Game Console Hacking: Having Fun While Voiding Your Warranty

The worldwide video game console market surpassed $10 billion in 2003. Current sales of new consoles is consolidated around 3 major companies and their proprietary platforms: Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft. In addition, there is an enormous installed "retro gaming" base of Ataria and Sega console enthusiasts. This book, written by a team led by Joe Grand, author of "Hardware Hacking: Have Fun While Voiding Your Warranty", provides hard-core gamers with they keys to the kingdom: specific instructions on how to crack into their console and make it do things it was never designed to do.

By definition, video console game players like to have fun. Most of them are addicted to the adrenaline rush associated with "winning", and even more so when the "winning" involves beating the system by discovering the multitude of "cheats" built into most video games. Now, they can have the ultimate adrenaline rush---actually messing around with the soul of the machine and configuring it to behave exactly as the command. This book builds on the motto of "Have Fun While Voiding Your Warranty" and will appeal to the community of hardware geeks who associate unscrewing the back of their video console with para-jumping into the perfect storm.

Joe Grand is the President and CEO of Grand Idea Studio, Inc., a product design and development firm that brings unique inventions to market. An electrical engineer, many of Joe's creations, including consumer devices, medical products, video games and toys, are sold worldwide. A recognized name in computer security and former member of the legendary hacker think-tank, The L0pht, Joe's pioneering research on product design and analysis, mobile devices, and digital forensics is published in various industry journals. He is a co-author of Hack Proofing Your Network, Second Edition (Syngress Publishing, ISBN 1-928994-70-9) and Stealing the Network: How to Own the Box (Syngress Publishing 1-931836-87-6).

Frank Thornton runs his own consulting firm, Blackthorn Systems and as a detective and forensics expert has investigated over 100 homicides and thousands of other crime scenes.


Jon Harbour has been programming video games since the 1980s. His first video game system was an Atari 2600 which he played with disassembled on the floor of his room as a kid. He has written on languages and subjects that include: C++, C#, Basic, Java, DirectX, Allegro, Lua, DarkBasic, XNA Game Studio, Pocket PC, Nintendo GBA, and game console hacking. He is the author of Visual Basic Game Programming for Teens, 3rd Edition; Visual C# Game Programming for Teens; Beginning Game Programming, 3rd Edition; Multi-Threaded Game Engine Design and XNA Game Studio 4.0 for Xbox 360 Developers. Visit his blog and forum at jharbour.com.