A maker finally finished an Xbox 360 project from nine years ago

The blogger behind Kennedn’s Blog bought a Matrix CoolRunner in 2017, a modchip built to hit an Xbox 360 with a pulse of about 100 nanoseconds, and shelved the project when it didn’t work out. This year the chip came back out, a £5 Raspberry Pi Pico finished the job, and the post is titled “It took me nine years to hack my Xbox 360.”

A chip was needed at all because Microsoft got the 360’s security right. The original Reset Glitch Hack write-up by GliGli and Tiros opens with tmbinc’s verdict that “software based approaches of running unsigned code on the 360 mostly don’t work,” so they went after the electricity instead. A tiny reset pulse sent to a slowed-down processor “does not reset it but instead changes the way the code runs,” they wrote. Kennedn’s version: the guard is checking ID at the door, so “You inform the guard that his shoelaces are untied and hit him over the head with a club.”

The 2017 attempt was a homemade reader wired to an old PC’s printer port, which Kennedn’s Blog says would have taken “over 30 minutes” to copy the console’s flash memory had it ever worked. In 2026, a Pico running PicoFlasher did it in “a handful of seconds,” and a Pico running Pico-dirtyJTAG programmed the glitch chip.

Kennedn’s Blog also notes a software-only exploit for the 360 dropped the week before the post, “rendering my years of effort somewhat moot.” That exploit is Peer Pressure from Grimdoomer, and its GitHub page lists what it needs: a 360, a mechanical hard drive and a USB stick.

If there’s a 360 in your closet, check the motherboard revision first. Peer Pressure’s own notes say Corona and Winchester boards have a hardware fix against it, and warn it could cost you data or a console that boots. If you’ve got a stalled project in a drawer, the parts for it may have gotten cheap while you weren’t looking.

Nine years late still counts as finished.