I would like to elaborate on the "hacks" some bore witness to and most have seen pics

[Phantom_RAcast]

Hacking is defined as:

"Unauthorized user who attempts to or gains access to an information system."

A game is a system of information. Information for entertainment, yes, but still it contains information. Some of that information should have been restricted to you, and you reverse engineered it. Which is, in fact, hacking. Cracking IS also hacking.

And It wasn't just the game you hacked, it was also XBOX live. Yes, you guessed it, that is a huge information system!

I have seen many hackers justify certain types of hacking by labelling them as different things. There have been many electronic sub-terms used by people to make illegal acts seem legal. Anyone heard of "Abandonware"? That was another good one. Abandonware is not legally recognised. Neither is claiming you cracked or reverse engineered instead of hacked an information system of any kind.

And you are right, SEGA do cover things up an insane amount.

The difference between the legality of reverse engineering and abandonware is that under US law reverse engineering is legal. Unless you're circumventing copy protection or DRM. UK law may different but he's not a UK citizen, he's not bound by UK laws.

As for reverse engineering being hacking it is not. Reverse engineering definitions:

The process of analysing an existing system to identify its components and their interrelationships and create representations of the system in another form or at a higher level of abstraction. Reverse engineering is usually undertaken in order to redesign the system for better maintainability or to produce a copy of a system without access to the design from which it was originally produced.

http://dictionary.reference.com/cite.htm...&ia=foldoc

With your own defintion of hacking, reverse engineering is not hacking. When you're reverse engineering you're merely looking at the program. You're not unauthorized to run the program are you?