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XBox Chip With Legal BIOS
Lours writes "OzXChip, an Australian company, has a new Xbox chip which comes preinstalled with the new (Cromwell Linux BIOS. Previous chips came without (or simplistic) BIOS for obvious legal and hardware-related (HD-key) reasons you had to go through a lot of manipulations in order to install a patched version of the original Microsoft BIOS or ask the vendor to do it which obviously he was not willing to do for free (when he was willing to). Since the new Cromwell BIOS is fully open source it can be shipped with the chip without any legal risks, gaining you a lot of time, sweat and money. Plus the chip has a very useful feature: by using software based on Andy Green's -- one of the maintainers of the XBox Linux project -- Raincoat, it lets you flash a new BIOS very easily: burn the BIOS file onto a blank CD, put it in the Xbox, boot and you are done. With such beasts there is not much left in the way of want-to-be Linux Xbox hackers who might have been affraid until now to have to deal with delicate hardware intricacies or reluctant to run the whole town for a vendor willing to mod their Xbox at the smallest fee. With important linux distributions also incoming (Debian and Mandrake are underway if not completed) it won't be long before everyone can write code for (and on!) the machine only a few minutes after receiving the chip in his mailbox. Hopefully we are going to see a zillion things running on the machine that Microsoft would only have dreamt of making (and selling)." Update: 01/23 16:07 GMT by T : The company's name is actually OzXChip, rather than OzChip (as originally rendered); thanks to reader Michael Muir for pointing this out.
will it still play games? and be easy to go back to the original bios?
2 of the best Killer apps for the X-Box I've heard of are the DivX player and the PVR. This chip will go a long way towards making it quick and easy to set those up.
It's too bad MS doesn't jump on the bandwagon. If they produced PVR software and sold it for the price of a normal game, I'd happily buy an X-Box and that software. I'd also pay at least $20 for DivX player software for it.
Jason
ProfQuotes
How does this change the problem with playing XBox Live with a modded XBox? I would like to mod my box to play around with a lot of the homebrew apps, but I really don't want to get my XBox's MAC address banned from XBox Live, as I really do like the service. This is assuming that Microsoft really does check for modded XBox hardware. Does this advancement help the situation?
Easy solution: buy a second XBox. No, really. There are a number of used/refurb XBoxes around if you look. The infamous "Disk is Dirty or Damaged" error (DDoDE) made for a lot of replaced XBoxes. If you look around at your local used game shops, I'm sure they have a couple used for a good price (or refurbished for a bit more money). Play XBox Live on your current working XBox, waste your time hacking around with Linux on the refurb.
In the article, there's a link to the pictures gallery.
;)
It has switch for "X-Box Live" compatibility
... and then there were none
Flashing a BIOS is *not* supposed to be an easy one step process, and there's a reason for it.
I can just see it now:
1) Linux hacker goes home with new hotly anticipated Starcraft: Ghost (published by Microsoft), which he stood in line for 10 hours to buy.
2) Linux hacker pops new game into XBox.
3) New UberSafeDisc protection on Starcraft: Ghost flashes replacement BIOS, replaces it with code for original XBox BIOS, then disables future flashing...
But with the depreciation of hardware over time, does it still cost them? Thoughts appreciated. -MMT
This is a good point.
However, some information: on the Xbox, the motherboard flash containing the BIOS is not writeable by default. You have to take out the motherboard and short out a couple of links with solder before it can be written. So MS cannot trash or update the original BIOS.
Most commercial modchips feature a write protect line which you physically have to switch to allow writes to the mod flash. Even those that don't are externally reprogrammable from a PC printer port. So this is no kind of crisis.
What is more possible to imagine in the future though are new games linked with a new version of the MS libraries which seek out and shit on assets on the HDD that MS don't approve of.
Just to clarify, the XBox only costs 200 dollars and comes with a Pentium III 733 MHz, not a Celeron. Any way you cut it, its a good price for the amount of hardware you're getting. Although it was more trouble for me than what this new BIOS will allow, I now use my XBox (with a 100GB harddrive) as a omni-emulator that allows me to play NES, SNES, Gensis, MAME, etc on my TV, as well as a media player so I can easily watch my DivX movies on my TV. In the future I plan on messing around with Linux and experimenting with PVR options (oh yeah, I own a couple XBox exclusive games, but that's really just a bonus to the real reasons I bought it). All in all, its been one of the best 200 bucks I've ever spent for the amount of stuff I can do with it.
Maybe people who buy that as a media player want to actually hear the media instead of the CPU/PSU/HDD fan.
Maybe people don't want a monster beige tower in their living room, but just a moderately big black and green box.
Maybe people don't want to pay for 300+ Watt current when 100 Watt will do.
> The Xbox itself is sold at a loss
No no no! Why do people always believe what they want to belive.
This is an urban myth. MS does *not* lose money on the sale of an XBox. It has lost money *so far* when incorporating all the development costs, but it doesn't lose more money each time someone buys one - it makes a small amount of the already lost/spent money back. The cost of the box easily covers the production cost of the unit and also incorporates a small profit for both MS and the retailer/distributor. Admittedly it probably makes more money out of the games, but buying loads of XBoxen will not send MS off into Chapter 11.
Actually I was able to land a job at the gaming industry with the help of the knowledge I was able to build from the PS2 Linux Kit. While not imminently useful to you right now, maybe, but it might lead to a 'next cool game' some time later.
And I think this is exactly one of the points Sony intended when the kit was released. It really takes some 6 months to fully handle all the details of the graphics system. I don't think this is the case with the XBox however. All the graphics are in a single chip with easy-to-use APIs.
And furthermore, if the modded XBoxes will be running something MS would have only dreamt of, then they will be mad because they just lost profits.