trencherfield
-
Posts
161 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
1
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Calendar
Store
Posts posted by trencherfield
-
-
2 minutes ago, NeMesiS said:
Hmmm...
I'll just go with no grounding. Still haven't decided to use the EMI shielding on the final product or not.
I have other concerns, I worry that the film might just peel off over time especially where the flex cable
bends to meet up with the HDMI mod PCB. One solution would be to see if they'll let me tuck the film
underneath the PI stiffener by a small about. Or we ground that end of the film to help prevent peeling.
But peeling may not end up being a concern at all, I'm just trying to anticipate any issues.
I'd prefer to avoid using a diode on the flex cable as it would incur assemble fee for one component.
Not sure if a diode coming off the flex cable connector on the HDMI pcb would have a similar effect.
If anything worries me about picture quality, it would be RF...
I wonder if it would be worth getting a EM/RF meter with a probe.
Not a dig here obviously, but man, your OCD is making matters too complicated for yourself. Really.
The EMI shielding film is really good. Various thickness available no doubt. I will tell you now the adhesive on mine never undoes itself, super sticky, even bent. I use it for heat protection too when using hot air on top of kapton and it's a sod to get off actually!
The diode was tongue in cheek for the moaners, you only have to google "EMI shield ground?" to see the faff.
The digital signal will not need a ground for the shield on it. 100% on that. So tell them no.
Any defect to the digital signal will only be digital deviation (jitter) and it's not getting re-clocked with a crystal etc so, honestly not much you can do. I would say there's more degradation to the signal and reflection by leaving the video chip on the m/board.
So summing up, you can order some shielded (no ground) if you wish to see any perceived improvement. Me I'd just use the tape on them. Copper 3M would be super fancy. Probably removing the chip would do more if it doesn't cause a frag etc.
-
I believe modern vintage gamer (MVG) has done a video on the 'how to' for programming and making a retail xbox into a Dev machine etc. Shows what you will need on the PC etc and is quite a good video overall for starters.
-
2
-
-
Good news at last after accident.
Best of luck with the modding, gets addictive
-
1
-
-
3 minutes ago, NeMesiS said:
@trencherfield I need your opinion... The manufacturers are asking:
Quote: "Do you need to do GND connection for the EMI film"
I already have a good grounding on bottom layer of the flex cable.
But is it good practice to ground the EMI film also?
Ohhh lordy.... you did not just ask that question lol The army of cinema/HIFI purists have stood up and marching your way haha.
People argue about this to infinity.
Common arguments;
1) If you don't ground it you'll gradually induce voltage in the shield.
2) Ground one end only for a drain path so to speak, grounding both can induce ground loops etc blah blah.
3) No, ground both ends so the RF can tunnel away...
Me, personally, I don't ground them no. The shielding on the Lexicon (£6K+ processors) worked great, solved the issue. No ground. Generally Hi Fi etc won't ground, some do, some don't. The Lexicon used a Medical Grade switching power supply (noisy) had ground, so obviously didn't want to induce that from the chassis.
If the masses that want it grounded, I dunno, run one end through a diode to ground to please them.
This is an Xbox though
Me I'd just shield it.
-
11 hours ago, Bowlsnapper said:
Thank you for clarifying this to me. I did and do not understand all the nuanced considerations involved in designing a bios. If it were to remain open source, it would be impossible to make a new Xecuter chip. It's my only problem with open source: It's way harder to Develop a super product like that. I don't know if it's been done in the Xbox arena. I don't think so. However, that may be what a lot of people prefer. I never even asked. Maybe I'm only asking for what I would want instead of most other people. I am notoriously ignorant but still can't help speaking on things like I know what I'm talking about. Yes, you are correct that even with what would appear to be sufficient and moral motivation, the capable individuals would not be convinced to code or engineer this. I'm legitimately bummed.
A lot of my motivation comes from wanting strongly to create a light side to Dustin's perceived dark. I feel like a wrong has been committed and he's being allowed to get away with it. It's easy for me to end up in a sellout state of mind if I'm trying to achieve that goal. You know what I mean?
How does that patch work, anyway? Would the developers just have to code support from scratch? How does modification like that work anyway, if you were to explain HDMI patching to a semi-Layperson?
As Nemesis said, I would not fret at this point mate. Highly likely, we would hope, that one of the teams will kindly help with this if they can. There is something else I had in mind that I can't mention here currently, but it looks like Nemesis is already on that path looking at his HDMI board pcb.
Hopefully the hardware performs well enough in the outset. I haven't assembled any because I have had a retinal bleed in my eye for the past year and having regular injections into the eye. Have another coming soon, ugh. So obviously looking into a scope and soldering isn't viable in that state.
If I manage to do some HDMI boards I would happily donate a few to the team for development so everyone can get this.
-
1
-
-
The Cromwell is the basis. As NeMesis has said and is referring to, is that it can be very difficult getting a Bios to work both with all the board versions, the Xbox kernel, the Xenium and other chip OS as well, especially where video output and scaling is concerned.
For example on a V1.0 using Xenium OS it had the bug of fragging when trying to boot Xblast from the Xenium chip. This would not happen on the other board versions. Same as the 1.6 line problem which was solved of course. These are the difficulties.
Yes there are people who can code and do this, some are probably watching. I'll tell you now, more often than not, despite what you offer, or how polite you may be asking, it's unfortunate but they generally can't be arsed. It's lucky there's the Cerbios team and I would say, if the HDMI board (I have a few to assemble) can work well, then hopefully that team might offer a patch for it, which would be very generous on their part.
Going opensource, in my view would encourage this.
-
2
-
1
-
-
1 hour ago, NeMesiS said:
So... I'm about to place the order for a proto batch of flex cables.
I'm thinking about doing an extra cable to tryout EMI shielding.
This is very expensive to do a small batch with but I assume in larger
quantities the rate should get better.
I was thinking the bottom side only should do.
Should I give it a try?
You could just use the thick self adhesive EMI foil tapes quite easily mate on that to save yourself some money to test the difference. 3M also do two versions and a copper one as well.
My older iMac was full of it inside the back of the case in true apple fashion!
I've used it before successfully on a cinema processor (lexicon) that was getting some interference from a vacuum display frequency and others.
I still have a large roll I use occasionally in projects for things.-
1
-
-
Smartxx V3 manual showing connections.
The connectors are the same Molex ones as per Xecuter 3. The plugs for the wires etc are also on Digikey etc or aliexpress.
The bigger double row one is the double JST for the LCD, again like the X3. -
Yes, removing all the shielding including the bottom can induce video problems from interference etc. There are older threads regarding this. Some boards are worse than others for being affected IIRC too.
I have a V1.0 board that will not output any video over component once removed from the shielding base. Once it's back in the case, bingo the video goes back to normal. The other boards I have do not do this that I've tested so far, bit of an oddball board.-
1
-
1
-
-
2 minutes ago, sweetdarkdestiny said:
But not at any price.
Obviously.
-
5 minutes ago, NeMesiS said:
Never mind...
SIB-109-02-F-S - Samtec - Spring Loaded Connector, Compression Connector, 2.54 mm (newark.com)
Not a cheap option...
I find solutions for solderless installs tend to get expensive.
Yeah it was a dead link on the manufacturers site from the pic I found.
If I find anything good in future for it I will let you know, since I'll only install the ones I make myself. -
I've been looking for you and the company that made that appears to have stopped making it, plus I can't find a small pitch one either.
I know it would be great to have something attach to the encoder so buyers could easily install it. I know it's no good being easy for you, me and others who do this kind of work and smaller, it would help a lot of Xbox fans out if there was something easy.
-
1
-
-
22 minutes ago, NeMesiS said:
I think I've probably gone a bit too long with the pads maybe?
Definitely need to reduce the via hole size along with the castellated holes on the edge.
This is my first attempt at a flex cable so a learning curve was expected as I wasn't sure
how my CAD designs would translate to a physical object.
They gave me some daft quote for the ribbon flex at 30 off - so told em to stuff it and thought since I'd not built the HDMI boards I'd just use ribbon cable at mega fine pitch for a challenge lol
So not done anything with that yet. -
25 minutes ago, NeMesiS said:
Oh right, interesting...
I'd be glad to order some to check them out if you could find where I could get something like that..
Was just the idea, don't know where to get them etc. Guess the best option would be to start with the pin spacing sizes... prolly .67 or half mill or sommet is it? Not looked yet myself at the encoder though soldered to them several times, not measured them or looked at the chip pdf yet.
Might find an IC socket with same pitch and cut the socket up to correct lengths, soldered to a pcb and size to press on with a clamp. Might work. Pcb would have to be deadly accurate. -
something like this on an internal cutout on a small pcb...
-
1
-
-
Just now, Bowlsnapper said:
Hehe, screwhole.
For clamping .... get your mind out the gutter lol
-
1
-
-
Hmmm nice screw hole there on 1.0 to 1.4 as well.
-
NeMesis,
There are those pcb's with those stubby springs on the edge or face I've seen in various equipment PCB's .... the ones not unlike the small sim card springs for example. Dunno what pitch they go down to, have to ask the fab houses on that if they do it.
If you had a pcb that fitted over the entire top of the video encoder, cut out in the middle with corresponding pins on sides (some for location fitting) and then a small pressure clamp over it then something like that might work as a solder-less fitment maybe.
Other than that it's those spider springs which are pretty terrible really. Can't imagine 20+ row of those being reliable. -
10 minutes ago, Bowlsnapper said:
Meaning it wouldn't IGR or boot any XBEs?
How the hell did you get the components? Those things were impossible to find when I looked a few months ago...
Correct. When you launch an XBE from the dash, the kernel in memory does a soft reboot, so reads the bios again.
I bought the stuff ages ago before the the proverbial hit the fan so to speak with the IC market. -
1 hour ago, Bowlsnapper said:
Did you source the parts from an X3?
No, as per the BOM in the github. But I have several X3's and have also disassembled an X3CE to interchange the parts to move further with it. He has released an update to the code but I haven't recompiled the newer release 1.1 as of yet as I left the Xbox stuff for a while, so didn't bother yet. On 1.0 r3dux code I got it to boot to dash, but the code was incomplete for the XBE call back to bios function as it stood.
-
I have a batch of the XboxHDMI pcb's and the components I've had for a good while but not got around to doing them yet due to other reasons.
I was spending so much time making openxeniums etc as well then made the Xecuter 3 r3dux clone (detailed on here).
Doing some company work at the mo, but will maybe get back into this shortly.... I stopped making/selling and left the Xbox stuff for a while.-
1
-
-
Yeah I was wanting to pick up a small CRT just for that nice retro look.
The problem I found was that the RGB out from the xbox (for most UK crt tv's) is 480i, won't do the 480p on rgb. So that means you have to use the (much better) component video out from the Xbox (480p/720p) where applicable (game dependant), which then means for a CRT you are looking at the JVC and SONY range of PVM etc.... this = ££££'s
So, gave up looking at those silly prices. You might find one where you are located cheaper, luck of the draw, but getting harder to find one without burn.
There's a reddit crt group for gaming. Lots of pics on there of peoples setups for eye candy. -
9 hours ago, sweetdarkdestiny said:
I would say your MB is fine.
Error 06 : Incorrect hard drive password.
I assume, that the HDD is locked to another xbox. If you put a different HDD in your XBox and boot up an installer diesk of your choice you should be able to set up the new HDD and your XBox should then work fine.
I concur.
For the motherboard to boot up and give you an error screen means the problem is most likely as sweetdarkdestiny describes. Install a new hard drive and boot the installer up as he said. -
1 hour ago, Prehistoricman said:
It's theoretically possible for that to be true, but it's not how MS implemented the kernel.
When the kernel loads a new xbe, it basically reboots itself. Even the debug monitor command to load an XBE is called "magicboot". It's not a full reboot, so it doesn't read the entire kernel out. I tested this and it only reads 1668 bytes from flash when you launch a new XBE. My guess is that it's reading xcodes and then a small bit of code to go back to the kernel which is still in RAM.
Thanks for verifying that. Appreciated.
Board Life Status
Board startup date: April 23, 2017 12:45:48
XeniumMods v3.xx SneakPeak!
in Hardware Mods
Posted
Depends on the BIOS. Generally one of mine boots the flubber at 480i then it reloads the end X box logo as the bios is read for force 480p then loads XBMC in progressive too.
The patches are different and game specific really on the XBE launch like the original fixes for the 1.6 that you could apply for Panther Dragoon etc.
Just get your order in, build your PCB up and test it out first
and get some rest in the mean time yeah. Leave it for now while the stuff comes in.