Did the PS3 and XBox 360 ever become moddable / capable of running homebrew?

[Jorpho]

I remember there was a good deal of fuss a year or two back when someone discovered that by zapping the XBox 360 CPU (or some other component of that nature) with a sufficiently high voltage spike enabled its security features to be overridden, and people were excited about the possibilities. It occurred to me just now that I never really heard anything come of that.

Is the XBox 360 widely moddable these days? Is there any kind of homebrew community for it? I know the Kinect got hacked and a lot of people were excited about that, but what of the console itself?

And how about the PS3? The last I remember hearing was everyone getting upset about the "Other OS" option being removed, preventing people from running Linux on it anymore, but then I thought that was sorely limited in how much of the PS3 hardware it could use anyway.

I would try to search for these things, but of course there's years of outdated information out there and it's hard to keep track of what's what.

[kedawa]

JTAG/RGH modded XBOX systems can run unsigned code.
I'm not sure what the situation is with PS3, but it was pretty some low level encryption was cracked earlier this year.

[Frankie_Says_Relax]

Yes, both consoles are/were hackable.

PS3 was much easier with earlier firmware, not certain if it's possible at all on current firmware.

I don't know much about the homebrew scene, but both consoles have all sorts of classic console and arcade emulation available.

[Battyone]

Yes, both consoles are/were hackable.

PS3 was much easier with earlier firmware, not certain if it's possible at all on current firmware.

I don't know much about the homebrew scene, but both consoles have all sorts of classic console and arcade emulation available.

For a PS3 as long as you have not updated your firmware since Jan 2011, and have either a Phat or Slim manufactured before Jan 2011 you will be able to load custom firmware and play homebrew. After that date a few things changed in the way Firmware works and there are no public jailbreaks for Slims post Jan 2011 and Superslims.

[BlastProcessing402]

For 360, you need to open the system and do some soldering and stuff, to get it started. This is completely different from the drive firmware hacking some people do that only lets you play burned discs. Hacked drive firmware doesn't run unsigned code, and RGH/JTAG won't play burned discs.

For PS3, if you're at firmware 3.55 or under, you just need a USB stick with the custom firmware on it. If you're over 3.55, you're mostly outta luck. For some you can downgrade the firmware back to 3.55, but that's a lot messier and you would need a special piece of equipment and open up the system to do it. And that's only if your system at one point was at 3.55 or lower.

And doing any of this on either system obviously voids your warranty and will most likely result in getting your system banned from the online service.