Game Console Homebrew is Weird

now I like game consoles as much as the next guy but if there's anything I love more it's domestic abuse and there's always been something so intriguing to me about taking a thing that's designed to exist in its own little walled off garden and imparting my will upon it one of my favorite things to do with consoles has always been installing some kind of Homebrew and I want to talk about that because I think it's just really cool from a technical perspective and we're seeing a lot of changes with the latest generation of consoles that make the future of the modding scene look Bleak at best if you're somehow not familiar with the concept basically you take a game console which are usually locked down to only play games or software published by the manufacturer and you mix in a little something some to get past those Security checks and unlock the full potential of the hardware people have been doing this ever since there's been any incentive to getting into a console and it's resulted in some incredibly cool uses for the hardware the Wii was my first console that I installed Homebrew on and it's still an incredibly popular all these years later for a very good reason a console with controller and cords probably won't set you back more than 50 bucks and for that you're getting a very capable emulation box once you take the time to run letter bomb and start copying over some free emulators and ported games and since the content isn't regulated by the manufacturer of the hardware Nintendo in this case you can make and install whatever you want even if it's something completely ridiculous like a complete version of Debian Linux which might actually be useful if it weren't for the absolutely minuscule 480p video signal but of course one of the more popular reasons for modding a console as far as I'm aware is to install emulators and ports of older games that were never published for that platform officially the Wii itself already features backwards compatibility with Gamecube titles and using some basic Homebrew it's not all that hard to bring the entire libraries of the NES Super Nintendo and the Nintendo 64 all onto the same box and once you add the abilities to run Wii and GameCube games from an SD card or USB stick using a loader app you're left with a library of potentially around 5 000 games you can run without having to leave your couch or bed doesn't work point being the Wii Homebrew scene is definitely one of the more mature examples since it's already had time to build an extensive software Library throughout most of the Wii and we use life cycles but other consoles still have a lot to offer in this regard Nintendo systems are still a favorite and the Wii U is basically just a Wii on steroids supporting a lot of The Homebrew we can run as well as its own excellent library of homebrew software I actually find some of the Homebrew on the Wii U massively helpful like for example blue pair which will just let you connect any regular Bluetooth controller to your console and use it like a Wii U Pro controller saving some of the wear and tear on your Gamepad which is nice because these things are way too fragile and expensive aside from that though I feel like the Wii U Homebrew scene is considerably more tame maybe because the hardware I never did too well in the first place so it didn't reach quite the same number of creative and Innovative developers that could have brought some really exciting projects to the platform there is one very prevalent category of software on the platform though but it's probably not something that Nintendo's layers would be all too Keen to have me talking about I think it's hard to discuss console modifications in general while being oblivious to the role that piracy has to play it's so easy just to find a sketchy 37 terabyte make sure you're using an ad block and just like that you're playing Watch Dogs on the Wii U it's a double-edged sword because on the one hand a lot of the engineers that figure out how to crack the security of a system are simply doing so purely for the fun of it and still want to support the manufacturers of the console and game developers you know I think one of the problems that Sony has is that people can start using this with pirated video games if they are opened up right well they can't use my stuff with pirated video games I made a I made a special effort when I released my stuff to not support pirated video games but if you discover a vulnerability and design and exploit around it releasing your findings could implicate you and whatever users of the exploit choose to do with their systems maybe not in the legal sense but if people are thanking you for making piracy possible it's kind of hard to drop that reputation at the same time the very tools that pirates might use to dump download decrypt and store their ill begotten goods are the exact same tools that game preservationists use to make sure all the titles on consoles now won't be lost to time later either through a lack of Hardware or damaged and forgotten software Homebrew gives developers insights into a system that just wouldn't happen otherwise and a lot of times Homebrew is part of the fundamental building blocks of reverse engineering that eventually make emulator development possible but a more exciting system and Topic in my opinion is the PlayStation 3 which was actually first system I ever talked about on my Channel For Better or For Worse and it's because the PS3 scene is one of if not the coolest thing you can play around with as far as older consoles go right now one of the most useful Homebrew utilities that you can get on PS3 is multi-man which is an open source game loader and Backup Manager that basically lets you back up and run all of your games from your internal storage rather than playing them from the disk drive and this means you'll get a pretty noticeable speed boost if you have an SSD installed in terms of other quality life improvements webman mod is another really useful piece of homebrew software that pretty much aims to pack together as many features as possible into a plug-in that's always running on your PS3 in the background webman mod does a lot of cool stuff for instance I can check my system temperatures while playing a game set fan speeds View files and install packages and even host an FTP server so I don't have to copy files to my Playstation with a USB drive of course those are just some of the things things I use it for but it does a lot more and of course like the Wii you'll get ports of lots of popular emulators and front ends like retroarch actually work really well here since the PS3 had pretty powerful hardware for its time so a lot of these things actually run with really good performance better yet with a little bit of effort you can even install and play PS2 games on a non-backwards compatible console by installing them as PS2 Classics games which actually uses the emulator built into all PS3s for playing PS2 games that you could download over PSN entering the 7th generation also brings one key feature that really sets these systems apart in my opinion something that can't really be overlooked which is online play and believe it or not this is actually a huge Advantage when you have Homebrew because even the lots of games from the Sarah are getting shut down a modded console is your gateway to playing them online again Take a Little Big Plant for example a game that it only just been shut down on the PlayStation 3 when I made my first video on the console I've always had a soft spot for the LBP games but it's the online experience that really made them worth playing for any amount of time the main campaign across each of the major releases is only a few hours long at best and you can really only make and play so many of your own levels before it just starts dragging on but with a little bit of modding you can get your game to connect to something like refresh private servers which are an open source replacement for the original Sony LBP servers that funnily enough fix the problems with Sony's old infrastructure that caused the attacks which got the old servers canned in the first place I'll be covering this in far more detail in another video but it's really cool getting to play Community levels again and it kind of breathes new life into the console as a whole since people who are invested in the PS3 enough to mod their systems and play on custom servers are usually pretty active so you can actually get a full friends list of people that actually use their consoles we don't know how much longer we'll have PSN on the PS3 given it's going on 17 years at this point but while it's still here it really offers an incredibly cool experience I feel like the PS3 scene really embodies the spirit of Homer in a way that most consoles can't since you can do so much with a hack system and engage with the community around it but the Homebrew scene is starting to get kind of weird that guiding Spirit of getting around the security of a console to do whatever you want with the hardware you paid for is being quietly dismantled by manufacturers in a disturbingly clever way Microsoft seems to have found the ultimate patch for hacked consoles and rather than any kind of Hardware or Vision or firmware update it's just a bit of social engineering that's fascinating I'll admit that I haven't put many hours into any version of the Xbox I grew up on the PS3 and the Wii so everything here is kind of foreign to me but it's just been really interesting diving into the world of modern Xbox Homebrew for the first time I got this Xbox One X console off a family friend since it ended up having a dead HDMI circuit but a quick motherboard Swap and soldering in a new control boards for the Blu-ray Drive got everything up and running just fine after that I went through the process of activating Dev mode on the Xbox which just involved downloading an app registering my Microsoft account as a developer account which cost 19 and then I could sideload pretty much any app over the network using their neat little web interface what I've basically done here is turn my Xbox into a Dev kid and even though this is a last-gen system the process is identical on newer Xbox series Hardware but once that was all said and done I have to admit I felt a little cheated the CPU and the Xbox One X definitely feels last gen and had a hard time keeping up with emulators for even systems like the GameCube even if graphically you can run the games just fine at 1440p or 4K with no extra frame drops it's still miles ahead of the power you'll find in a PS3 but something just doesn't sit right with me here I had to pay Microsoft for permission to install third-party software on my Xbox and since it's fully managed by Microsoft they could decide tomorrow that since I haven't published any apps on the store I'm not actually a developer and just close my account meaning I can't switch into developer mode and I can't use Homebrew which is actually something that people were becoming victim to not that long ago Microsoft said it was an accident but if Homebrew is supposed to be like its namesake home brewery then this is the equivalent of asking Budweiser for permission to brew your own beer in your own home and renting all of the equipment from them on the condition that you won't do anything to piss them off but unfortunately this strategy has so far kept anybody from bypassing the Titan security of the Xbox One valve on the other hand takes a decidedly more libertarian approach this is a steam deck you buy the steam deck and you own the steam deck they tell you how you're supposed to use the steam deck but if you don't want to use your steam deck that way you don't have to you can just close steam if you break your steam deck they give you what you need to fix it the steam deck is effectively just a computer the steam deck is your computer this is the most radical departure you'll find from what every other console manufacturer has been imposing on their customers since they started making consoles it's even hard to call emulators on the steam deck Homebrew since they're literally just apps you're installing on Linux valve can't take that away from you and they've made it clear that they don't even really want to in the first place they just want you to buy games on Steam which is so convenient there's not really any reason not to so I guess that basically covers everything interesting and weird about the homer scene right now it's kind of scary to see how well it's being suppressed with the latest generation consoles but only time will tell if this ends up becoming the status quo or if a few clever minds are motivated enough to crack into these platforms anyway but with all that said I'm basically done here I'm gonna get to installing more Homebrew and not actually playing games on my game consoles so I hope you enjoyed the video thank you very much for watching and as always have a good one pretty quick

Channel: Lowest Logan

Views: 6,284

Keywords: gaming, game console, emulation, mupen64plus, ultrahle, emulation history, video game history, video essay, nesticle, nintendo wii, nintendo switch, nintendo gamecube, nintendo wii u, nintendo 3ds, sony playstation, microsoft xbox, nintendo emulation, nintendo homebrew, wii emulation, gamecube emulation, dolphin emulator, cemu emulator, wii sports, super smash brothers, 6th generation, 2023, 2011, homebrew, console modding

Id: -VDK4SFj_Ig

Length: 12min 23sec (743 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 19 2023