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Xbox Mod Chip in Beta Testing
Odinson writes: "Well it looks like a modchip design has been completed for the Xbox. The most interesting thing is that 'Modified XBE's and custom code can boot' with the chip The chip costs $65 list in U.S. dollars." Wake me up when standard X86 code can run on the Xbox :)
All wiring points are VERY easy - no IC's to solder to - all presoldered pads.
This one is also real. Heard about them a few weeks ago... Looks identically (Xtender and Enigmah), except that the Xtender has a flash-upgradeable firmware.
A modchip is something you solder into a console that disables the copy protection. The first ones i can think of were for the Playstation. They let you play imported and burned games.
As far as WHY... well, if you have to ask, you'll never know =). If you want to do some homebrewed developing, play imported games, or (heaven forbid) pirate games, modchips will let you do that, whereas those things are impossible on a "stock" console.
"Upon attaching the waterblock to my penis, I began to notice that I know nothing about computers." -- JRockway
anyone knows what an IC is?
IC == Integrated Circuit, the little (or big) black things with all the little tiny pins. they're tough to solder to, unless you've had some practice.
Yeah, just like a Dreamcast! Seriously though, every single platform you mentioned already has an emulator on the Dreamcast, plus many others (oringinal Sega Master System, Coleco...), plus it runs Linux and NetBSD and can play DivX files and VCD's and MP3s, and is only 50 bucks!
Straight x86 code porting is not really well done on XBox Dev. My crew and I spent a few weeks trying to port Linux to the Xbox and we just ran into way too many problems -- including trying to get the Xbox file system to work and destroying one dev unit by formating the drive -- oops. We were able to get a CD demo kernel booted but past that we couldn't do squat - eventually we just gave up.
I would not get your hopes up for an linuXBox any time soon
I heard the Xbox has a proprietary DVD player that spins backwards. Sooo.... won't that be a problem in making an Xbox of your very own?
It's not that it spins backwards (counter-clockwise versus clockwise or whatever) - the X-Box DVD's read from the outside-in, versus the inside-out. Please note that this not adds to their proprietariness and makes it harder to pirate, but it's also a bit ingenious - you get a faster linear read rate at the outer edge so it can read in its data that much quicker.
Where the wind blows, the tumbleweed goes.
IIRC Consoles are generally sold at a loss, it is generally accepted that the real money in the console market is in the games
This is a myth.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
I think your biggest limitations would be the memory available on these. 64MB doesn't hold much of a scene and texture information and swapping out to hard drive completely destroys the fast memory advantage. Still, they might be useful. How about a video encoding farm? 64 MB of frames to each XBox with a few frames of mpeg or divx or whatever coming back?
Maybe someone that knows a bit more about clustering can contribute, after all, this is basically a "Hey, we can make a Beowulf cluster of these after all" kind of post.
Bleh!
Um.. I'm going to break the rules a bit and post a reply to my own, previous posting because I've found some more info.
The following was on XboxMods.co.uk, a well-respected site:
After chatting with the Enigmah coder - he tells me they are at an advance stage with a DiVX player addon !! sounds like fun :)
Bottom line - homebrew is gonna rule the XBOX !
It's not clear as to whether that add-on will be hardware or a software upgrade (is anyone out there in a position to take an educated guess?) but, either way, it looks as if the Divx explosion is coming soon to an Xbox near you.
A modchip is usually a PIC or ASIC programmed/designed to be used as a hardware "patch" for mass-produced hardware.
what it does,
The original Sony Playstation popularised them; they were used to defeat the copy protection used on Playstation games whereby extra sectors were included on the CD that were unreadable by non-Playstation CD drives. The modchip intercepted the protection check and spoofed the Playstation BIOS into believing a copied disc with missing protection sectors was legitimate.
and how are you supposed to install it (do you need to make your own pcb for a daughtercard, do you need to unsolder something and then solder this in place), etc.?
It (potentially) varies from modchip to modchip, but these things are designed to be installed by (almost) Joe or Josephine Public, so typically it's just a case of soldering some wires from pins on the modchip to specific points on an unmodified motherboard. Sometimes these are the legs of ICs (fiddly), sometimes actual tracks (fairly fiddly) but in this case, it's "vias" - the small circular solder pads that link different layers of a PCB (many PCBs are 4+ layers these days, both for reasons of size and to improve their radio emission and acceptance characteristics).
For the record, I have never owned a console or a console game (nor obviously pirated any) but I am interested to know what hack value consoles have in general and in this case Xbox.
The potential here is an easy way to bypass Microsoft's "only boot purchased game DVDs" protection and use modified Xbox consoles to boot copied DVDs or even home-made discs, such as Linux or *BSD.
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Yikes.
Don't buy the cheapest soldering iron you can find.
Get one with an iron plated tip. Use good flux. Use Good Soldering Technique.
I'm one of those guys who buys your stuff after you're tired of it at a swapmeet. Don't make a horrid wreck of it, leaving corrosive flux and burn marks all over the inside.
alt.binaries.cd.image.xbox
http://www.binnetwork.net/
All they did was put the boot sector at the start of the second layer of a dual-layer disc. All dual-layer DVDs have the second layer spiral from the outside-in; the RS in RSDL stands for Reverse Spiral. It makes sense, as when the player reaches the end of layer one the head is going to be on the outside of the disc.
Its the Gamecube, not the X-Box that additionally reverses the layers to the reverse layer is the first one. X-Box discs could be read by a normal DVD drive if it could cope with the encryption (otherwise it would be a real headache for the Box to play 'normal' film DVDs and music CDs), the protection comes from the fact that all currently available DVD-R burners for home use can only write one layer, making them unbootable.
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