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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 :)
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!
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.
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!
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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