ModChat

A ton of awesome releases and advancements in this month's ModChat! First comes the release of the Lapse Kernel Exploit for both PS4 12.02 and PS5 10.05 firmwares. BadHTAB for the PS3 evolves into BadWDSD, a separate but better and more exciting development for PS3 owners allowing further access now on Super Slim variants! The original Xbox revision 1.6 gets a huge development as well, now with the ability to reflash the on-board BIOS for the first time. We touch up on some Switch news for the first time in a while, with a new Atmosphere CFW update for the latest Switch firmware, but not all good news when we discuss the EULA changes. However, some reverse engineering efforts towards the WaveBird receiver, Mario Party 4, Mario Kart 64, and even Dinosaur Planet have all released this month!

A whole lot has happened since the last episode of ModChat, and there's still been a few topics not covered within this episode! For the ones we do go into, the first is covering some major progress on the PlayStation Home revival project Home Laboratory, which is now available by default on the XMB for the latest PS3HEN and Evilnat CFW users on PS3! The PS3 also gets some renewed Hypervisor related interest in the form of BadHTAB, which is based on old HTAB related work from geohot and has been worked on here again in 2025. The Xbox 360 side of house gets more love, with Sonic Unleashed being ported to PC thanks to XenonRecomp, both of which have been released. The OG Xbox gets a fancy new payload in the form of Skeleton Key which serves as a Swiss Army Knife for stock OG Xbox users to run and quickly have several powerful tools available on their screen with minimal effort. Finally, a new FATXplorer tool releases in the form of XDON, allowing for easy Xbox and Xbox 360 drive mounting over a network.

At last the long awaited Xbox 360 Hypervisor exploit shown by Grimdoomer has arrived in the form of Bad Update! This means that unsigned code can be run on any Xbox 360 up to Kernel/Dashboard 17559 using only a USB drive and the NTSC version of Tony Hawk's American Wasteland. This does not require any other modifications to be done to the hardware and can be performed on an unopened and unmodified console, making this the first software-only exploit available for the latest system software version! As this episode will only be focused on Bad Update, we walk through where this started from Tony Hawk's Pro Strcpy, read through a couple of blog posts Grimdoomer made leading up to the release, and of course we set up and try Bad Update for ourselves before giving some final thoughts.

Some great new functionality being added to consoles old, new, and even a whole new FOSS based handheld to check out! The wpa2psp plugin for PSP was released and took off, allowing most PSP consoles to get back onto modern WiFi networks again. The PS Vita gets some more love with a couple more ports, one for Carmageddon and another being the Ultimate Spiderman game on Android. We even go to the library on this episode thanks to the Video Game History Foundation's launch of a digital library! PS5's JAR Loader gets updated as we now see read and write access on firmwares up to 7.61! A newer minimalist type setup for a PlayStation ODE is shown thanks to PicoStation's recent updates allowing for better compatibility across the PS1's library. After the pleasant surprise of Grand Theft Auto 3 being ported to the Dreamcast, we're in for another surprise seeing the beginnings of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City being ported over! A whole new system you can build from scratch, the Game Bub, is a project we check out being a handheld FPGA console compatible with the Game Boy family of games. Finally, we take a look at... McDonald's India API security? Yeah, I won't explain that one, just give it a listen and a laugh.

A Dreamcastic (or maybe Dreamtastic?) episode of ModChat starting off 2025 with some awesome ports for Sega's last console! We talk about the recent Grand Theft Auto III port being released in an open-alpha test, the DOOM 64 port, and even the beginning of a port of Xash3D for Half-Life! PC players also got an AWESOME port of Star Fox 64 in the form of Starship. Evilnat has been working hard on his custom firmware for PS3 which has results in the final release for 4.91.2, officially being out of beta! If you needed more DOOM, you can now have more DOOM, this time around in a PDF! Finally, we talk about how a recent Nintendo service announcement might have been the greatest advertisement Pretendo could have ever asked for.