It’s part of the ideology of the hacker: take it apart, fiddle with it, and make it do what you want.
Illegal homebrew development has existed for years: shady individuals authored and sold bootleg Atari cartridges back in the ’80s, followed by 100-in-1 NES cartridges, and so on. However, hobbyists have found better (and more legitimate) ways to explore and extend their hardware: home brew software. If a program doesn’t exist, do it yourself. If there’s a barrier like Digital Rights Management, find a way around it.
An excellent example of this sort of home brew is the Xbox Media Center. Why have a DVD player, a computer for watching videos or playing music, and a console for playing games, when you can combine all three into one unit? Unbothered by corporate interests, DRM restrictions or marketing concerns, a geographically distributed development team has built an incredible piece of software. XBMC is an extremely versatile video and audio player with network streaming, RSS feed readers, live Weather reports, access to YouTube and Google video, and much more. Bill Gates was even impressed by its capabilities.
The Sony PlayStation 3 includes Linux support out of the box with their Open Platform. The Sony-sponsored Yellow Dog Linux, released on November 27, 2006, was written specifically for the PS3. Other distributions such as Fedora Core 5 and Gentoo have been successfully installed.
You have to admit, there’s a certain amount of “because I can” mentality with Linux. However, there are many uses for a game console running Linux, including game console emulators, routing, or serving web pages.
Emulation allows programs to run on a platform other than what was originally intended. Common examples include MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) and cartridge dumps of older consoles, such as the Atari 2600, NES, or Sega Genesis. At this point, virtually every cartridge-based console has been emulated in one form or another. For example, armed with a ROM (software image of the contents of the game media) and an emulator, you could play the Nintendo game Super Mario Brothers 3 on an Xbox.
There is a story of a Student Association web server running on an Xbox with Linux and Apache until the new manager, not knowing what it was, took it home for his kids to play with. In essence, a tool was mistaken for a toy, and that’s part of the paradigm shift one needs to recognize when dealing with these consoles: they’re not just children’s toys anymore.
