A team of developers this weekend announced that the Zune HD, as well as older Zunes, have been cracked.
Developers itsnotabigtruck, Netrix, Nurta and the ZuneBoard Development Front worked to develop the hack, which opens the Zune not only to third-party applications loaded outside of official channels, but also gives applications access to the full range of the Zune HD’s powerful hardware, including robust OpenGL acceleration.
“Until recently, writing applications for the Zune meant one thing: XNA,” itsnotabigtruck said. “While the XNA game development platform aims to provide a framework that makes game development accessible to the masses, on the Zune this translates to no 3D, no Internet access, and a performance penalty of around an order of magnitude – all when the hardware is right there.”
“The limitations of XNA are now no limitations at all.”
The developers also announced the release of OpenZDK, a development kit for open Zunes. Though there is no telling what the community will ultimately concoct, the door is now open to emulators, homebrew 3D games, classic game ports and third-party app stores like Cydia for jailbroken iPhones.
“Getting started guides are available for end users and interested developers. You can download the Quick Start Kit right now from the list of mirrors. If you have a BitTorrent client installed, the torrent-based download is strongly recommended – the more people that download, the higher the speed. However, numerous mirrors are available to download through more conventional methods.”
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