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TechTV Cracks Open The Xbox
Kevin writes: "TechTV has posted some pictures of the inside of the Xbox ... Interesting stuff, I believe Patrick Norton from The Screen Savers is working on overclocking it." Warning: doing this might reduce your eBay resale value.
Basically, what it comes down to is the Xbox has the shared memory architecture, and the PC does not. That is, there is no video card RAM on the Xbox, there is no system RAM on the Xbox, there is just 'RAM' on the Xbox. The GPU and CPU both have equal access to it. The PC, as you surely know, does not work like that.
Then there's the fact that the Xbox games are all designed to run at Ring0 in the kernel, too...
Here're some direct links to the pictures, without having to jump through hoops. (TechTV's not particulary standards-compliant site that crashed Konq on me once; the dreadful JS that is used for *everything*; the pop-ups required to get to the pictures; the slowness of the site)
Please no Karma claims; I'm at the cap - it's just a much more convenient way to get to the actual images.
Xbox screws
Warning
Pat sizes thing up
Righty-tighty, lefty-loosey
Just a couple more to go
Under the hood
Hard Drive
The motherboard
These hands have killed Athlons
CPU central
Intel inside
The 'silly' link titles are TechTV's, not mine. You may have to copy/paste the shortcuts into your URL bar in case TechTV's site plays nasty with image linking from other sites. (I don't think it does, though)
Alex T-B
St Andrews
pics are small and hard to read, but if I'm seeing things right, there's what looks to be a standard TSOP packaged FLASH ROM in there. Very desolderable and readable...too bad all the stores around here are sold out of XBOXes. I'm supposing someone's already done it, but if not, as soon as I can get my hands on one I'd be glad to provide the ROM contents to interested parties.
FYI, the gamecube ROM appears to be merged into the DRAM chip, so good luck hacking. There are five chips (basically) in the GC: PPC core, ATI "flipper" chip, 2 MoSys SSRAMs, and the "ARAM" part. No ROM on the list...however, when the disc unit is removed, system still boots okay, so there has to be a ROM on that board somewhere. I guess it's in the ARAM because it's the only chip that is cheap enough/simple enough to accomodate a mask ROM as part of its contents. Perhaps it is a stacked RAM-ROM package or a multi-die on lead frame package...gotta get another gamecube and bust out the sulfuric acid on the package...
having seen these pictures of the inside of the x-box and the inside of the gamecube first-hand, though, I'll have to say that the gamecube wins hands down for elegance of design. The 14-month design cycle of the x-box is painfully evident. Look at the size of the x-box motherboard! The gamecube motherboard looks to be the footprint of the processor heatsink on the x-box. :-P agh, and that ugly power supply....and all those empty spots on the motherboard. Future upgrade potential, maybe...And *two* fans!!! no surprise M$ is losing $100+ per box. I'm not sure about Gamecube, but at $100 cheaper than X-box, they could still be making money on the console with its clean design and small parts count...
of course, good hardware is only half the formula for success of the console. Games are important too...
And so the final big question is: what do you do when 50% of the units shipped have failed hard drives after 3 years? Those can't be "quality" hard drives in the x-boxes, and they probably aren't working in the friendliest of conditions...
Some info:
1) XBox will only boot from layer 2 of a DVD
2) The bios is held encrypted in the nv2a
3) IIRC the dvd drive isn't a normal one.
4) There is meant to be all sorts of encryption built into the hardware.
5) I think there are monitering routines to detect code tampering at run time.
6) The network stack is encrypted.
7) There is a custom disk format i.e. not fat32.
etc...
It will probably be cracked eventually, but I doubt we will be seeing linux on it any time soon...