The blog post reminds me of similar efforts with Shockwave. There's people building decompilers, and runtimes, and if you join enough Discords, you will notice the people in them are cross-contaminating between communities if you will, they share insights with one another, in their efforts towards specific goals. They're hyper focused on making one game or another come back. There's Habbo Hotel, and Coke Studios, as well as other games.
The Coke Studios effort is interesting because there were no "private servers" developed at the time, unlike Habbo which had many, and there are Shockwave Xtras that no open runtime supports currently.
There's several attempts at a full runtime as well, that run in-browser.
Projector Rays (decompiler) really was the biggest release to date, and recently people have been really hacking at it, to some extent AI has helped to reverse engineer bytecode far as I can tell.
For anyone curious, one of the runtimes is called DirPlayer:
Where can I boot up Coke Studios? Enjoyed that game as a kid, including making music (which was so friggen cool! They had tons of samples you could just drag and drop into a timeline).
Edit: fun memory. I figured out how scamming works at some point. IIRC (and I may not) I set up a minigame in my studio, and contestants had to give me their furniture to participate in a game. Since furniture could stack weirdly, people made all sorts of crazy mazes that were actually quite difficult to navigate due to the fixed isometric perspective.
Each stage required handing over a more expensive item than the last. At some point someone handed over a super rare/expensive piece of furniture.
Not gonna erase that. ACTUALLY I think I figured out how to clone items due to a bug. Or mine infinite DBs. Used that as cover to get someone to give me their item. Was a long time ago.
Anyways, a user handed me their super rare item and I then gave them a stern warning on how this is a common scam and I just stole their item(s). Then I handed everything back over to them and they profusely thanked me. lol
These projects are really neat. Last week, I was able to build (and play) the Xbox 360 release of Sonic Unleashed on a couple of ARM SBCs using Sonic Unleashed Recomp.
You take an Xbox game designed to run on an Xbox 360, a 64 bit PowerPC system and decompile its binaries back into source code. You now have the ability to modify the game as well as port it to other systems and architectures such as Windows on X86_64 or Linux on ARM64.
It's more nuanced than that; the approach you're describing is usually called "decompilation."
The difference is how far one goes in hoisting the "source code;" in this "recompliation" approach the source code, while C++, is basically an IR (intermediate representation) between the original game's assembly and a host platform, and the hardware itself is emulated (for example, the original architecture's CPU registers are represented as variables in the host architecture's memory). The machine code is translated to C++ using a custom tool.
In a "decompilation" approach the game logic is converted (using a decompiler, like IDA or Ghidra's) back into something which resembles the original source code to the game itself, and the source code is usually hand analyzed, marked up, rewritten, and then ported across platforms. The product is something that attempts to resemble the original game's source code.
Of course, they lie on a continuum and both approaches can be mixed, but, while they both involve C++ in the middle, the process is starkly different. Recompilation is much more copyright-friendly, because in many implementations only the modifications are distributed and the original binary is translated by the end user (who owns the software/a license to it), whereas decompilation produces an artifact (source code) which is a derivative work encumbered by the original software's license and generally should not be distributed.
Seeing this [1], I thought it was something related to taking assembly instructions in the original code, emitting C statements that match the instruction, and then compiling that C code.
Your idea is much more accurate; see my sibling comment. It's basically using C or C++ as an intermediate representation for machine code, rather than trying to recreate the game's higher-order logic/structure or source code.
You can play game backups, use unofficial HDDs at bigger sizes, send over new games with FTP, use third party and DIY controllers like GuliKit's offerings or a Flatbox leverless arcade controller. You can play a modded version of Rock Band 3 with all the songs from all the games, using a Wii Guitar Hero controller with a Pi Pico-based adapter in place of the Wiimote. Any game you installed from disc for faster load times becomes playable without the disc in automatically once you get Aurora running (this is pretty cool, on some other modded consoles like PS4 you'd have to reinstall the games another way).
As far as homebrew in the sense of people making their own games and applications, I don't know that there's much going on. Maybe you can find a controller tester app. Sadly the 360 scene has a lot of proprietary stuff going on, and uses some official dev SDKs, IIRC. Where 3DS and Switch modders have everything on GitHub and freely licensed, 360 has a lot of binary-only releases on random forums and such. It would probably be a major effort to change this and involve rewriting stuff people already know and love.
I did the the RGH 3 mod to half a dozen or so 360s a few years back for myself and friends. If you just wanna play games with modern comforts, things are in a pretty good state. We don't need to worry about the original disc drives, HDDs, or controllers wearing out and making the console useless, we can replace or avoid them all. The wireless card is also easily replaceable, a friend of mine had one that seemed non-functional after he spilled some Mtn Dew all over his 360 back in the day. Everything else seemed good after a clean but I just got him a new wireless card off eBay and swapped that out.
If anyone wants to get into this and doesn't already have a 360, the S models are easiest to mod and most reliable (no RRoD). Some are Trinity and some are Corona motherboards inside, but both are hackable. Corona may need a post-fix adapter, but they're cheap and easy to install. Just avoid the E series.
For modding tutorials, MrMario2011 on YT is great.
There is also a software-only exploit that's a bit worse but more accessible. It came out after I already did all my modding, so I haven't got experience with it.
Crazy that it has taken so long. I understand these are small teams trudging off in the dark but you could have imagined there would have been more eyes on this and hands tinkering in the time when the Xbox 360 was being sold than today. Right at that same time in history the iPhone was getting cracked basically every iOS release, sometimes by teenagers. Seems like there were a ton of hackers around back then.
The Coke Studios effort is interesting because there were no "private servers" developed at the time, unlike Habbo which had many, and there are Shockwave Xtras that no open runtime supports currently.
There's several attempts at a full runtime as well, that run in-browser.
Projector Rays (decompiler) really was the biggest release to date, and recently people have been really hacking at it, to some extent AI has helped to reverse engineer bytecode far as I can tell.
For anyone curious, one of the runtimes is called DirPlayer:
https://github.com/igorlira/dirplayer-rs
Edit: fun memory. I figured out how scamming works at some point. IIRC (and I may not) I set up a minigame in my studio, and contestants had to give me their furniture to participate in a game. Since furniture could stack weirdly, people made all sorts of crazy mazes that were actually quite difficult to navigate due to the fixed isometric perspective.
Each stage required handing over a more expensive item than the last. At some point someone handed over a super rare/expensive piece of furniture.
Not gonna erase that. ACTUALLY I think I figured out how to clone items due to a bug. Or mine infinite DBs. Used that as cover to get someone to give me their item. Was a long time ago.
Anyways, a user handed me their super rare item and I then gave them a stern warning on how this is a common scam and I just stole their item(s). Then I handed everything back over to them and they profusely thanked me. lol
The difference is how far one goes in hoisting the "source code;" in this "recompliation" approach the source code, while C++, is basically an IR (intermediate representation) between the original game's assembly and a host platform, and the hardware itself is emulated (for example, the original architecture's CPU registers are represented as variables in the host architecture's memory). The machine code is translated to C++ using a custom tool.
In a "decompilation" approach the game logic is converted (using a decompiler, like IDA or Ghidra's) back into something which resembles the original source code to the game itself, and the source code is usually hand analyzed, marked up, rewritten, and then ported across platforms. The product is something that attempts to resemble the original game's source code.
Of course, they lie on a continuum and both approaches can be mixed, but, while they both involve C++ in the middle, the process is starkly different. Recompilation is much more copyright-friendly, because in many implementations only the modifications are distributed and the original binary is translated by the end user (who owns the software/a license to it), whereas decompilation produces an artifact (source code) which is a derivative work encumbered by the original software's license and generally should not be distributed.
[1] https://github.com/N64Recomp/N64Recomp
As far as homebrew in the sense of people making their own games and applications, I don't know that there's much going on. Maybe you can find a controller tester app. Sadly the 360 scene has a lot of proprietary stuff going on, and uses some official dev SDKs, IIRC. Where 3DS and Switch modders have everything on GitHub and freely licensed, 360 has a lot of binary-only releases on random forums and such. It would probably be a major effort to change this and involve rewriting stuff people already know and love.
I did the the RGH 3 mod to half a dozen or so 360s a few years back for myself and friends. If you just wanna play games with modern comforts, things are in a pretty good state. We don't need to worry about the original disc drives, HDDs, or controllers wearing out and making the console useless, we can replace or avoid them all. The wireless card is also easily replaceable, a friend of mine had one that seemed non-functional after he spilled some Mtn Dew all over his 360 back in the day. Everything else seemed good after a clean but I just got him a new wireless card off eBay and swapped that out.
If anyone wants to get into this and doesn't already have a 360, the S models are easiest to mod and most reliable (no RRoD). Some are Trinity and some are Corona motherboards inside, but both are hackable. Corona may need a post-fix adapter, but they're cheap and easy to install. Just avoid the E series.
For modding tutorials, MrMario2011 on YT is great.
There is also a software-only exploit that's a bit worse but more accessible. It came out after I already did all my modding, so I haven't got experience with it.