I really enjoy your channel and all the research, history, facts, and tutorials you do. I recently found your channel and have binge watched pretty much all your videos while I've been stuck in the house waiting for these world events to pass. Thanks!
On another note: I can't wait for the Switch Lite to be cracked. I have a Pokemon edition sitting in the box waiting for ways I can get all my retro game backups playing on it.
This is a great video, and if people want a deep dive into the hackers and repercussions of the hacks, I highly recommend the XBox Underground Darknet Diaries on the subject. It deals with heavier stuff though.
I can highly recommend these episodes, they go more into detail about what happened and I think some of the things should have been incorporated into this MVG video as well
darknetdiaries.com/episode/45/
darknetdiaries.com/episode/46/
Y'all should check out Darknet Diaries' two-parter "Xbox Underground" for extended listening on this topic!! It gets pretty dark but it pretty much explains in detail everything thats being talked about here by the hacking group themselves
I just recommended this too it's fantastic isn't it??
Link?
With all the landfill boards being resurrected & so many leaks, I'm genuinely surprised that the XBLA remake of GoldenEye hasn't appeared in the wild. On the PartnerNet it was known as 'bean', with a Perfect Dark Zero Joanna icon. See 08:30.
The golden eye leak brought me here. Very good video. You got my sub :)
There’s a two episode series telling the story of the guys who did many of the leaks, including interviews, on the Darknet diary podcast. Highly recommend. Episodes are titled Xbox underground.
Link?
It’s always a treat when a new MVG video is uploaded!
I listen to a podcast that talks in depth about this subject in episode 45 called "Darknet Diaries" they have two episodes about this subject. it goes into great detail into how they acquired the dev kits
There’s a really good 2 part series on this Partnernet breach on the Podcast Darknet Diaries. Really worth a listen.
Wow never knew any of this back in the 360 hay-day. Awesome video as usual MVG!
Please go check the episodes 45 and 46 of the Darknet Diaries podcast about this stuff, it's about the kids who got some of the first dekits and hacked into an enormous amount of companies thanks to it, they literally stole Xbox one source code years before release. It's an insane tale with everything, hacking, police, suicide and crime, please check it out everybody!
what is the game at 3:35? i know i've seen it before but can't remember what it's called..
This reminds me of PC Dos game -Piranha,but looks like modern version.
@@adam1984pl piranha looks cool, i'll check it out, thanks. : ) but i'm pretty sure it's not that, this was a sort of indie game around the late 2000s, i think it was cross-platform and had over the top opengl effects and am awesome trippy electro soundtrack. i have an idea.
@@adam1984pl yep image search helped. it's called 'geometry wars' and it's on steam. : )
that sounds like my first attemps at making websites in php without any security
I wish we get the leak of the cancelled "Darkwatch 2" game from Highmoon Studios.
Browsing PartnerNet became a part of my morning coffee at my first QA job. Oh, I do miss it so.
Some XBLA developers began requiring a password to their games, so you couldn't get to the main menu without knowing a button sequence; I seem to remember Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet doing this.
Dude. How did you get so good at making technical details so interesting? Thank you for doing what you do
rip the blade interface good did I love that look
Amazing content! Man I love this channel.
And this is why, ladies and gentleman, we destroy scrapped hardware before sending it off.
burn your hard drive, formatting is recoverable, cia will find you
;-;
I love how you have an action replay sitting on your shelf. I used to love using that to rip music and cheat in games!
I just bought a Zephyr XDK w/ sidecar. So excited for it to arrive.
@ModernVintageGamer
At 8:44 - was that a transcript between you and another person?
It seems to me that if the 360 would have been more reliable, and PartnerNet had ANY sort of security this wouldn't have happened.
Crazy that partners had access to literally every other devs stuff on there too.
Awesome stuff, wish i had access to that back then. Flashed my 360 in 2012 but could only play burnt discs. Was still awesome to get games days or even a week early from xboxpirate. Sadly my flashed xbox froze during a system update then had red ring, i blame the update, was no co incidence. XB1 has been abysmal, no hacks, everything's boring now compared to dreamcast-360/ps3 era
This channel has to be one of the most interesting channels out there
It's actually MVG Monday for me. I have to research about soft-mods on the PS2 and Wii and this is just the place for that.
God all of these videos are remarkable. Your channel is just A++
Another top notch video, very interesting to learn more about the Partnernet
I will never hear the name Frankenstein again and won't think of this video.
Thanks for your hard work and research
I love how perfect dark zero is called bean
Future video idea: The DVD CSS key release :) I know it's outside of your usual console topics but it's a good one .
This is so interesting thank you for enlightening those of us who had no idea this took place. Thank you.
3:35 That's the best looking 360 I've ever seen!
Info : Leaks
Mistakes were made eh
I remember actually connecting my dvd drive to the PC to flash the firmware when that first came out! Later XNA became available for consumers to run their own code on a retailkit (100$ I believe were the only costs to that), which is when I bought an Elite in order to do gamedev on it. Great memories to that period of gaming
I remember what a hassle the dvd media id flash was. Make a logic probe from a nokia cellphone serial cable to extract the keys. prat about cycling the power and jamming the disk tray half open whilst shoving the probes on tiny contacts and pressing keys on the pc all at once. It was really fussy on what i/o card the pc had and the software was pretty unstable. After much faffing about you still had to get expensive duel layer dvd-r disks and mess around with header files before burning. Then it gets banned from xbox live and all you can do with it is play offline copied disks. No launchers or homebrew iirc.
With second hand games only a few quid more than the blank dvds it really wasnt worth doing in hindsight tbh.
Ps3 on the other hand was amazing once exploited.
Yeah, XNA was a $99/yr subscription. Bummed they never just unlocked the software when they phased out the 360. Now I've got all these hobby projects I can no longer run on my 360, as XNA Game Studio Connect can't find a subscription. Odd, because they _did_ change the dev unlock for Windows Phone 7 to become permanent when they'd decided to phase it out in favor of Windows Phone 8
@@halofreak1990 pretty sure I used xna for free back in the day, might have used a keygen or wangled a student licence by lying but I definitely didn't pay for it. Messed around with it for a while then never touched it again lol
@@meetoo594 "pretty sure I used xna for free back in the day"
It only required that $99 subscription if you wanted to debug on the Xbox360 or when you wanted to publish a finished XNA game to the store.
Developing on PC was always free of charge. And yes, you could get into the program with a student license, if you qualified for one.
@@halofreak1990 ahh that explains it. I must have obtained a student licence, which was quite easy iirc as I had all the 360 debugging stuff activated.
Used to fake being a student at multiple institutions round the world to get free stuff back in the day. I'm betting it's a lot harder to get away with nowadays.
Great video as usual. Thanks for so much information.
phone: *ding*
me: awww hell yeah dude a new MVG video!
This type of content are always fascinating,thx for this video :)
Ah partner net. For a period (gh metallica era) you could pretty much just look at whatever any other studio had in submission and download and play it if you had access. Lots of pre-submits of music games with different actual setlists going on back in the day. There were "was there a leak" emails every single day.
There is a great podcast episode about the dev-kits on DarkNet Diaries!
I highly recommend listening to darknet diaries Xbox underground series.
He interviewed the guys behind the whole breach and covered the whole story behind Xbox 360 and partnernet, as well as some other interesting stuff.
The main purpose of partnernet at activison , was to get crash data during MP testing. For the lead testers, and the devs the kits were hooked up to PC and running on emulation, with 30-70 regular test kits on the same server. There was a tool in partnernet that allowed you to get assertion data(crash dump files) from any of the kits connected.
At Konami it was the arcade game remakes (tmnt, hcu, xmen, etc) the real bitch with all this, is you ended up having to install and reinstall different updates and versions of the xbox os about 9 times a day because the dev branches and test branches weren't shared, and we got our builds issued on disk only. Even for the partner net stuff we just had a fake file on Pnet, and the real files loaded from a burned disk, because Konami is a japanese company, and is very strict on everything.
KDE america doesn't have any devs on site, just the yu ghi oh card developers for the american market, and the QA for all of Konami
Man I loved the original blades UI. So many memories.
So you still can't homebrew xbox 360 without JTAG or RGH??
or atleast play Xbox 360 games by burning discs with xbox 360 iso without modding??
Great question
Still You need RGH to run hombrew and play games from usb drisk. To play burn disk games You still need to flash DVD drive.
Always enjoy these vids!
Reminds me of one of the big publishers that shipped us some dev kits we needed urgently. They didn't bother to wipe them before having them sent to us so we had dev versions of another studios game. Big licenced IP that got us all very excited to see. Of course I'm sure no one shared the info but I know a few lunch times were wasted playing another studios game.
Subbed! Love the vids!
MVG are you gonna talk about the recent Nintendo code leak's?, I'm interested in hearing from you what could people do with it
Windjammers is one of my favorite Neo games...I love the shirt...man do I miss Data East.
If i could date one channel on youtube.... This would be it
Don't tell my fiancee, she may get jealous lol
But in all seriousness, this has honestly become my favorite channel over the past year since i have been a subscriber... Not since OG angry video game nerd have i been so excited for a certain day of the week because it means "Monday is a new episode of MVG", keep up the good work my friend... Love what you do, and appreciate you a ton
Also...just became a patreon member...
ha 1:33 I just played one of my random out of 12,000 morning games on my OG Xbox w CoinOPS, and it was that and that exact boss before its eaten! Salamander 2 baby!
Oh my... This video gives me flashbacks to when I flashed the Xbox drives of my friends and my own drive. I was kcuky enough to have a BenQ drive in my. 360, so flashing it was a breeze. But the friends hat Lite-On drives, so you needed a probe. Of course because I was young and dumb I was WAY to overzealous and said I could flash drives, no problem. My buddies obviously also wanted flashed drives, as when we were in school, we didn't have any money. Long story short, I bricked their drives, and they don't trust me with computer stuff anymore :D now we all bought jtags for a steal so everything's good.
Anyway, thanks for uploading this video and jogging my memory!
Ah the days of having my jtag online in MW2. Miss them terribly... Bought sooo many KV's! Se7enSins!
I had never heard of this. Thanks a lot for the video.
This is such a fantastic video. Great job.