XBOX360: Homebrew coming of age - Xbox 360

February 16th, 2007, 05:02 Posted By: Talvish

A couple of days ago the site Pensive Gamer explored Homebrew on the Wii. Today it continues with the XBox 360:

As a company, Microsoft's success is partially attributed to its support of the developer community. So when Bill Gates saw a modded original Xbox it seems appropriate that he was curious how homebrew developers could be engaged.

In August 2006 Microsoft's answer came with the announcement of the free development tool XNA Game Studio Express and the subscription-based XNA Creators Club.

Released in December, this is the only mechanism to do legitimate homebrew on the Xbox 360. Unlike the PS3 and Wii a web browser is not available. Until Microsoft believes people really want a browser and Microsoft is comfortable with the security implications, a browser won't come.

Unlike like the other console makers, however, Microsoft has built and continues to build infrastructure, tools and marketing programs around their homebrew platform.

The XNA Strategy
The enabling technology for Microsoft's homebrew strategy is the XNA Framework and its Common Language Runtime. In a nutshell, the framework provides APIs to access features of the Xbox 360, and the CLR is the sandbox/operating environment applications run on.

For amateur game developers there is plenty to like about Microsoft's strategy:

1. The tools are free and allow you to build applications for Windows and the Xbox 360.
2. There is plenty of information on the Internet and at Microsoft's developer site.
3. Your code runs on the 360's standard operating system and allows remote debugging.
4. The framework gives you access to much of the console's abilities including 3D graphics acceleration, audio, private storage and rummblable controllers.

There are 8 comments - Join In and Discuss Here