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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 $65 list in U.S. dollars." Wake me up when standard X86 code can run on the Xbox :)
Someone should attempt this and make it easily available, just to piss microsoft off, by beating them to the punch (for a 'family pc console') on their own Platform!
"The United States has no right, no desire, and no intention to impose our form of government on anyone else." - Bush 05
for me to buy an xbox. 199 price and mod chips on the horizon, is there anything better?
Yes there is, Halo for the PC... the absence of which is going to force me to buy an xbox.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
200$ for the Xbox, 100$ for the Modchip, Dunno how much for the DVD writer and DVD-Roms...
:/
Guess I'll stick with originals
Anonymous Cowards blow.
You have to really like soldering to do this.
This could be helpful for the Xbox linux project, if x86 code could be run then it will be easy to complete this project.
the biggest problem will probably be microsoft's lawyers, I bet you there is a clause in the EULA for the xbox making modchips of any kind illegal, etc. And besides, even if the modchip is legal (which it is) microsoft only has to make it look iffy enough to take these guys to court until they run out of money.
"The United States has no right, no desire, and no intention to impose our form of government on anyone else." - Bush 05
Well, it DOES have an Intel processor (Celeron I think).
Therefore, "standard" x86 code should run just fine.
One only runs into problems when trying to do stuff with the rest of the hardware, since, I imagine, the I/O ports would be different, the memory map is probably different, etc.
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.
Dear Timothy and everyone else,
I consider it a violoation of MIT X Consortium's copyrights and intellectual property to continually lable and presumably agree to the naming convention and usage of the X Box strictly as a utility of instrumentality with disregard to previous works that have been retained by MIT.
An "X Box" is a computing device that provides client or client and server resources within the X Window System. The Letter "X" was brought to you by MIT and it is a violation to use the letter "X" in any advertisement or naming convention of a computing device that does not involve the MIT X Consortium and its intelect.
This is just a notice. If this notice's requirement of cease and desist of practices, within 30 days, involving the terms "X" and "X Box" and "X Terminal" and "X Computing Devices" and "X Console" and not limited to the terms, we shall submit a notarized affidavit and a court order unto you in understanding that you must obey FRC and USC. Thankyou for your time and the clock is ticking. ;)
Sincerely,
Bob Johnson
I heard the Xbox has a proprietary DVD player that spins backwards.
So where do you buy backwards DVDs for it to play? Sheesh, it's bad enough having region coding, now I have to check if I'm buying a clockwise or counter-clockwise DVD?
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
And it is called "Tribes 2". Even has a linux port.
I love going down to the elementary school, watching all the kids jump and shout, but they dont know I'm using blanks.
And as for microsoft, the standard of console design is to sell the hardware at a loss and make all the money back by forcing you to buy games for a proprietary platform...
Do the math.
$90 GeForce 3 +
$85 733-megahertz (MHz) Intel Pentium III +
$50 (estimate) mobo +
$20 8GB HDD +
$20 NIC +
$20 3D sound card
$30 DVD-ROM
$8 64MB ram
_______________
$323 total. I believe they retail for $199 now
and that's not counting the costs of cabling and controllers... MS will be reamed if modding becomes commonplace... hehe. Score one for the almighty h4x0r.
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.
Actually, I'm not sure how you find the modchip legal. Although the EULA does prohibit you from "reverse engineering", more importantly, under the DMCA this is very clearly a circumvention device.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
...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.
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
Since the console is underpriced and the games are overpriced, Microsoft shouldn't even object.
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've heard the same thing about the GameCube which leads me to suspect that it's a false rumour.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
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!
It's much easier to scratch the outside of a CD/DVD than the inside.
This is not ingenius, IMHO.
Also, is your math right? sure, the outside of the disc is SPINNING faster, but does that necessarily mean it reads faster? (remember, the data is read in a spiral).
S
Perhaps the XBox might be on its way to iOpener-dom thanks to these chips. The macrovision fix and DVD region code fixes especially make this worth the price of admission.
If this works, I might just eat some more words of mine...that I won't buy an XBox but instead look to places like half.com to get a used PS2.
Hopefully work will also continue on indie servers for XBox multiplayer play in spite of MS starting their own network. The XBox was *made* to be a LAN Party box. Microsoft just didn't know it when they were designing it.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
The BIOS is apparently distributed over several chips on the mobo.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
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.
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!
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.
Hell.. you can play DivX titles on your $50 Dreamcast...
...but you can't go up to full DVD resolution and I think that the bit rate is limited to 700kbs
Yeah, I'd heard about that. As I see it, unless you achieve something that fills the screen and is as good as DVD to all but the most discerning eye, the whole exercise is just hacking for the sake of hacking.
I presume (and hope!) that the inability to render Divx at a high, full screen resolution is largely down to the Dreamcast's lesser computational abilities whereas, once they've found a way to hack it, the Xbox will have more than enough firepower.
But it is ingenius. You can sell more games that way!
The other drawback is that you can't have funny shaped media, but since microsoft isn't focused on the portable market (yet), this isn't much of a problem. Does that mean that the gamecube, with its small DVD media, have plans for a portable player sometime?
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
yeah sure. You Europeans should be amashed of yourselves. Only 400 000 Gamecubes and 500 000 XBox sold. What the hell? Japan by itself is outbuying the whole European market.
Obviously you've never tried Hunter: The Reckoning. Habe you? I can't stop playing it, its crazy fun
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 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 can read and play normal DVD's - so this shouldn't be a problem if you just want to run a linux box. Storing data from the outside in does increase the risk of edge scratches damaging the data, however.
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
Go ahead and buy a Gamecube if you want, but I would strongly suggest that you consider an XBox. I'm not too impressed with the Gamecube's graphics but I might get one nevertheless, because of the price drop and because it's got some good games.
Well if you decide to buy an XBox, I highly suggest that you buy Hunter: The Reckoning. It's extremely addicting. This game is so much fun especially if you're playing with friends.
they are not worried about linux on the desktop. they are worried about linux in the server room.
Volume is not everything.
Everyone knows you can sell dollars for 98 cents and have HUGE volume, and be 'very close to breaking even'.
Selling a million units at a loss does not look good on paper. If your business model is based on profit via selling games, and you aren't selling them, it looks bad on paper no matter how you slice it.
Another thing to consider is that MS will probably try to tweak future X-box wiring to disable the current modchips. Sure, modchip makers will eventually adapt, but it will be a source of FUD against the whole practice of chip-modding. Basically, what I'm saying is that X-boxes will never be easier to crack than they are now. That's another reason to buy one now. The only problem with the plan is resisting the urge to buy games for it while you're waiting for the right modchip and software to come along. Still, it's possible. Just buy it, stick it in your closet, and take it out when you can cheaply modify it into a living room Linux machine / DivX movie player / downloaded-games machine. Hey, it will cost $199 when all this stuff is ready, and it costs $199 now. Just buy it now!
alt.binaries.cd.image.xbox
http://www.binnetwork.net/
because I remember when I was in college working for a production company called "digital fx" (in oregon) we produced all kinds of really complex animations mostly on amiga computers (some running lightwave) - the most memory we had in any machine was 96 megs of ram - most of the computers just had 16 fast.
The most complex scene we made was a chessboard on a coffee table with the camera rotating around some chess pieces that were playing a game - as I recall it took around 72 megs to render and that includes memory needed for the OS.
I think if it was done right 64 megs would be more then enough for most television type applications.
2002-05-06 10:30:25 Xbox Hacked? (articles,games) (rejected)
And this:Many console warez groups have been doing this for a while. The story I submitted even had a link to a video of people playing ripped games but I guess it was to "weak" for the Slashdot editors.
A quote from a console site I visit:
Xtender ModChip Specs!!!!!!
The chip is made up of a lattice chip and an eeprom and is much like the neo4 in design
31 wires
Plays imports and backups
no dvd multiregion
cdrw / dvd-r/ dvdrw work (certain cdr work too)
works on ALL consoles
Get your Unix fortune now!
toilet ... equator ... Coriolis Force
Toilet/Coriolis connection debunked here.
Xbox and GameCube discs spin clockwise just like any other common optical disc (such as a CD, a copy-protected audio disc, or a DVD); they just store their boot blocks on the second layer, which normally starts at the outside of the disc and spirals inward.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Have the person reading Slashdot to you click on my user ID if you want to know what I've written.
Now why the FUCK would I want one of those? How come nobody says what the fucking thing does?
Read the grandparent:
Modified XBE's and custom code can boot (This is a HUGE feature - as you'll all see soon)
This is the milestone. An XBE is the Xbox equivalent of a Win32 EXE or a Linux ELF, that is, a program file. If you can boot a modified program file, then you can potentially make a file called "grub.xbe" that will load the kernel of a free GNU/Linux operating system. This is the approach that this team plans to take.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Funny guy, I take my figures from chartrack.co.uk. Over 500 000 XBox unites have been sold in Europe and only about 190 000 in Japan.
Worldwide total sales for the XBox = 3.1 million
Worldwide total sales for the Gamecube = 3 million
Failing, discontinue it? The gamecube have even fewer sales and I don't see them stopping production anytime soon.
XBox 2 is already in the works. Get over it, this console is here to stay. In my opinion, the Xbox is the best console followed closely by the gamecube.
...but, what family do you know that would be able to sit down in front of any current Linux distro and find it useful?
I know this was modded "funny", so I'm hoping you weren't serious, but I'm just trying to be realistic here for all the "LINUX ON EVERYTHING!" retards out there.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Every XBox sale brings them one step closer to doing for the game console segment what they did to the PC segment.)
Don't be fooled. Selling consoles cheap does not gurantee anything in software sales. I bought a laserdisk player long before DVD's became popular. The promise from the industry was the disks would be cheaper then video tape because they can be pressed cheaply in mass. I still have the player and only 3 movies. They didn't keep up their end of the bargan. Pre-recorded tape became cheap and Laser disks became more expensive (became an elete item). DVD's had the same promise. It also failed. Disney Old Yeller, Polyanna, The Parant Trap, Swiss Family Robinson, etc are all more than double the tape price for the DVD. (7.79 vs 18.99). How can something that is mass stamped cost more than a tape that has to be assembles from lots of small mechanical parts and recorded instead of stamped?
HP is trying to hit harder in the give the razor away stuff. My new PC came with a new HP printer. The color cartridge is over twice the cost of the cartridge for my old HP printer. (the cart is 1/4 the price of the printer) For printing web pages and articles, I use the old printer and refill the cartridges. The jump in price convinced me the gain was great while the risk of destroying the printer was low (price of 4 cartridges).
MS still has the barier of few titles at high prices to contend with plus the online subscription for network play. Sony and Nintendo can keep MS software unsold or selling at a loss for quite some time. The high price of the software will encourage piracy (note mod chip enables CDR and DVDR's to be used) The hardware (sold at a loss) may be popular as a DVD player that may have the Macrovision, region coding, and forced previews/warning screen issues fixed. (watch out for the MPAA, DMCA, & MS on this chip)
The truth shall set you free!
I'm pretty sure that also makes it impossible to burn with a standard DVD burner, because if the CD is spinning the same way, but the head is moving from out to in rather than in to out, then the spiral is the wrong way... think about it.
I'm fairly sure that most burners only like to burn things in the conventional spiral direction, thus, writing the binary data backwards will not solve the problem.
There's no reason for a sig here.
biut it doesn't matter you can STILL buy a n64
You can still buy lots of NES consoles on eBay. Nintendo has long used the existence of eBay against the "preservation" and "but piracy of no-longer-available software is fair use" defences. (I'd give you a link, but it appears to have disappeared in the 2001 redesign.)
emulating the c64 would be a wonderful use of new hardware... emulating the n64 would be piracy
Actually both would be piracy, unless you have specific license contracts that state that you may freely copy and redistribute software for the Commodore 64. Unlike patents, copyrights do not expire.
On the other hand, how did Nintendo 64 software developers develop and test their software? Emulation isn't piracy if you own the copyright on what you're emulating. Even Nintendo has recently realized that that highly substantial non-infringing uses for flash cartridges make the flash cartridges in and of themselves no longer illegal, and has removed the "emulators exist ONLY to play pirated games" language from its IP FAQ.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I have to agree with sean23007 on this one.
Sony has admitted to losses on the PSX and PS2 consoles. Nintendo had a loss on each N64, but I'm not sure on the Gamecube. I'd assume they ate it a bit on that one as well.
The reason being that if you're willing to accept a reasonable loss on the hardware you can make it up in two ways:
a) retail sales of games, of which you take a percentage.
b) licensing.
And that's where the real money is.
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.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"