XBox stuff
So, with the new XBox 360 set to go on sale in North America on November 22nd, I've been thinking about taking some risks with my current Xbox and trying some of the SoftMOD hacks (and this and this) for the xbox to run as a media client; Audio (MP3, WMA, WAV, CDA), Video (VOB, TY, MPG, WMV, XVID, DIVX), Photos (JPG, BMP, GIF), Emulator (PS1, N64, MAME, Colecovision, Atari, SNES, NES), Linux, FTP/Telnet service, etc. Additionally, you can then upgrade the 8GB HDD to a larger one (with LBA48 support) and rip most of my exensive LEGAL library of Xbox games to the hard drive to play rather than load all the DVD's all the time (as well as several of the games refusing to hardly play anymore with even a single scratch on them because of the crapy Thompson/Phillips DVD player in it). With 250GB drives for sale locally routinely under $80, it seems pretty cool. Also, the fact that the hacked boxes can then run a great software DVD player with output support for 720p (something even the retail Xbox player won't do even with the cheesy $29 IR remote kit) all with just the wireless controllers, really appealed to me.

Well, I delved into the extensive world of online XBox hacking at XBox-HQ and XBox-Scene. Read a ton of the forum FAQ's, posts and how-to guides (many of which are later invalidated because of a new or better way of doing it). And managed to totally door-stop my XBox hard drive...grin. It was a critical error that killed the Softmod update in the middle of the update (one that a later softmod exploit cleared up related to the newer Action Replay 8MB memory card I had used). See the post mortum post here. Anyway, I was trying to recover from the error, and figured the saved game exploit was bad (it was, but only in respect to not working with my memory card) and was going to delete it from the HDD and try to retransfer it. Good thinking (right!), but the softmod had also managed to completely wipe my entire C:\ drive on the XBox, so I had no MS Dashboard left to boot. For those of you that don't know what that will do, it involves turning on your xbox, and getting a nasty multi-lingual catastrophic error informing you that your xbox needs service. Since I couldn't boot to the dash board (which is what allows you to copy exploits from the memory card to the HDD, which is where the game has to load the saved game exploit...I was sort of screwed). Plus, the XBox "locks" hard drives so they can't be tampered with if you don't get a proper boot, or don't know the pass key unique to each and every XBox BIOS. And I couldn't get that key without reading my EEPROM or getting to the HDD (not even from Linux FATX boot).

Sigh. Figured I was stuck with an 8GB door stop, and my only recourse was going to be to buy a Hardware BIOS Mod that needs to be soldered and nasty stuff done to the inards of your XBox. Anyway, I got an Xecutor 2.6 CE chip for $29 (including S&H). But prior to getting it in the mail, I managed to find a GREAT thread on Hotswapping the XBox HDD without EEPROM Backup. I tried it and it WORKED (make sure you have a video cable plugged into your XBox though, even if it isn't connected to anything)! I immediately paid the $10 yearly fee to join the XBox-HQ VIP group...figuring anyone that hosts such a great support site is easily worth $10. Well, after that, I managed to get back to a "stock" xbox (with the help of a Linux boot kernel and XBoxHDM 1.9). And then found the great Auto Installer Deluxe 2.11 Final ISO that had a Soft Installer Deluxe 3.0 hack save game exploit that actually WORKED with my Action Replay 8MB memory card. Within 20 minutes, I had a fully hacked and upgraded xbox with EvoX dash and XBMC installed.

This is a pretty sweet setup and I'm amazed at the work that has been done on hacked XBox content. I'm also doing this "because I can" with the hardware and it is fun/interesting to work with, and has the nice side benefit of allowing me to play legal copies of songs I already have on several hundred CD's, as well as movies and CD's on a cheap box already in my home entertainment stand (and is still far less than the cost of putting together even a basic HTPC). I'm NOT doing it to copy games or anything else, no matter what you may think.


- posted by Jeff @ 9:26 PM | 0 comments