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Strong Hints On Flashing Your Xbox

Posted by timothy on from the wink-wink dept.

customsex writes: "bunnie has written a nice one with pictures documenting his adventure flashing his bios on his xbox. check it." His page also points you to the Sony vs. Connectix case regarding reverse engineering of hardware.

12 of 219 comments (clear)

  1. Microsoft at their best by torqer · · Score: 4, Interesting
    The XBOX keeps "multiple versions of the BIOS around in case different games rely on features or even bugs found in previous BIOS versions."

    man pretty smart of microsoft to realize their own mistakes may be required in games

    1. Re:Microsoft at their best by BlacKat · · Score: 2, Interesting

      More like people taking advantage of specific hardware/bios "quirks" in thier software. I suspect they're not supposed to but some people do to "optimise" performance.

      Heck, back in the Atari 8bit days, and the Atari ST days, you had to downgrade your ROM or TOS image for specific games... especially old ST games which almsot all virtually requires TOS 1.0 (buggy as hell!) or TOS 1.06.

      So not necessarily a MS thing, and it is great foresight, assuming of course the X-Box can actually be told which BIOS Image to load on boot. ;)

  2. running things for different platforms by Kevon · · Score: 2, Interesting

    wonder how hard it would be to mod a bios to let you boot up things like Office 2000 or something like that. Not that it would be particularly useful displaying to a TV. Something like geiss would be cool to run on a big screen hi-def tv, though.

    Conversely, when will someone get me a program that will let me play DOA3 or other xgames on my PC? I wouldn't think that would be too hard. I think MS should even support it because if we can buy a program to let us buy and run games on our PC, they don't lose money on each console sold.

  3. Is it illegal overseas? by Guysdrinkingbeer · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I understand that posting the ROM image is illegal in the states, but does that apply to Europe or Russia or even China? I know that the Xbox is not in release in those places yet but should not stop a small email attachment of the image making it's way overseas and winding up on a web site. Just wondering. Thanks.

    --
    Great people don't need people to complete them, great people complete other people. -- Matthew Pawlikowski.
  4. Long-term benefit by smittyoneeach · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Recall reading the Wired article about the XBox, where they mention that its initial $300 dollar price will be driven down to around $100 as soon as possible.
    Sorry about the low end of the computer market, but it'll be cool when you can drop a grand, pick up a ten-pack of them, and construct your Much-Ballyhooed Beowulf Cluster (MBBC).
    Maybe one day /. itself could run on such an installation. Feel the irony.

    --
    Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
  5. The point? by SilentChris · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I'm not entirely sure I see the point of this exercise. Bear with me. I can see upgrading the drive cables or trying to solder on extra memory for performance reasons (as some people have done), but flashing the BIOS of the XBox seems to be a pointless exercise. First, you need to have pretty strong hardware knowledge -- it's not something that's going to be "mod chipped" in the future. Secondly, and more important, apparently the BIOS is heavily encrypted and/or compressed, so (if Microsoft used its noodle) it will be extremely difficult to retrieve.

    As opposed to hacking an XBox to use Linux (which I agree is a noble pursuit, if not flawed), why not find a cost-effective way to make a "LBox" out of cheap hardware. Put a penguin on the cover or something.

    Me, personally, I bought my XBox for playing games and DVDs, like most people. I love fucking around with hardware myself, but this thing is a toy to be played with and enjoyed for me, not a job.

  6. Re:Doesn't MS lose money on every Xbox? by pacc · · Score: 2, Interesting

    "a C64 emulator"

    Underacheiver, you should get a $50 Dreamcast instead. But an N64 emulator would make use of some bit of the Xbox.

    Demand SID ringtones in your next mobile phone!

  7. Congrats to Microsoft! by Ndr_Amigo · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I know it's an odd thing to say, but I would like to congratulate Microsoft on (unusually!) actually being half-decent. Listening to the phonecall, whether he was coached or not, I would congradulate Mr. Thompson on not being a smeghead and actually NICELY asking for the image to be removed.. without threatening legal action over some obscure EULA clause for looking at the motherboard or something :)

  8. XBOX MAME by timbong · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Someone already made an XBOX MAME emulator that supposedly runs at 60fps. However he cant release it because of legal restrictions and it only works on the developer xboxes now. His website is http://www.otakunozoku.com/xbox/

  9. Re:Why flash the ROM? by Ungrounded+Lightning · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The only way I can imagine this failing is if the BIOS runs the entire game in protected mode with no way to subvert it.

    Well, actually I can see one way it could fail: If the BIOS uses asymmetric cryptography to see if the game is signed by Microsoft's private key and refuses to run it otherwise.

    But that would also break the "game that flashes the ROM" unless you can get Microsoft to sign it.

    Or break the asymmetric cryptography. B-)

    --
    Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
  10. windows by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Linux certainly would be cool to run on the Xbox, but what about windows? You ask, what's the point of that, it already runs windows. I'm not talking just that 23 k stripped down version of the 2k kernel. I mean running a full 2k version. The reason for this would be for running games that are already out for the PC and running them on the Xbox. Would be quite interesting to see how they performed. Only problems would be finding the right drivers for everything, but with Nvidia bringing the nforce out soon, the drivers for that may work on Xbox. Actually, the same holds true for linux on Xbox... where are the drivers? guess it's not needed if you just want to run bare minimum, but I'd like to take advantage of the hardware.

  11. Halo notes by Butcher · · Score: 2, Interesting

    As one of the Halo developers, I can tell you that nobody is going to beat it on the hardest difficulty using only the melee attack. There's just absolutely no way. There are levels full of enemies that are basically immune to melee. It's insane enough when you have all your weapons. :)

    We use a variable number of texturing passes on the environment based on how many lights are shining on a surface - the minimum is four and it's easy to get even higher than eight on certain surfaces in a firefight.

    - butcher