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Xbox 1.6 with Hynyx ram chips and Samsung ram chips piggyback: (Pita!)

Intro Since the beginning of time (2004) it was known that the 1.6 was missing the unpopulated footprints for the extra 4 RAM chips and this made the upgrade impossible. I was thinking recently that if all the signals for the extra RAM chips are still available on the board, we can add RAM to the 1.6 by just connecting all the necessary signals. After the tutorial segment I'll go into why this mod works. I'll also post a video on YouTube at some point. Be warned: this is more difficult that a 1.0 - 1.5 RAM upgrade Tutorial Required items Everything mentioned in the 1.0 - 1.5 RAM upgrade tutorial: https://consolemods.org/wiki/Xbox:RAM_Upgrade 4x 90mm long mod-wire. I used enamelled wire from a transformer. ~8 hours spare time Step 1: flash the modified XBlast OS BIOS XBlast OS (as a BIOS) is super helpful in doing this install correctly. It will boot with any number of extra RAM chips and includes a test for the additional RAM. XBlast OS will not show the 128MB test option on a v1.6 Xbox, so I've gone ahead and rebuilt it from source with that check removed. xblast_os_v0.60.bin Alternative Download Link: https://mega.nz/file/eeAwTZKQ#aaFcbACj3htA6cEtKwoiy1L7uK93o4YwUSqkGBEsUz8 If you don't trust my build, this is the line of code that needs removing: At this point, I suggest booting it up and running the test. The test is under Settings > Tools > 128MB RAM test Step 2: Remove the motherboard from the Xbox Step 3: Place the new RAM chip on top of an existing chip You'll want to solder down the corner pins first to get a good mechanical bond and so that you can adjust the alignment. I do this by pushing down pins 30 and 31 and soldering them down to the chip below. Then I check the alignment of the rest of the pins. If it's bad, then the chip can be nudged into position while reflowing the two pins. Then solder the two pins opposite. Step 4: Push down the rest of the pins Except pin 28! That is the chip select pin and it is unique for each RAM chip. Leave this pin floating in the air and don't solder it yet. Pin 30 is marked on the PCB. The pins come in a kind of ‾‾\__ shape. When you push them down, the whole pin will rotate around this end -> ‾‾\__ . I like to also push down the tail ‾‾\__ <- of the pin to get more contact with the chip below. Step 5: Start soldering all the pins Very little extra solder is required. Use lots of flux. I like the tacky flux that usually comes in syringes. I also like the drag-soldering method. If there's any excess solder, you will get shorts between pins and this extra solder can be wicked away. The new pins won't naturally touch the pins below even after pushing them down. Step 6: Check for shorts and missing connections For the first pass, I like to go in with a microscope and nudge each pin (of the new chip) with a cold soldering iron tip. If the pin moves easily, it is not soldered. Also check for shorts at the same time. If you have the patience (and want it to work first try without frying your Xbox), check for shorts and continuity with a multimeter. I skipped this the first time and got bitten! Best to clean the pins and pads with IPA before checking with the multimeter. Step 7: Add the chip-select wire First, figure out which bank you are adding: Then, find the chip-select solder point: Bank 1 CS is left of the label for C4P10 Bank 2 CS is between the labels for C4R12 and C4R13 Bank 3 CS is left and above the label for C4P21 Bank 4 CS is between and above the labels C4R1 and C3R1 For banks 2 and 3, the chip-select wire can go through the hole to the left of the GPU. For bank 2, 90mm may be too short, so check the wire length and cut it as short as possible. I removed the GPU heatsink to access this hole. At this point, it should look something like this: Step 8: Reassemble and test in XBlast For a quick test, I don't bother with adding the fan, GPU heatsink, HDD, or DVD drive. The test in XBlast should look like what I first posted on reddit: If the Xbox reboots twice and FRAGs, check the bios selection (if you have one available). A normal BIOS will not accept between 1 and 3 extra RAM chips. If the Xbox reboots three of four times (and it's faster than a normal FRAG sequence) check for shorts. This happened to me. Step 9: Repeat for the other 3 chips The first one is the hardest. Step 10: Reflash with your favourite BIOS Some 1.6 BIOSs won't support 128MB. The X3 BIOS works just fine and it's the only one I tested so far. xblast_os_v0.60.bin

I don’t have any Xecuter chips left. I have: Various PSX/PSOne chips at least 30/5 different types. Ps2 chips few left… I don’t think worth installing with new software mods. 2 NEW Xstation kits for PSX Xbox: 4 - 1.6 motherboards. Excellent shape/working. Nothing else included. 20+ various working PSU’s At least 10 Xbox’s modded with 3TB to 8 TB hdds. 1 has DVD drive issue. I may fix if I have time. All have cables/controllers work flawlessly. Any caps with issues replaced. All clock caps removed/surfaces cleaned. Have basic external HDMI converters. All are hard modded with unlocked hdds. No soft mods! Couple are Tsop’d. All in good shape. Some have minor scratches. 1- Xbox portable monitor I purchased new in early 2000’s used less than 4 hours. It mounts to top of Xbox and clips at rear ridges of Xbox. Fun to play in bed not bother wife, but horrible if you intend on reading small text. I think it’s a 7 inch screen???? Intel brand. They were in plastic packaging you had to cut open. Really no way to save packaging. I bought 2. One is buried in packaging somewhere around here. I haven’t found it in 4 attempts over 10 years. I’m sure I will someday when I’m looking for something else. Chips: 2 Xenium Ice (one complete in box / one I used for softmodding) 1 Xenium Gold 24K new… Not sure I’ll sell this one. At least 25 OPENXENIUM latest run At least 12+ Aladdin chips/ various runs/versions. 3 PSU adapters that run off vehicle voltage input. 2 PC PSU to Xbox PSU control boards for powering on/off/adapting. I forget the company who made these for a while. I used them with the car PSU’s from mini pc, or picotech???? When I modded and installed some Xbox’s in cars back then without AC/DC inverters. I also used one when I built the portable handheld Xbox in 2004 I think. Might still be a link to thread on Xbox-hq dot com somewhere. I used to post now and then there years ago. Nintendo: At least 20 Pico chips 3 Wii systems softmodded with external hdds. Other Sony: Plenty of Vita pre setup 256/512 GB modded SD cards with system adapters Plenty of PSP 128 GB pre setup SD cards with system adapters 2 PSOne 5inch screens. 1 PSOne with faulty laser. I see someone replaced the laser capacitor at some point. 2 PSOne consoles with attached 5” screens with cabling/ controller and inside the over shoulder carry bags. Both with car cigarette lighter power adapters and 110/120V wall adapters. 2 PSX 1001 working motherboards with PSU and controller ports 4 Ps2 systems modded with various hdds up to 8 TB. One has the old IDE adapter, the hdd might be smaller… possibly 500GB. I don’t remember using anything smaller. The rest have newer sata adapters. 2 original backwards compatible PS3’s, factory. With nib lightgun setups. Time crisis type. Other PS3 lightgun setups CIB. Few are crysis type and 1 used CIB a/r style lightgun rifle. At least 5 hard modded PSX systems. 1001-55X 75X series 5-6 GameShark/Action Replay parallel port adapters. Sega: 3 SD card laser replacement modded Dreamcast systems. Too many Dreamcast arcade sticks, lightgun and other stuff to list. If you’re looking for something particular, ask. Arcade sticks/controllers: Arcade Sticks for almost every system ever made. Modded sticks. If it exists, I probably have at least 2. Arcade sticks custom made by me for systems that didn’t have any, or had junk, or haven’t made yet. Ask if you’re looking. If you’re looking for dirt cheap arcade sticks, I don’t have any and not willing to lose $ on them. I have more than 70. I don’t mind keeping them. I would sell some if anyone wants to pay what I did new. They are still new. Some boxes aren’t great. All have boxes except custom made from scratch by me. I forget if the Chun Lee 360 blue arcade stick was Xbox or Sony, but I installed I think the brooks board to work on both systems and PC. Its in box too. I have way too much to list on everything TBH. I just mentioned here what I have way too many of off top of head. I’ve collected since the late 70’s as a child. Repaired/designed electronics. If there’s anything anyone is looking for, ask. I didn’t list anything I’m keeping for myself. I’ll always have gaming stuff until I expire and assume room temp. No time soon! You may have something I want??? Just ask. I’m open to trades.

5.2 is the latest I find. 5.0, 5.0a, 5.1?; not sure of any letter as it is not listed with an f - simply 5.1; and 5.2 along with a complete save are available at archive.org: https://archive.org/details/streets-of-rage-remake

you copy the xtras pack(minus the roms) to the media folder, then go to configuration>change default directories>set media directories>media directory, and set the path to the media folder. The default media folder its in E:\, you can just change it to D:\media\ since its the current folder for the emulator

I've also noticed that to get the dvd drive working again it's enough to reset the console with the full IGR gamepad combo on cerbios if you don't have xblast or have a single bank hardmod.

Issue has been confirmed to be a problem with the startech adapter and compatibility with Samsung dvd drives by the guys on the cerbios discord. Will need to use one of the china adapters on all consoles with a samsung dvd drive.

I figured out at least PART of the problem I think. It only causes this error on HDD's of 1tb or larger. I tried on several brands of 250gb sata, 400gb sata and 750gb sata drives I had laying around and the problem is not there. As soon as I use any 1tb, 2tb, 3tb or 4tb drive though the issue happens again. This is on a fresh format of the drive with ONLY the cerbios.ini, bootanims on C and xbmc4gamers on E and nothing else at all. This doesn't tell me why it is happening though or how to fix it. Anyone here have any ideas on that?

I also don't have an IDE USB or IDE to sata Adapter to plug the xbox drive into a PC either (I used to have all this stuff... but somewhere along the line it all vanished after I sold my original Xbox way back when). Thanks Frosty for the IDE cable advice. I haven't ordered the adapter yet either, so will see how I go. I have multiple SATA drives sitting here I can use, they aren't big ones either (like 128gb SSDs).

Alrighty, I just got xbmc4xbox transferred to my Xbox and it works perfectly.

Alright. Here is the final bios pack :

x3.3294.v16plus - works 128MB x2.5035.v16plus.bin - works 128MB evox.m8plus.v16 - can only use 64MB but still works 256k.yoshi.k2005.v16 - works 128MB but it's a debug BIOS For some reason my X3 flashbios now has no video output, not even a black screen. After about 20 seconds the front LEDs go orange. I'll see if I can deselect the extra RAM by resoldering the chip-select points and maybe this fixes it.

The Theory There are some awesome scans of the Xbox motherboard online for versions 1.1 and 1.6 (they have a sickmods.net watermark). I traced all the signals of a RAM chip and found these results: A0 - A11 address pins are connected to the same pins of the chip under it BA0, BA1 bank select pins are connected to the same pins of the chip under it Same for CK, ~CK, CKE, ~RAS, ~CAS, ~WE, VREF, MCL, and DQS However, the data pins DQ00 - DQ31 are in reverse order The data mask pins DM0 - DM3 are also in reverse order Since both the data pins and data mask pins are in reverse order, we can reverse both and achieve a compatible interface The chip select pin ~CS is unique for each RAM chip After this, I started tracing the ~CS signals back to the northbridge/GPU on the 1.1 motherboard. Then, I found the same pads of the northbridge on the 1.6 motherboard. Luckily, all 4 of the CS pins are exposed on the bottom of the board! At that point, I had to confirm that the 1.6 northbridge wasn't actually incompatible with the extra RAM. The chip is labelled XGPU-B which is unique to the 1.6. Maybe NVIDIA removed the extra chip select logic to save on die area? So I connected up my scope to 2 CS pins of the existing chips and 2 CS pads on the bottom. My expectation was that during the 128MB RAM test, the existing RAMs will be deselected most of the time and so their CS pins would be high. During normal operation, the extra chips should be deselected. I don't have any scope screenshots, but here was my setup with the scope probes and flying wires. That was 3 weeks ago before I ordered the extra chips from China The experiment confirmed the expectation and the rest is history.

No I used Rocky5. And it worked fine. The reason it's playing up now is that I attempted to flash the TSOP (from inside Evox, with an M7 bios) while still softmodded and as mentioned that's broken something. Sweetdarkdestiny is not to blame (and If I'd had their disk to begin with, I probably wouldn't be in this situation but that's my own fault for not doing enough research to begin with!). I can boot up Agent Under Fire, and when I attempt to re-soft mod it just reboots the xbox and restarts AUF. I also can't attempt to recopy the softmod files back to the xbox hdd because I can't get into the dashboard to do that. I think my only way out is to either build a new HDD (which I was planning to do anyway) but I need a Sata/IDE adapter to before I could use it. As I think I mentioned, I've got the eeprom backup from the console, so I should be able to do that. A burnt disc does not boot, making me think I'm definitely running a stock bios, but why the orange light? Also: When games boot, the light stays green. As mentioned also before: My Xbox boot splash screen says "Microsoft" not Evox or anything else. The other thing to note is that on occasion when loading the light flashes green, but it takes ages for the MS logo to appear, but then it does, and then black screen again. If there is some "Soft" way out of this then I will gladly attempt that while I wait for a SATA/IDE adapter to arrive. EDIT BTW definitely not blaming Rocky5 either, as Rocky5 can't allow for my idiocy and stupidity when designing their softmod!!! IF there were some way to use AUF to run something from a memory card (I have a usb adapter cable) that might fix this or allow me to check files on the HDD or whatever, I would certainly give that a try. EDIT number 2 this is a v1.0 box.