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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 :)
You have to really like soldering to do this.
Hey wait, I could also just stick with my goddamn PC!
If RIAA goes on like that, we'll need PC modchips soon, anyway...
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
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.
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!
Can anyone please explain what a modchip is
Modchips fix hardware-bugs in game consoles: e.g. inability to play backuped games or DVDs.
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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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.