TrantaLocked

Not yet but I'm looking forward to it. MakeMHz's twitter has important info for anyone who hasn't checked it.

I just got mine in! The rest of the kits are supposed to be shipped out throughout August but seeing how this is gone there could easily be spillover into September.

Well the last news update says the first batch should be completely out by August 1st so I guess I'm on the backend of that as my 1.6 kit still has yet to ship and I ordered in April.

Has anyone had their order shipped yet?

I just found out from the newest update the upscaling feature is indeed done by the Nvidia GPU! That is awesome!!! The work the team is doing on the patcher and power noise reduction is outstanding, totally worth the money. I am so excited to run this at 1080i to my Trinitron.

Is there a for sure confirmation yet on exactly how the upscaling is going to work and if it will add lag or will it be almost like how native 720p/1080i games run, except the games still internally run at 480p. Could someone could take some photos of the color correction part of the app? I have read there is a gamma correction setting but I want to know how it works, as in how fine the control is.

Does it matter if I use the leaded or unleaded version?

The iron is rated up to 450C but can be set to as low as 200C. What do you think about the ChipQuik method? This $16 pack is supposed to make it easier with a regular soldering iron as MakeMhz shows.

I plan on installing the MakeMhz HD+ native digital mod in my 1.6. The only thing I'm concerned with is the AV port which has large solder joints. They remind me of the power jack on my laptop that I tried to replace but was unable to with my soldering iron because the solder had a higher melting point than the 450 celcius my iron is supposedly rated for. Should 450C be good for the entire job?

Crash Bandicoot: Wrath of Cortex. Just a game I plan on playing and finishing as I never got past a certain level as a kid, the one where you play as the girl character and there's a river with floating platforms you hop to. My dad and I tried this level and neither of us were able to beat it after a while so we gave up and I never played it again.

Yeah my experience is telling me to just get a regular hard drive. I did not experience the bug a guy on reddit had for the intro cutscene for Jedi Academy on his SSD but it might still occur for some people. But then yesterday I experienced a mid-race freeze in Burnout 3 that I can't for sure attribute to the SSD, but it's possible that was the cause. I'm now using the 2.5" WD Black HDD with the Startech adapter. Now I just have the stock 8GB drive and 870 EVO on the side as backups but that wasn't my original intention as SSD for cold storage is a bad idea. Despite how old that stock drive is, it should be good for a while right? I do have my EEPROM and BIOS backed up too. If anyone is interested in getting a 2.5" to 3.5" bracket, due to its length the green RXD-629A7-7 IDE/SATA adapter doesn't fit with most metal brackets in the plastic enclosure, and I have tested both the Sabrient and Corsair double-decker brackets with no luck. I do have the single drive corsair bracket coming in the mail that screws in from the bottom where the drive really hugs the side wall tight enough that there should just be enough room, but otherwise you would need to use supports under the SSD and screw it directly into the plastic enclosure without a bracket. The red Startech adapter is very short so it will fit with anything.

For whatever reason the hard drive compatibility form isn't functioning right now so I will update with what I have: Both my 870 Evo 250GB and WD Black WD5000LPLX 500GB locked fine with Chimp and work with both the green RXD-629A7-7 and red Startech SATA to IDE adapters on my softmodded 1.6. I did need to Install Kernel Font to prevent the every-other boot failing. Bootup and games work fine but I did notice that sometimes I need to clear my cache for games to startup faster. At least with the 870 Evo SSD, it seems the drive's caching has the opposite effect of speeding things up: for example the more I reboot Burnout 3, the slower its loading screen becomes. It's only when I switch to another game, then back to Burnout 3, will Burnout 3 then load quickly again. I don't really know why this happens but it's why I clear the cache often now.

I am interested in something like Qwix or C-xbox tool but which also allows me to use an ACL file for the chosen xbe. As far as I know ACLs are only used with DVD2XBOX (which can use the context menu on extracted XBEs in its file explorer to process with ACL files, for anyone looking for that functionality).

Thank you.

Update on the above issue I had with a redumped ISO from archive.org not being able to be loaded by any ISO extractor program. A comment I saw there said to use the Xbox image browser so I went and downloaded "Xbox 360 Image Browser 2.9.0.350" and was able to use that to extract the ISO that was giving me problems.

It was the same thing with both the version with the extras disc and when I updated. I was able to get widescreen to stick by booting directly into it rather than launching as an application, and I have it set to black button on startup in the dashboard launch config application from the extras disc. 4:3 still doesn't show assets correctly though.

Softmodded with rocky5 1.1.8. I use the default softmod dash as I prefer its plain style, and was not able to find a setting for path for games but I did find one for skins. I'm ok putting everything in games, I just expected it would recognize any game xbe on the entire drive not just in one path.

Yes everything is set to widescreen including in the ms dash. Every place that it can be set, it is set to widescreen 720p enabled, but then XBMC4gamers starts in 4:3 even though it is set to 720p, and switching back and forth resolutions makes 720p actually show widescreen. I don't know why that is or how to fix it because it doesn't make any sense, that the setting is not CHANGING it just isn't working at bootup until I manually change it back and forth. Yes the assets looks good in widescreen, but they are squished in 4:3 for me (this is with ms dash in normal mode with only 480p, all dashboards in normal mode with 480p when I use XBMC4gamers in 4:3 mode), so all of the artwork looks bad in 4:3. So 4:3 is ugly because everything is compressed, and widescreen doesn't work unless I go into the settings every single boot and switch resolutions. So again, this program does not work for me. I looked at the artwork and can see they are not natively compressed, XBMC is doing that to them in 4:3 mode. If I can't practically use widescreen because the setting for widescreen doesn't work at startup, then I'd prefer to just use 4:3, but then the assets are squished in 4:3 mode so everything is ugly. I have checked everything, trust me there isn't anything I did wrong in any settings.

I have everything set to widescreen and HD resolutions enabled in my main dashboard but XBMC4Gamers still starts in 4:3, even though the settings in it are for 720p in appearance and widescreen in video settings. Changing the resolution back and forth allows it to go to widescreen so I don't know why it can't just boot in widescreen mode when the settings should dictate this. Also, if I want to keep XBMC4Gamers in 4:3, all of the assets are squeezed as if they're supposed to be stretched for widescreen. For this case I have every single setting possible set to normal and 4:3 and it still does this, so I can't really win with this program.

In case I want to launch a game in ISO form ran with the attacher default.xbe instead of doing the regular route for game storage, is it possible to get the dashboard to recognize the ISO and list it in the Games section? I did edit the attacher default.xbe with the proper game title but that still didn't show up, neither in applications nor games. Edit: I got it to recognize by putting the folder in my regular F/games folder. I was putting it in a separate ISOs folder but F/games is the only folder the dash seems to acknowledge for the games list.

Thanks, same thing with XISO and other programs so I'll probably just use an HDD ready version. How differently do programs patch games in terms of generic and game-specific patches? I saw a patch for a loading bar hang with Burnout 3, and I wondered why I never had this issue running it off my SSD, dumped from my physical copy through DVD2XBOX. Did I not encounter the issue because DVD2XBOX uses game-specific patches or did I get lucky somehow? Where does Qwix stand in that respect? Maybe it's because I have a 1.6 Xbox?

XDVDmulleter doesn't work for me. I have done everything I can with the program, it always leads either to an error about invalid TOC entry or if it rebuilds an ISO it just makes a larger ISO, or if I extract it just creates a new ISO. No way to access the actual files. Edit: The original download must have been corrupted because I was able to select another game without getting the invalid TOC entry and it extracted correctly. But after redownloading, same thing. Just won't allow me to load this particular ISO, not sure why.

Does SMR make a difference? I thought maybe with how Xbox writes cache often it could make a difference but I suppose the speed at which the CPU can write will be slower than an SMR drive in worst-case re-write scenario, not to mention the cache these drives have. That was one of the things keeping me from getting a 2.5" because almost all of them are SMR now.

Yeah it's an 80-pin one but the cable is opposite orientation wise to the original cable so I need to plug the black end into the motherboard for the other end to be able to reach the hard drive. I ordered a second cable just in case but it appears like it would be the same situation. I needed to change the jumper depending on which way I had the cable going, either Master for black side motherboard or Cable Select (remove jumper) for blue side motherboard. Reviews on amazon for the first one that I'm currently using seem mixed, with some saying it's perfect and others saying it's annoying. Maybe different Xbox revisions had a different IDE plug orientation on the motherboard? My Xbox is a 1.6 and the notch faces inwards on my board. As for why I chose an SSD, there are few factors. For one I liked the idea of trying and bug testing it. I have seen a report on cut scenes in certain games crashing the system so I figured maybe if I run into any problems I can report on that for the community. I also wanted to confirm if they can be locked properly on a softmodded system, and at the least this 870 Evo 250GB can be cloned and locked just like a regular drive through Chimp. I believe all that is needed is ATA security support but I'm not 100% sure. Might be the AES 256 encryption support instead. SSD's are low power and noise, and these days come with long warranties for cheap. $40-$70 USD for the 870 Evo with a 5 year warranty while for a similar HDD, also $40+, and usually far higher for an equivalent 5 year warranty. The WD Black Performance 500GB 3.5" for $56 did catch my eye for it's 5 year warranty and CMR recording so If I were to get an HDD it would probably be that one. I understand there can be wear and data rot issues with SSDs and I intend to see how these factors actually play out in the end. I don't intend on fully filling the SSD so I think wear leveling should be ok, but if it's not I want to find out.

I can confirm installing the kernel font works. I'm using the green adapter (RXD-629A7-7 or JP103-5) people used to recommend, but I also have the red startech one coming in the mail soon and will update with results. The SSD is a Samsung 870 Evo 250 GB; everything else works but the Xbox would only boot to dash every other time until I installed the kernel font. Boot times are the same before and after at about 23 seconds from power to visual of the dashboard, which seems to be the same as the stock hard drive.