That's not ENTIRELY true, but close... if somebody gets a serial port working on a box, and linux running I can send them a program that will make the phatbox boot anything... it just has to point at the proper serial port... it's essentially a run-time patcher that does the same as the hack and how I tested the patches before actually making the changes in ROM. Then of course you just need a modified patch program to patch the alternate locations, which I could compile easily enough
really, anybody who got a serial port would be good.... I could make the rest pretty simple, even make it run from a pre-made VM