Is Microsoft's New Step to Prevent XBox 360 Piracy Enough?

[Starlight]

Earlier today it was reported that Resident Evil 5 for Microsoft's XBox 360 Console was leaked online.

That being said, it has been pretty smooth sailing for modders of Micosofts next-gen console. Maybe its been a little too easy for them!

With the forthcoming release of MLB 2K9 and Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X, Microsoft has thrown the modding community a little bit of a curveball.

Microsoft has implemented a new way in which they create discs, maybe a way to stop piracy or just a way to get the New Xbox Experience to people that dont have internet access? In these 2 new releases, Microsoft has added a portion of the disc dedicated with the NXE update which is throwing off the the way 360 modders are able to play discs.

There have previously only been 2 types of PFI and Video partitions, and now they have discovered a new "3rd Wave" video partition on the discs.

The way these new discs are made, they are said to only boot up on systems that were modded with firmware before the developers of the hacked firmware discovered how to stealth the backup discs.

So, users with modded systems that want to play these games are forced to downgrade their hacked firmware to a firmware that Microsoft has been able to detect, and therefore, ban users of Xbox LIVE.

Is this a new way to thwart off piracy of Xbox 360 games, or will the modding community find away to play new backup games on LIVE?


More PlayStation 3 News...

[seed143]

first time i heard that you can pirate xbox360 games!

[madmax666]

This article is inaccurate! Tom Clancy HAWX and MLB have been leaked for days

And yeah.. they've also started work on a patch too

Last edited by madmax666; 03-04-2009 at 01:17 AM.

[PS3 News]

That kinda depends on how you look at it... they mention "forthcoming release" likely referring to the RETAIL releases of MLB 2K9 and Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X, but if they are leaked already then yep, this 'protection' will do little good for those titles as it's too late (they used poor examples if so).

[xandura]

nope, its just a few lines of command into a new firmware to make it able to recognize the 3rd video partition or "wave"

1.51 might arrive this weekend, and yes re5 leaked cuz they have elite bundles for sale with the game in it and a stupid sticker that says, dont sell b4 the 13th

[tworok]

c4eva already said that it's easy to add compatibility with these new games on the ixtreme firmware, the firmware is done, and it's being tested, and hopefuly will come out soon.

simply put, the ixtreme firmware checks (among other things) for the crc of the video partition, until now there was "wave 1" and "wave 2", if the crc differs from these two, the firmware won't boot the game, that's why these games don't work on ixtreme firmwares.

the next firmware will check the crc for the wave1, wave 2 and wave 3 video partitions, allowing the system to boot a "wave 3" game to boot (like mlb or hawx)

now what i fear is that if microsoft will do this more often and make us update the firmware much more often than just once a year

[dan0]

Aren't the developers of iXtreme already starting to bring out an update?

i don't think MS are trying to prevent piracy this way.. its just a way to update every console to the NXE cause soon it will be compulsory.

[pole91]

I think that this decision is not from microsoft... but it's from the game developer... anyway c4eva is now working on a new firmware which can pass this new "problem" . Maybe at the end of the week ixtreme 1.51 and 1.6 will be available.

[imdbowlgod]

microsoft cant stop piracy, only slow it down for a little bit.