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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 :)
Check out http://xbox-linux.sf.net/ .
They're working on the port of linux to the xbox. Don't get to excited, though: they haven't surpassed the planning stage yet.
Bye,
yota
This could be helpful for the Xbox linux project, if x86 code could be run then it will be easy to complete this project.
Could you use this to make a graphics render farm? A rack of 25 X-Boxes all running Linux - let me see that would cost just $5,000 for the X-Boxes - the same as a high-end graphics PC. That would be sweet - you'd have your own powerful personal render farm and the warm feeling inside from knowing that you've cost Microsoft over a couple of thousand bucks.
would also be interestign to put some console emulators on it after that, your xbox can double as a nes, snes, sega genisis, n64, playstation.... on a regular tv, with a console like controller, interesting hack it would be
"The United States has no right, no desire, and no intention to impose our form of government on anyone else." - Bush 05
...for people who have been downloading x-box games to actually get to play them. for about a month a couple of "groups" have been releasing x-box titles (some of which they say can be played on cd-r's although dvd's are suggested). however, apparently the only systems they work on are x-box "developer" systems (I'm assuming the console that game developers get to test on) and "prototype modchips."
the price does seem a tad high considering what playstation modchips cost now-adays, however, you pay a premium for the newest and it appears that playstation 2 modchips still cost ~$50.
Can anyone please explain what a modchip is,
what it does, 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.?
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.
So much for MS's hardware encryption, finally it got cracked. Expect the site to disappear as soon as MS Lawyer XP slap the DMCA on them. This hack will probably help boost Xbox sales because everyone will be getting one to run a real OS them (assuming that the modchip makes it possible). Is that's good or bad for MS, depends. It will look good on sales figures "Most popular console!", but bad on their bottom line "500,000 game titles and 2 million X-Box consoles sold: $ -100 million profit. Uhm, what was that question, 'what are the 1.5 million owners doing without X-box games?', Uhm...".
Gotta wonder if MS has seen this coming. Their "BIOS" could (and should, IMO) still have a few things up its sleeves, it would be cool if the EEPROM code is self-modifying and can make the modchip useless or blow up the modded Xbox and leave its owner warranty-less? This could be triggered perhaps by instruction codes that can be embedded onto newer game titles.
Have to wonder too, who was behind the design and manufacturing effort, shouldn't it take a lot of money to get ICs printed and tested? I wonder if anyone at Sony HQ spent $100,000 on a "toilet seat" lately.
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
All Hell is going to break loose when it becomes possible to play a CD holding a Divx film on the Xbox.
And here's something I'll bet MS already know: they're going to sell a lot more Xboxes when that happens.
With Divx, you can cram an absolutely fine rip of a DVD onto a single CD-R. That incredibly compact size also means that they only take a few hours to download. The downloadee can then churn out copies for his friend at about 25c a shot, as opposed to $1.50 or whatever for blank DVDs.
The only hurdle to widespread casual distribution channels evolving is that watching films at your workstation is uncomfortable and cabling the signal to your main television is a little too messy, unsightly and expensive for most people.
Find a way for people to play Divx on their Xboxes, however, and the situation reaches the momentum it needs to really take off.
Then the shit will really hit the fan and the studios, the premium channels and Blockbuster all have a HUGE problem.
Which isn't entirely unfunny.
So, is this likely to happen anytime soon? Well, I think this is what they meant on the Xtreme-Xbox site when, while listing this mod chip's features, they stated:
Modified XBE's and custom code can boot (This is a HUGE feature - as you'll all see soon)
I may be wrong but I'm pretty sure that the whole copyright situation is about to explode.
Nvidia Make a EV6 bus Nforce chipset for the Athlon.
The Xbox has a GTL+ bus Nforce chipset.
The logic on both are the same, the only differance is the main CPU-RAM-chipset bus type.
I think even the joystick ports on the Xbox are just USB ports with a different plug on it.
AFAIK all that needs hacking to load a X86 OS onto it would be its ROM BIOS. Mind you I'd assume only X96 OSes that support the NForce chipset would work.
Which I assume most of the current ones, that is if Nvidia wants to sell many Athlon chipsets.
Yes it would be good to turn a XBox into a x-box, especially with MS subsidising the cost of each Xbos by $200 or something.
The Xbox has a unified memory architecture, which for those who don't know, means that the cpu and gpu share the same 64M.
Furthermore, the GPU in the Xbox, like the Geforce4, has two programmable vector units. I'm not an Xbox developer, and I havent written any vertex programs yet, but I think it may be possible to use them in custom HPC apps because of the unified mem.
The limiting factor in using Xboxes as cluster nodes to me is the 64M of ram, but there is a spot for another RAM chip (which is used in the Xbox dev kit), so that may be correctable.
As to whether just the 700Mhz cpu, ram, hd and nic are worth it for clustering at $200, I havent done the math, but I would certainly guess so. I cant think of any system I could buy a bunch of identicals of for $200 a piece regardless of speed.
I've been working on an n64 emulator for a couple of years now (it's one of the few GPLed n64 emus if you care to search).
Last summer I left university and got a job with a games company working on an Xbox title (funnily enough, a large reason I got the job was through demoing my emulator). A couple of months back I ported the emulator over to the Xbox. The whole job took just a couple of hours, and the results are fantastic. Speed wise it's spot on, and I've been able to write a couple of directly defined pixel shaders that provide and exact match for the n64's combiner and blender. The n64's joypad maps almost perfectly onto the xbox controller - with the exception of the z-trigger which I've had to map onto a thumbstick press (ergh).
The sticking point? Everyone at works knows about the emulator, and I doubt it would reflect well on our company if anyone traced it back to me. Having said that, with mod chips now becoming available (and people undoubtedly leaking the XDK), it really will be a minimal job to port existing Windows-based emulators over to the Xbox.
The drive is indeed IDE, the power connector however is nonstandard. The issue is that the discs are protected by a fake TOC, so normal DVD drives will not read past the first 2 minutes or so of the disc. A properly modified firmware works wonders.
However, the issue of emulation is easier said than done. Even something like VMware, which is a pc on pc type thing, is not easy to program, which makes the xbox, a far harder target.
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The only problem being actually FINDING a dreamcast for 50 bucks. Enough people know that this is a great deal that virtually noone has them for this price. EBworld was (and still is)selling USED dreamcasts for 70 dollars a pop. This is without any games or any other such things. If you can actually FIND a (working) Dreamcast for 50 dollars, I would be happy to buy it from you for 60. (Despite the fact that I already own one)