nerding it up
Stare into the voided warranty long enough, and the voided warranty begins to stare back at you.
Last night Jon and I set out to install modchips on his and our buddy Paul's XBoxes. For those who're scratching their heads: mod chips let you override the XBox's BIOS, and with it the unit's factory-specified hardware limitations. This effectively turns the console into a general purpose computer that happens to have a great interface for games and video output. After you've chipped an XBox it can be used to watch movies, play old NES and SNES videogames or even run a webserver.
Paul couldn't join us for this fun-fest -- he lives in San Francisco -- but he bought some of the components while he was in town for the holidays, then shipped the rest here so that I could do the install.
Well, 7 seven hours later I'd managed to break both modchips by improperly upgrading their BIOSes. God dammit. This seemed much easier when I did it to my own XBox. The situation is fixable, but it'll be a pain. The only worthwhile product of our efforts yesterday? Some pictures of the apartment with electronic entrails spread throughout.
More after the cut.
I couldn't let Jon have all the fun
Although "fun" might not be the best word for it. Both Jon and Paul ended up with the 1.6 XBox. Microsoft has made numerous revisions to the hardware, the 1.6 being the latest and hardest to mod. All those white squiggles are wires that had to be added to reroute the board's circuitry, in addition to the installation of the chip itself. It's a big headache. The 1.6 is also not compatible with the most popular hacked BIOS. I didn't know that at the time, which is why I was up until 3AM last night soldering and cursing Microsoft.
Everything except the TV was doing something related to the modding process. Doing a bit-for-bit clone of my hard drive didn't work, unfortunately (the hard drives Paul and Jon bought are slightly smaller than it, so we'll have to install everything manually). However, I did discover WinHex along the way. If you want to play around with the sort of forensic data tool the feds might use to pick over your hard drive, give it a whirl.
More of the modding process (the tomatoes are optional).
Comments
I like what I see. What modchip are you using?
Good luck on the future BIOS flash.
the chips are xecuter 2.6's, which have two 512k bios banks available, to prevent people from doing just what I did -- overwriting every usable bit of code on the chip. Stupid me, I saw the flashbios startup screen read "1024k", which I assumed to be the size of the currently selected bank (turns out it actually means 1024k total, spread over 2 banks). So I make the bios 1024k, which ended up overwriting both banks, and voila, dead chip. Since we had encountered identical symptoms previously w/ wires coming loose, I assumed that's what had happened immediately after the bios flashing (presumably from the motion of the tray closing). Said to myself "we'll fix that later, let's flash the other one now with the same CD" and bang, two dead chips. Argh! I'm an idiot.
But I was exhausted and slightly drunk. Oh well. Once morning came I realized what had happened pretty quickly. Now I'm trying to find someone who does mods in the DC area -- if I can't, I'll be ordering a chip programmer to let me undo my handiwork.
Tommy, you're a shaman.
That picture of Jon is pretty sweet, though it looks like he could easily have another finger (other than his thumb) on the side of his hand that you can't see - Just like in The Princess Bride.
Linked from a Begging To Differ post (http://www.beggingtodiffer.com/archives/2005_05.html#002704)
Um... you know about soft-mods, right? You don't even have to open the little bastard, just get hacked fonts. Google a bit for "UDE2" and you can even get a saved game that does the whole thing for you. You just buy an original Splinter Cell, Mechassault, or James Bond game and the geniouses who figured out the hack do the leg work. Of course, if you *want* to drop in a 120-gig HD, you can, but you can do the aforementioned stuff (media PC, emulators, etc.) without even cracking the case open. And best of all, you don't have to buy expensive mod chips or solder a thing. More at www.xbox-scene.com. Check the tutorial threads in the forums.
I've got a soft-modded 1.4 and I use it almost every day. Streaming video off my main PC, watched on the family-room TV? Check. MP3 music (WHICH I OWN), streamed from my PC, over my entertainment center speakers? Check. Final Fantasy III (WHICH I OWN) played with an Xbox controller? Priceless.
I haven't explored softmodding in any depth but yeah, I've been aware of its existence (didn't know there was a splinter cell exploit, though). There's a similar exploit in PSO for the gamecube that lets you load software.
Personally though, I'd rather have the big hard disk. And hasn't XB Live started banning boxes with the hacked fonts?
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