headaches
Yeesh! My heartfelt apologies for the lack of updates. Catherine's been adjusting to her recent promotion to Associate Box Mover at work, and I've been running to Capitol Hill on a near-daily basis to pick up the slack left by a less-than-dilligent coworker. The limited technical energies I can muster have been spent screaming at the BTD folks that they're totally all cogs in the machine, maan, and wrestling with Jon and Paul's XBoxes.
Ahh, the XBoxes. You might remember when Jon and I spread the poor machines' guts throughout the apartment prior to frying their tiny electronic brains. Well, I got a reprogrammer and put the appropriate BIOS on the chip. I acquired and installed a ready-to-go suite of apps called "Slayer's XBox AutoInstaller" that featured dragon graphics. Then -- more problems.
This won't interest anyone else, probably, but I had to search all over the goddamn internet for the solution to my problem, so I'm writing it down here, if only to allow others to find it, Google permitting.
So: Jon and Paul have the most modern hardware revision of the XBox, the 1.6. This revision is a real bastard to modify, and it only works with one particular flavor of the various hacked BIOSes: the Evox M8 16. All the others either fail to produce a video signal, or just give you the so-called "Christmas lights" failure: a flashing red and green power LED and a very unhappy XBox.
I had gotten past all this, by putting the appropriate version of the Evox M8 BIOS on the mod chip. The XBox booted up with the little Evox logo you see above, and would load up either Slayer's disc, or the MS dashboard, or one of the Slayer-installed dashboards on the harddrive: Evolution X or Avalaunch. All of this points to a working modchip. Generally these things are all-or-nothing.
Which made the final symptom so confusing: I couldn't launch any applications from either dashboard. This made them useless -- I could load up the hacked operating system, but not run anything from it.
So here's the solution. It's weird, it's stupid, it's arbitrary, but here it is. Jon and I are installing Xecuter 2.6 lite modchips. These chips have two 512k banks for the BIOS. You can boot from either one -- there's a little switch that lets you select between the two -- but there shouldn't be any difference between the two. The only reason to have more than one is to provide a backup for when you screw up (being extra talented, I had managed to screw up both at the same time).
Anyway, the punchline is that for the unique combination of the Xecuter 2.x lite and the Evox M8 BIOS, you must put the BIOS in bank 2.
There. That's it. Infinite thanks to the friendly miscreants over at #xbins-help. I hope this helps someone else avoid unnecessary XBox pain.
Comments
So... I'll be beating Paul at Dr. Mario soon then?
yup. I'm copying over games at the moment -- slow going. But I should hopefully have everything configured and ready to go by the end of the weekend.
But Jeff, Jon and I need your help with this: we can set up whatever wallpaper and startup music we want, safe in the knowledge that Paul will have to fly me out there to get it fixed. I've got a good idea for the music (a clip from the Sopranos belittling your heathen coast, then straight into "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun"), but the wallpaper... well, that's stumping me. Goatse? That seems like it's been done.
An interesting problem... I'll talk to him this weekend and see if I can figure out his most-hated images. When do you need to know by?
Well, the sooner the better I suppose, but I want it to be a surprise. The fallback is an image of something unpleasant involving the controller that will presumably be in hands at that moment.
Tommy, just one question...are you a man...or a GOD?
here's my input:
I'd have a hell of a time topping that, so I won't even try.
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