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Another Xbox Anatomy Lesson
Keith writes: "Icrontic.com has taken apart, examined, and modified an Xbox. In their latest article, they point out some debugging leads on the Xbox, and a possible USB hack. The Xbox is looking more and more like a PC." A lot of the investigation here is incomplete; watch this space, because it won't be long until Xbox surgery is commonplace.
HardOCP have also ripped the guts outta the xbox, and their server seems to be a bit more responsive as well.
Plus I trust the hardocp guys a bit more than the average "look maw!Ii'm on the interweb!" reviewer
You really need the pictures to do it justice, but here's the text:
:).
The Guts
[picture of xbox w/ cover open]
Here's what awaits you under the hood. If you've come this far, you have now voided your warranty, congratulations. After this, just take out the hard drive and DVD-ROM and you're in.
[pictures of two IDE hard drives]
Microsoft is actually using two different kind of hard drives in the Xbox. One is a Seagate ST310211A U Series 5 10GB hard drive. That's right - 10GB, not 8GB like Microsoft claims. The second kind, which is the kind we got, is the Western Digital Protege WD80EB, which is a 5400RPM 8GB drive. The Western Digital drive is not listed on Western Digital's website. It appears some people are getting the 8GB Western Digital drive, while others are getting the 10GB Seagate drive. We tried plugging the hard drive into a normal computer. No operating system will recognize it. No surprise there, it's probably a proprietary filesystem. This will be pretty easily circumvented, however, and you should be able to hook the Xbox hard drive into your computer and get files off of it. I'm working on a program to do this.
[pictures of motherboard]
Microsoft is nicely silk-screened on the motherboard. How cute. Also note how there is a silk-screen for additional memory. There are two more silk-screens on the back of the motherboard as well. Apparently Microsoft sent out development kits, which had 128MB of memory instead of the 64MB of memory that comes with the retail kit. That's what these silk-screens are for. Perhaps Microsoft will release a future version of the Xbox with more memory. If you're a very skilled solderer you could actually solder additional memory chips onto the motherboard. I was also surprised to find that there was no shielding on the power supply unit, and no active fan on the CPU.
[next page]
Motherboard Features
[pictures]
Here's the little riser card the controller ports plug into. Chances are you can modify this to connect some kind of USB hub to it. We're still working on it.
[picture of circuit board]
Notice the "DEBUG" silk-screen? I wonder if shorting that lead lets you enter the BIOS. We still have to test this.
[pictures of power cables]
The Xbox has an AT power cable.
[next page]
Onboard Chips
[pictures of chips]
The nVidia MCPX3 Southbridge and a Samsung DDR memory module (specsheet located here). The nForce uses AMD's Hypertransport technology.
[picture of chip]
This is the Conexant video encoder chip, which performs DVD video decoding.
[pictures of heatsink and GPU]
Underneath the heatsink lies the nVidia XGPU, the video GPU of the Xbox.
[picture of Celeron]
Intel has their BGA mobile Celeron 733MHz with a 133MHz FSB on the Xbox. It's impossible to take out without some serious modification.
[picture of thermal paste on motherboard]
We took off the thermal pad that was on both the GPU and the CPU and put some nice thermal paste. Now it's ready to be overclocked
[next page]
Back of The Motherboard & Conclusion
[pictures of back of motherboard]
Here's the back of the motherboard after we took it out. Note the two silk-screens for additional memory.
[picture of tape]
These little pieces of tape are on the back to prevent the board from getting scratched by the metal casing.
[picture of ATA100 cable]
And last but not least, we tried to substitute an ATA100 cable in for the Xbox's ATA33 cable. Unfortunately, this did not work. The Xbox would not even show an error message after we did this. The motherboard can support ATA100, but Microsoft must have the motherboard programmed to only allow the hard disk to run at a certain transfer setting. Too bad.
That's where we are right now. There is a lot of potential here for hacking this machine. It can be done. I think the debug trace will open up a lot of options once we learn how to use it. This COMPUTER does have a BIOS, and there must be some way to get to it. It's also possible to wire in a USB hub into the controller riser card. We're still working out the wiring for this, and once we get it to work we will share the process with you.
I think it's definitely possible to upgrade the hard drive. I'm planning on ghosting the data to another drive. I'm sure someone has already tried this, and if you have please email me and tell me if it worked or not. What we're also going to try is upgrading the DVD-ROM. We're going to put a computer DVD-ROM in the unit, plug the ATX power connector into a running computer, and plug the IDE cable into the DVD-ROM. Hopefully it will accept the new drive. Chances are it won't, though.
Microsoft appears to have hard locked what kind of hardware is allowed on this machine. That doesn't mean it can't be hacked or tricked to allow upgrading. It's only a matter of time before someone figures it out. The Xbox IS modifiable, we just need to figure out how.
If you're interested in modifying your Xbox, or if you would just like to chat about your Xbox, please check out our Xbox forum. I will be monitoring it and giving advice and tips to help you modify your Xbox. Please share what you've done so we can figure this thing out!
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
$300 Xbox
-----------
$300 733MHz P3 + 10mbit ethernet
$100 1.33GHz T-Bird
$100 Motherboard
$70 20G HD
$50 case + 300W PSU
$30 Linksys 100mbit ethernet
-----------
$350 1.33 GHz Athlon + 100mbit ethernet
Xboxes are cheap, but not that cheap. My numbers are my guess of pricewatch * 1.5, which is what I usually end up paying. With the Xbox you're also paying for an NVidia chipset close to a GF3 with TV-out and controller(s?).
Although I'm sure there are a few other obstacles, I think the biggest one is that MS has a proprietary (and IIRC, encrypted) file system on that HD, and according to the HardOCP article, the HDs can't be switched out for an off the shelf one. Also, i don't see how you could reformat that thing, as it certainly won't accept a boot floppy with a copy of fdisk on it.
My other sig is funny!
First off, the PS2 and GameCube don't use UMA. Both have embedded memories for framebuffer and textures. GameCube also has a separate audio memory (I don't know about PS2). For framebuffer and textures, UMA creates a big bottleneck. You have lots of high-bandwidth demands on memory, and only one memory to talk to. Having seperate framebuffer and texture memories reduces the bottleneck on main memory.
Also, on the topic of latency, only the GameCube has truly low latency access to memory. Their "1T-SRAM" allows fast random access, low-latency memory access, whereas any system based upon DRAM only has low-latency for accesses within the same memory page. Page misses are relatively high latency.
BUT.........
Just a few days ago there was another discussion at this fabulous web site about hacking the XBox, and several people pointed out that M$ uses various encription techniques in this machine which makes hacking incredibly difficult.
Perhaps before people start spanking their monkeys for a second time thinking about hacking an XBox, they should recall the discussion following the first article.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
TV is 60 frames interlaced (60 half-frames per second), unless you're using PAL instead of NTSC, then it's 50 frames interlaced. movies are 24 frames per second, but are generally double-shuttered or triple-shuttered, so that you're actually seeing 48 or 72 "frames" per second. Movies have choppiness during long pans, or have you not noticed?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
There actually is no reason why DVD decoding should be done in hardware. The specs of the x-box make it suitable enough to do DVD decoding in software easily. Maybe the video decoding hardware is for TV output or input. Maybe one could convert the X-box into some tivo-like appliance?
If digital video playback is done in software (I'm talking MPEG here folks), it might be possible to get this thing to decode DiVX ;-) or other digital video formats as well.
Or am I too far off base here?