What work goes into making exploits?

https://nostarch.com/xboxfree
Equally a few of those doing the fundamental work on the 3ds had a talk a few years back


Approaches will vary between hackers, the systems they are working on, the work that was done before*, and the gear they have available (universities often have some really swish gear so should the would be hacker have left such things then they may find their options more limited).

*if you are not good at soldering you are unlikely to want to solder several dozen wires to a machine to dump its memory, someone else does that and releases the results and you can then pick through it at your leisure.

To answer the specific question, but for general console hacker
Sometimes emulators, sometimes earlier versions of hardware/software with flaws, sometimes any old console, sometimes ones used by developers, sometimes ones with extensive hardware modification, sometimes specific consoles they already know the timings/keys for (which may flow from the hardware mods), sometimes a more limited programmer-focused type of emulation (a big boy disassembler can do some fairly impressive things that are of basically no use to any end user), sometimes a whole bank of devices if the exploit is finicky, sometimes an amalgamation of a few of the other things on this list (up to and including just putting the motherboard or hacked drive in another machine as the original is now too far gone), sometimes a board that comes from the factory, sometimes a demo unit, sometimes a hardware emulation of the device. As more security or more powerful computing for the day happens** you tend to see a shift to the more exotic sources as the end user stuff is increasingly locked down.

**much of the stuff in the hacking the xbox thing I linked at the start was universities, nation states and very high end electronics companies at the time. Today you can reasonably afford to have much of that in your little home workshop you might only use for hobbies.

Thanks for the information.