T2Steve

Dream with me for a few moments.. what Dashes should we keep around at this point? If they could be updated (within what a OG xbox can do) what updates should be done to them? One of the dashes that I've always wanted to play around in was Avalaunch. I remember hearing good things about it, and the integration of the various skins and etc via webpage was an interesting concept. I think if it had some love shown to it, it could become a decent dash again - mostly by updating the broken links etc. Unleash is probably everyone's go to favourite. Aside from the missing ability to backup the EEPROM and flash the BIOS, it is a lightweight and easy to use work horse. Evox has the EEPROM and flash thing down. I really dont see much need for it beyond that. I suppose it's also easy to create your own skins for it, but Unleash really did surpass it in every way. If unleash could get the two previously mentioned features added in, I think Evox is dead. XBMC - honestly I like it as a media player but not as a dash. it just feels kind of clumsy and bulky. I think it is fantastic for what it is and achieved so many things that the 360 stole directly from it... but now every time I look at it I think about how much better Kodi has been developed, and for fairly obvious reasons. It's a shame that XBMC isn't updated so much anymore. I was talking with Blake the other day and I suggested that we try to update hexen with new links that point to live sites. What would you like to see? If we could dream for a few minutes and come up with some new options, what would you pick?

Feel free to post your own Kryptic yeah when i read through it I thought it was kind of bunk, it doesn't go into enough detail on the software etc, but honestly this isn't a hard thing to do and I (greatly) suspect that these are going to be replaced entirely by the Pi method. Someone just needs to dev up a bit of software to use the windows app for editing EEPROM data on a Pi, and then how to tag on the three pins needed for this on the GPIO. A Pi zero and a few pieces of header total what like $9? and you dont have to find any resistors or a computer with a com port or anything. It's an all in one solution..

OK kids, this goes into the repair section as it will allow for the manual extraction/edit of an EEPROM in the event of a dead hard drive on an xbox and no EEPROM backup is present because of course it wasnt backed up... There is another method that involves using a Pi that may some day become easier/more frequently used, but for now this is what i've built and what i know. Unicron2006 gets full credit for the design. The pic was stolen from Llamma, which no longer is a site. In order to read the EEPROM you will need to use a program called PonyProg. it can be downloaded here. (http://www.lancos.com/prog.html) you will need to choose the Serial port and calibrate once PonyProg is up and running (sorry, no pics at the moment). Once you have it all setup you attach the wires to the applicable places - Ground can be any ground on the xbox (I usually gator clip it to the case, but you can also just place the wire under a screw on the motherboard and screw it down). Shown below are the two points you will need to hit with your EEPROM reader/writer. For this reason, on my device I attached the SDA and SCL reading lines to pin header so that i can just place the pins into the holes. There are a few different results that can happen here. The 1.0-1.5 xbox will give an error message and you have all the time in the world to tinker with the EEPROM. a 1.6 xbox seems to detect that it is under attack and tries to defend itself by powering itself off. for this reason you need to dump the image pretty quickly on a 1.6. After capturing the EEPROM, the next step would be to create a new hard drive for the xbox. Xbox HDM is quite useful for this. You may also want to take this opportunity to use an app to edit the EEPROM to your liking, since your existing hard drive is dead or missing altogether... a popular edit is to change the hard drive key to all 0000000s so that it is relatively easy to clone and distribute hard drives into new xboxes. Regardless of how you want to go about doing it, you are effectively good to go. Final thoughts - this is a kind of thrown together how-to, and there are other tuts that are more complete than this one. At some point i might edit it and give it more info, but the basics of what you need to know are here. It's my gut feeling that we are going to see a Pi replacement option in the future that eliminates the need to build an EEPROM reader altogether. A Pi with the right image would allow us to relatively easily grab the EEPROM and edit it and flash it back all from the Pi without needing to find a computer with a serial port etc. On a side note as well, I'd like to work with someone to dev up a device that we can use to slip in between the vents on the side of the xbox and then place the SDA and SCL into the applicable spots so that the EEPROM can be captured and edited without having to open the xbox. This would prove to be invaluable for those of us who have JAP special edition xboxes that we dont want to open up - we could grab the EEPROM, edit the region to North America, and then use the regular soft mod game save exploits.

updated.

Here is the live link to download the Action Replay Software Action Replay Xbox v1.40 website http://uk.codejunkies.com/support/article.aspx?article_id=196

This should work with any standard xbox memory card as well

Links to original post: http://xjet.50megs.com/photo.html You need a Mad Catz memory card for Xbox and USB cable Use a utility knife to shave a flat spot on end of card. You will notice a soft spot when you are deep enough. Cut out the soft spot. (end of usb cable should slide in firmly) Now modify usb cable. Cut end off cable with about three inches of wire left. NOw use utility knife to remove insulation from cable and connector. I also removed the metal strain relief from connector to shorten it up. Remove shielding and ground wire from cable(ground wire has no insulation. you should have black, red, white and green wires left) Now disassemble memory card. Remove circuit board from black rubber end, insert usb connector, slide circuit board back in being careful of wires. Now cut wires to legnth and solder start at left 1: black 2: not used (Xbox yellow wire) 3: green 4: white 5: red Now assemble memory card. Download and install Action Replay for Xbox from www.codejunkies.com. Plug memory card into usb port, windows will prompt to install driver. Select install from a specific location and browse to your install directory for Action Replay . The driver is in the drivers folder.(default would be"C:Program Files/Datel/ActionReplay Xbox/Drivers"). Once driver is installed start Action Replay and enjoy.

Here's the first article - stolen from ISOZONE where it was stolen from XBOX-Scene symptoms of this include the xbox powering on automatically as soon as plugged in, as well as not responding to power button presses, or randomly powering on/off. I got a request by a member from another Forum to do a tutorial on the V1.2~V1.3 motherboards on the trace corrosion issue. I will pretty much use the same words as the previous tutorial, as it will save me some time. Here it goes: Disclaimer: I take no responsibility if you damage your motherboard, X-Box or person when doing this tutorial. Do so at your own risk. It has been pointed out by chunkhead from the afterdawn.com and llama.com Forums that some X-Box motherboards have a corrosion problem on some traces. This corrosion is due to some sort of contamination from the factory. Due to this corrosion, it was found that some X-Boxes affected can produce the following symptoms: (1) The X-Box fails to power down using the power on/off button on the front panel. The power cord has to be pulled out to shut it down. (2) As soon as the power cord is plugged in, the X-Box powers up without pressing either the on/off or eject buttons. (3) While the X-Box is on for a certain amount of time, it shuts down by itself for no reason. The time factor before shut down can vary wildly. Corrosion on traces will cause less current flow due to part of the copper in a trace being eaten away and the copper itself changing its chemical composition, almost turning it into a resistor. Just cleaning the trace from this contamination will not fix the problem. You may be lucky enough that it will work, but it will more than likely fail once again at a later stage. This tutorial will show how you can bypass the affected traces using kynar wire. It wouldn’t hurt to clean up this contamination to prevent any further deterioration of the affected trace/s, as well as preventing any cross contamination. I have to admit that I personally haven’t come across this problem, but I don’t doubt that the problem does exist. At this point, thanks are in order for chunkhead who was the one who identified this problem in the first place. I’d have to say it was an excellent find. Performing this trace repair is almost like installing a modchip. Therefore if you’ve had experience in this department, then it should be a breeze. If you’re not handy with a soldering iron, then DON’T attempt this yourself. Get a friend or worst case; pay someone to fix it for you. Just point him or her to this tutorial and they shouldn’t go wrong. Doing this trace repair for someone who can’t solder is almost guaranteed to do more damage, and perhaps a worst case: damage beyond repair. You have been warned. Before we get into this tutorial, read through it first to give you an idea of what is involved. It will also give you an idea of whether you want to do it yourself, or if you would prefer to palm it off to someone else. I’m not going to explain how to open your X-Box and remove the motherboard. There are plenty of tutorials on the internet for this. Here is a list of tools and materials needed for a successful repair: TOOLS: • 15~40 Watt Soldering iron • Fine flat bladed screwdriver (Jewelers type) or fiberglass pen • A pair of side cutters • Magnifying glass • Good lighting MATERIALS: • Kynar wire (30 AWG or finer) • Stranded wire slightly thicker than Kynar (Optional) • Solder (0.7mm thickness is best or thinner if you have) • Desoldering braid (Optional) • Liquid flux (Optional) • Double sided or insulated tape With your motherboard removed from the X-Box, place it so the bottom is facing up. Look at the following picture to give you an idea of where the corrosion is usually located, plus a view of The Sections of Interest The green lined box shown above is the general area of corrosion. The picture shown below gives a better close-up: Next picture is courtesy of chunkhead showing the actual corrosion (Picture has been watermarked: “chunkhead”): At this point, it’s best to closely look at where your corrosion is located and what traces are affected. Use a good magnifying glass for your inspection. You also need to determine if you need to repair trace E. Trace E will be shown in a picture further down. This trace is used as a voltage source, what voltage it is exactly I don’t know. But in most cases voltage traces are a fair bit wider than signal traces. If your motherboard has contamination on the E trace, then you will need the thicker wire as listed in the MATERIALS. If you see no contamination on the E trace, then you won’t need the thicker wire. Thus there is no need to repair this section. But if you do need to do the E trace bypass (repair), then it’s very critical you use thicker wire than Kynar. If you can’t find the right size wire for this, you can always parallel two or three lengths of Kynar wire to give you a required thickness. I’ll leave it up to you in which direction you want to go. DON’T go using really thick stuff. You’ll only end up making a mess, plus it’s not a heavy current area. When you have determined which traces you need to bypass, have a look at the next picture which shows the traces and the tagging I have given for each: The next picture shows where one end of your Kynar connections should be soldered: The next picture shows where the other ends of your Kynar wires should be soldered to: Next picture shows trace D’s position: Next two pictures show the positions of the E trace bypassing: Next picture shows that you MUST scrape away some solder mask from the vias for Traces A and B. Unlike the V1.0~V1.1 motherboards which have their respective vias exposed and tinned already from factory: Next picture shows the mask removed. To remove some of the masking, gently scrape it away using the fine tipped flat bladed jeweler's screwdriver or fibreglass pen. Try not to gouge it like I did. If you do need to do the E trace bypass, then you MUST again scrape away a little of the solder mask on the track to allow a thicker wire to be soldered on properly. The next two pictures shows some of the mask scrapped away from both ends: Last picture shows the completed job: Ok, lets start by attaching a wire for your A trace. Look at picture A. You need to attach your wire to the small via. But first measure the required length of Kynar wire by placing it over the motherboard. The other end needs to go to the A pad shown in the B picture. Give your length a few mills extra and strip off a small portion of insulation on both ends. Leave only about 1mm (1/32”) of exposed wire on each end. Solder in a small amount of solder into the via shown in picture A. Make sure the solder sticks to the via before soldering the wire to it. You may have to give it a couple of tries before the solder takes. Now solder the wire to the via. Now look at picture B and solder a small blob of solder onto the pad. Now solder the wire to the pad. You’ll find that soldering to the pads and resistors are much easier than soldering vias. Thankfully there are only two you may need to deal with. Now do the same as above for the B trace wire. When soldering to the resistors of your C and D trace wires, allow a little more wire exposure on the respective ends, say around 2mm (1/16”). DON’T leave the iron on the resistors for too long, otherwise you risk moving them. I don’t think there is any need to explain how to do the other wires, it’s only logical the sequence of steps you need to use. If you need to do the E trace, then make sure you scrape off some solder mask and solder to that rather than to it’s vias. Remember: solder a small blob on the exposed copper before soldering the wire to it. When you’ve completed all your wiring, secure it down with some electrical or double sided tape. You can use hot glue, but DON’T hot glue any of the solder joints. Go over ALL your work carefully to make sure you haven’t made any mistakes. When your satisfied that everything is ok, then reassemble everything back into your X-Box and test it out. Hopefully your X-Box has been fixed and is behaving as it should. If you’re still having problems with your X-Box, then please post in the appropriate section and hopefully I or someone else can help you out. Good Luck!!!

makes sense. I think that the mode select pins are still consistent, and the "what pins must be grounded" info should remain the same.. A QSB that fits over the AV bottom pins is possible with either a ribbon cable or header that could go to a separate PCB that has component etc out. That's a decent solution for the age old "where can i get good component cables" problem. forget a cable, just have straight up component out.

we need to take a look at these and figure out which pinout is accurate. The pins listed in my pic are definitely different than what are listed in Blake's.. the important point though is the mode select.. we need to confirm mode select grounding so that we can use this for forcing Component out. With a pair of diodes we could use an on/off switch to force component out vs AV cable

explanation of MODE SELECT, as provided by http://www.gamesx.com/avpinouts/xbox.htm

After giving this a bit more thought over night, I think what might end up being easier for anyone doing this in the future is to significantly shorten one of the 5v, 3.3v and ground lines, and solder them directly to the crimped pin that goes into the ATX side of things. That would reduce the number of lines in total and make for a smaller footprint overall. when i rebuild this I'm pretty sure that I will test this route out. Fewer lines means more room to maneuver.. I'm also thinking that it might be an idea in advance to just pull each of the pins out and re-organize them so that they are color coded correctly with red lines being 5v, yellow being 12v, 0range being 3.3v, and black being ground. the purple, blue, and green would correspond with white/blue/grey or purple/green/gray. That would make it a bit easier to follow.

For those who want to go from ATX to 1.0-1.1

Here is a run down of how to make a 1.0-1.1 to 1.2-1.5 adaptor. It's not terribly complicated. First, it's helpful if you have a donor board to take from. I placed my troubled 1.0 donor upside down and then blasted the power connector with a heat gun on high for about 4 minutes. eventually it gave out on its own and i picked up the mobo and gave it a slight tap to make sure it fell out on its own. The first picture is the power header from the motherboard. Next up is a 24 pin power header from a dead power supply. I removed the extra four pins (this was the type that slid the four pins off) and the 2nd picture is that header. The third picture is after I've removed the wires that are absent on the header, and added the wires that are absent that should be present. This was a bit of a pain, but a little wedging and a tiny bit of sliced fingers got it all together. Fourth pic, I stripped and tined the wires to make things go a bit easier. I made things harder on myself by not identifying what lines needed to be doubled up on. There are two grounds that need to be merged, two 3.3v (orange), and two 5v. Had I been paying a bit more attention (and I hope the readers who follow this do pay more attention) I would have not twisted and soldered each individual wire, but instead frayed out the wires, interlocked them and gave it a twist before adding solder. This would have given a better connection down the road. Fifth pic is the completed adaptor, along with pis six and seven showing my garbage solder job. I'm totally aware that two of the points are bridging but they are both ground so I honestly didnt care. Something that I absolutely should have done and did not do was get some heat shrink. It would have made this a much cleaner job in the end and when I do my clean up on it, I'll be desoldering the wires and placing some heat shrink on it to prevent accidental bridging. After confirming that it is all working nicely I'll probably hot glue it all just to give it a bit more strength. The eighth and ninth pic are images of the adaptor working and the xbox it was working on. Funny thing was that it turned on with no issues initially but with no hard drive it would give me grief about turning off. I grabbed the hard drive from my xbox that i did the TSOP split on sine it has both iND and X2 files on it, and plugged it in only to get an error 13. I thought that i must have screwed something up, maybe the iND files are looking for a DVD drive or something. Connect up the DVD drive and put in hexen and it is trying to load but isn't doing it. At this point I'm convinced that the 5v line just isn't good enough and that's why the hard drive isn't able to boot... and then i realized im an idiot. I put everything back into the split TSOP box, and then went into hexen and unlocked the goddamned drive. Plugged it all back in and turned it on and everything worked - no issues. So tidy up and to do list - get some heat shrink and re-do the solder connections with proper shrink, grab/find my fine point needle nose pliers to pull out a pin header that separated from the wire when i pulled the wire out, and hot glue the connections after confirming that they work. Do a proper smush test to see if i have to clip all of the stupid wires and shorten everything. I'd say there is 2-3 inch worth of wire and im thinking it might be a little on the long side of things. So there you go.. how to make a 1.0/1 to 1.2/5 PSU adaptor by T2Steve. Long live the Scene!

ah good.. I was just thinking about this tonight.. need to make a 1.0 to 1.2 adaptor

going pretty quickly

Welcome one and welcome all. Hopefully we get this going to the same level as XBS and keep this bastard rolling for ever.