After all of Microsoft’s attempts to lock people out, six years later, the Xbox is still the number one console for hackers. Considered a lame also-ran when it first debuted, hardcore gamers have slowly come to embrace the Xbox as the coolest console out there, and ironically, its popularity as a hackable system is an underground source for that brand revision. Just take a look at Xbox Scene, or hop on Craigslist, or Talk to Matt Hargett. The popularity of the Xbox as a hacking platform is obvious to anyone who’s seen the ads all over Xbox hacks for $200 a pop. Drop in a mod chip, add a bigger hard drive, and games suddenly find themselves in possession of a game console that can suck games off their discs and store them indefinitely. Maybe Sony should give up on its marketing campaigns, and just give the public details on the technical specs for the Playstation 3: hackers still have to buy the hardware, after all. (When was the last time anyone talked about hacking the Playstation?)
Matt Hargett spends most of his days teaching corporations how to implement agile development practices. But at night, Hargett’s an avid gamer with more than a little bit of reverse-engineering know how. That came in handy when he decided to upgrade some of his Xbox games to display in 480p instead of 480i. How did he manage this?
Why, with a hex editor and a copy of IDA, the eponymous debugging program for Windows.
Hargett’s had previous experience with game hacking. He previously worked on the ScummVM LucasArts adventure game emulator. But Hargett’s real hobby is picking apart other people’s code, after its been compiled. A few years ago, he got an Xbox, but only recently, after he found the bargain bins at Fry’s and Best Buy full of sub-$10 Xbox games did he even use the thing.
Then, a few weeks ago, Hargett discovered a forum thread that described how one could hack Xbox games to upgrade their display quality. “Once someone explained what they were doing it was like ‘oh yeah, that makes total sense.’ It took me four hours to figure out what the next step was. Now I think for other games it’ll be really really easy,” said Hargett.
His first conquest has been Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Hargett said that playing the game in 480p decreases the appearance of jaggies, the stair-stepped aliases that appear on the edges of poorly rendered 3D objects. Hargett was so delighted by his success that he even attempted to crank the resolution of the game up to 720p.

“The screen you see displayed on your TV is basically three graphics buffers. so even if you have a 4/3 monitor, it’s 640X480 times three. Take that to widescreen, and its 720X480 times three,” said Hargett. “The amount of RAM you use for the graphics jumps significantly at 720p. If the game uses a lot of the Xbox, it’ll run out of memory and not work. Anything that’s a direct port [From PS2 or GameCube], where they didn’t update the textures or anything, will probably work.”
Unfortunately, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire hasn’t yet made the jump to 720p. He said that the game did run, but graphical glitches made it impossible to play. Hargett feels that his troubles with cranking that game up to this higher resolution come from a stupid mistake on his part, however, and he plans to keep beating on the code through the rest of the week.
As his work progresses, Hargett will be updating a wiki page he’s made for the project. It’s good to know that there’s folks like Hargett, hacking away out there so the rest of us can benefit from this type of work after the fact. With any luck, he’ll build some patches to do this for the unwahsed masses of folks who have chipped Xboxen, and no software skills.
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