But I assume my stance on this will be a controversial one. They spent the time making it all, and I'd love to just have it for free but I can't fault them for wanting to be compensated for the effort and ongoing development.

It would be cool if this was all available in a public repository so other chip makers could build and modify the hardware/software, but ultimately it's up to the people working on it to decide if they want to share it or not. It also has additional RAM that it exposes to the system, and has an ARM-based processor onboard that can run tasks in the background, separate from anything the Xbox itself is doing.īy fully implementing the LPC interface, we can give the system access to an additional 8MB of SDRAM plus 16MB of static RAM (all of which is MMU mapped as virtual system memory, CPU cache-able, and usable by the kernel) along with two ARM CPU cores that can be used for off-loading tasks from the Xbox's CPU. And it can do some fancy stuff that hasn't really been possible until now.

It injects modifications and allows for adding modules (features) without re-flashing. This also makes it cleaner to distribute (allegedly) since Microsoft's BIOS itself (or parts of it) aren't being shared. It modifies the stock kernel at boot-time instead of using a pre-compiled BIOS. Well Stellar works differently from previous chips/BIOSes we've seen so far.

Xbox installation