Prehistoricman

This issue sounds just like the other dead 1.6 that we have on the forum right now

It's surprising to me that that heatsink is so much better than stock. Or do you think it's due to the better thermal glue?

Looks like the clock cap leak has gone far and wide. The two nearby screw holes are showing corrosion

Super weird! That must mean that somehow the 5V standby supply isn't reaching most of the motherboard. Can you check these 3 points: The two arrows on the right refer to the inductor's two ends that go into the motherboard.

Both? There are 4 measurements: each side of the two resistors.

Next to the front panel connector on the motherboard you will see a bunch of resistors. Can you measure the voltage on the left and right side of those two resistors R3G6 and R3G4? These form a potential divider to drop the voltage to 3.3V for the Xyclops.

Sounds like the power button is shorted to ground without the button being pressed in. Usually the power button shorts this signal to ground. Can you unplug the front panel (yellow wires) and re-measure?

Prong = multimeter probe? If yes then usually you put black to ground (the xbox shield) and red to the thing you want to measure.

I fixed the BIOS and called it version 0.60. The 0.56 source code was good except for one thing: the net flash was super slow. This also happens to be an issue with the Xecuter FlashBIOS for some (or all?) users. According to the commit history of XBlast, this issue had been fixed already but I couldn't see any changes in the source that would be responsible for the fix. I enabled debug output on xblast, then hackily patched all the broken and segmented debug support. After a lot of testing, I found an easy way to test for the issue. In a ping test, the BIOS would respond instantly to every other ping. Thanks to the debug output, I could see that the functions to send the packet were actually being called on time but somehow a packet was not transmitted. That brought me to the lowest depths of the ethernet driver: forcedeth. The function to write the packet to the hardware registers and send it is forcedeth_transmit. At the end of this function, pci_push is called which is helpfully commented "force out pending posted writes". That's exactly the bit that sounds like it's not working. So I just duplicated this function call and magically the issue was gone. Turns out the nForce just needs a couple clock cycles before it's ready to transmit the packet. The compiler would sometimes sneak in an instruction to delay pci_push and this is what makes Xblast 0.56 work properly.

Correct, there is no known way to reflash the ROM in the Xyclops. I do think that is a topic that is under-researched. It would be sick to bring motherboard flashing to the 1.6. Hexen is just a program that has the ability to reflash the motherboard's BIOS chip.

If you have a modchip and FTP access, is there any need for an exploitable game? I don't see any because you should be able to just run the softmodding tools directly with the modchip installed.

You like stacking too huh? Why not just switch the output enable pin?

That is right. Hardmods are by not necessarily permanent. Usually you can just pull the modchip off the pinheader and the Xbox behaves like stock. I'm not understanding this question.

TSOP is the shape of the BIOS flash chip (thin small outline package). It's basically a bad name, like how we call the SMC, System Management Controller, the PIC just because it's a Microchip brand microcontroller. Even the v1.6 has an SMC, but no PIC because it's the Xyclops chip. An even worse name with wider usage is 'CMOS' for a the BIOS settings data in a PC. CMOS is a semiconductor manufacture technology and isn't specific to PCs at all. In other news... old man shouts at clouds.

The BIOS I put in the tutorial is bad. It works for checking the RAM but it shouldn't be used aside from that. The source code was updated since the 0.56 version that works well. It's some mix of my compiler and the source code changes that have broken it. The known issues are: HDD flash does not work. The BIOS can't read the HDD. Net flash does not work. The page times out before the upload completes. CD flash may be dodgy. It works for me but not for someone else. Unfortunately a modchip supplier started shipping Aladdins with this BIOS flashed on, effectively preventing any users from installing another BIOS! What a mess. I'm working with them to fix this. This is why you don't download people's dodgy .bins from the internet. And this is why I shouldn't download dodgy source code from the internet On the plus side... teaser #3: Xbox with 96MB RAM??

I measured and the X3 doesn't release LFRAME like OpenXenium does. It sits at about 0.8V pulling 60mA from MCPX. The current from a dead short circuit is higher at 71mA. This Xbox has been powered with the X3 installed for >1000 hours and no sign of damage yet. But it's still polite to release that strain.

That's the experience I had on my 1.6.

You can try the ones from this post.

95/64MB will be due to the BIOS not being fully patched for 128MB. I don't understand the full consequences but I know that XBMC at least will still be able to use the full memory in that case.

It seems either the Chihiro games that are downloadable are unpatched or not fully patched for running on an Xbox. I tried: Virtua Cop 3 Outrun 2 Ollie King Ghost Squad Crazy Taxi High Roller And only Virtua Cop 3 runs properly. I believe someone patched this game to work with the Xbox controller because you don't need a light gun as the arcade machine would have had. It's also possible the Mega download I found for those games isn't up to date with the latest patches that people have been working on.

Where did you get the 128MB patch 'm8plus_true_128MB_fixed.ips'?

Teaser #2 Here I've lifted the A8 and A9 pins and swapped them. Repeated for all 4 chips. It works as long as the BIOS is patched to flip the function of these pins.

Sounds like the laser module cable isn't plugged in fully or has a bad contact.

It's a DSLogic U2Basic upgraded to Plus capability. The input threshold can be set by the user between 0 and 5V in 0.1V increments. My problem is not related to the capability of the analyser but some physical property of this setup. If I plug in the probes, but leave them disconnected from the analyser, I still see issues. Possibly a series resistor on each probe at the header would solve this issue. Before building this setup, I had much longer wires connected to the same analyser and this was more stable.

I've been busy... Can you guess what I'm investigating? The probes on the left connect to a logic analyser. Sadly this didn't work as I hoped. It introduces some kind of interference, signal reflection, or something and makes the Xbox very unstable. For example: The Xecuter Live Config was also rather corrupted with the spinning logo having some crazy polygons. Xblast was blasted, usually with just some white sprinkles around the screen but occasionally something interesting. Looks like the BIOS failed to extract all its own images. Looks like it is trying to display all the titles at once, the text is smaller than usual, and I didn't make 2 changes.