corona2222

I looked into crystal cases recently, +$100AUD+ship on ebay, more than a whole xbox+extras

tut on finding the open/close/ready points: https://web.archive.org/web/20030608143129/http://www.coverx.org:80/tutorials.php?id=1 theres some interesting snips on compatible drives here under DVD drive: https://xboxdevwiki.net/Hardware_Revisions "If the firmware from this drive is applied to a SAMSUNG 616T or 616F PC dvd drive it will behave as a Xbox one", i assume that means original discs work. but tracking one down to buy maybe just as difficult as any other solution

is it possible to swap just the lazer diode out with one from another DVD player or PC drive? (lazer component, not the whole head assembly)

During development we came across double quotes, single quotes, apostrophes, hyphens, and others that looked similar but were not xbox legal (or supported in game). This was usually caused by some program the files had been through automatically changing filename characters. Another way was designers/artists using wrong characters because they were copying and pasting filenames from Excel, Word, Outlook or wherever, (again app's automatically changed characters). If you need to quickly diagnose in future, you can confirm by pasting filename in HxD, along with the legal Xbox Characters KaosEngineer posted, then check the hex values. All the ASCII and Unicode varieties of hyphens: http://jkorpela.fi/dashes.html

I upgraded HD (Toshiba MQ01ABD100) and used JP103-20330-818-2 adapter (both spare), i've had handful of these and never a bad one. FTP speed similar to original HD, and loading a game on HD was about 30% faster (from timings). but unsure how else to test performance, is there an app? UnleashX reports Ultra DMA 4 (ATA-66MB/s) using the original cable with new adapter+sata HD. I tried an 80 wire cable but it stayed at U-DMA 4, what is the highest DMA you've seen achieved using 80 wire?

thats great it got fixed. if not bad contacts then maybe router was broke (software or hardware) or activity on your network overflowing the router. As Localhorst mentions could be PC doing a bunch of network stuff at the same time.

"it depends on other traffic" i.e. from the PC or other networked devices. OP has 1Gb/s between PC<-> router now, so they can max out xbox FTP with about 0.9Gb/s to play with for any surfing, downloading, etc. Adding for future reference: 95 seconds to transfer 1GB contiguous file over 100Mb/s router to Xbox. I noticed FileZilla drops out "too many connections" when many files are queued up - solved by limiting connections to 1 in settings.

Just pointing out the the xbox has 100mb/s max ethernet. Therefore total transfer time will still be 100mb/s despite 1Gb orange light between your PC and router. So you were already at the best speed. With 1Gb/s, data gets from PC to router faster but sits there until xbox is ready to accept data. 100mb/s has theoretical max 45 Gigabytes per hour (80% is realistic due to processing and buffers etc). 1 game should transfer roughly 15 minutes this will slightly vary depending on other traffic and router settings, but certainly not an hour or days. Given described symptoms and 6 years, I suspect possibly minute cable breaks or bent/dirty/oxidized contacts for the frequent disconnects and slowness. Software can be coded to be more resilient to connection problems or left sensitive to issues, i.e. CoreFTP might hide time outs and reattempt operations in the background hidden from user, which explains the slowness, where as FileZilla gives up. Possibly the router has deteriorated i.e. bad ram/chips/board connections, or accumulated data its filled cache and needs a factory reset or other oddness. Best to throw out the old router and cables so they don't get used again (very frustrating diagnosing these problems at work only to find a known bad cable was put back in the store room which gets used again ) Unrelated to this but I recently found a brand new USB<->ethernet adapter I bought $5 from Ebay/China only working at 5mb/s (was set to 100Mb/s)....barely ok for web browsing but painful for transferring anything.

Amazing work they've done. Right way to produce HDMI signal - lifting after GPU instead of converting post component. I don't have patience for SMT level work but will be interesting watching the install tutorial. I tried soldering flexi ribbon before and ended up melting all the plastic and nothing stayed stuck to the board I now have a temperature controlled iron so I would probably have more luck.

where does it connect to on the xbox board?

Only reason I can think is any games with race conditions requiring the original read/write HDD speed to work (i.e. poor programming expecting X code to be run before Y asset is loaded), or any developers wanting to test new software works on 100% original equipment (unlikely though).

If girlfriend smells like leaky capacitors, take her to Doctor, not electronics specialist.

I've had a quick look ... the text is embedded a bit in the .xbe but mostly in scripting files (it occurred to me after my post they probably have a script engine and left the text in scripts as its a single lang game). Text strings in scripts are null terminated so if lucky, they are indexed and no offsets or sizes to worry about.

I notice there are bits of English text in SMT Nine, this makes the search for text data files easier.

A whole game language conversion can include text, speech audio, graphics in GUI & HUD. I assume you only want text? First lazy question is do you have the game source code? It helps but I expect 'no' I've only recently got back to XBox original so not sure whats possible with tools now and I've not touched software again yet but I assume disc and binary security checks have been circumvented and files can be browsed. There may be data integrity checks to please/circumvent after data modification. Skip the following if you know this stuff Text string data could be held in the .xbe file but majority of games want to avoid bloating the xbe because it takes longer to load, so text is usually stored in an external text string data file, possibly multiple string files (for efficiency or separation of areas i.e. UI, speech, in game items, other text like credits and licences etc, and anything accidentally left in). And then there maybe duplicates of these files in different languages (I assume SMT Nine is Japanese only). This is the sensible way....but theres no standards - its entirely up to the games programmers how text was implemented, how and when its loaded and how its rendered. Text files may be combined in single file or left as multiple, which may be located directly on disk or inside an archive file format with all the other game data files (which may be common format or proprietary) Its easy to browse files and throw suspects in a hex editor to see if theres any english text, however for Japanese its probably best/easier to use Notepad++ search in files using some in game text. (search the whole game data and go make a cuppa). The format of the text file could be in XML or similar open common format, raw text files are rare, otherwise it will be a proprietary format which should be easy to reverse engineer. Let me know what you find or not I use to code xbox 20 years ago, and hoping to get around to playing with the XDK again, I'll try to find a bit of time to look in to this stuff with you. A lot of this will depend how disciplined the programmers were at the time, if they left bits of text in the .xbe or did something weird then it could get messy to figure out and edit.