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Prehistoricman

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Posts posted by Prehistoricman

  1. 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.

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  2. 7 hours ago, nerdbombing said:

    Now, does my comparison chart need updating, as 1.6 version can't be tsop'd, a 1.6 can only be soft or 'mod chipped', or have things changed since those videos were posted?

    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.

    • Thanks 1
  3. 1 hour ago, nerdbombing said:

    So the [general] difference between TSOP and Hardmod is that with a TSOP you are reflashing the stock 'microsoft chip's' bios to one of your liking, whereas a hardmod is permanently placed on the board to accomplish the same thing with a few added features?

    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.

    1 hour ago, nerdbombing said:

    Like, one would have a "TSOP" circuit board they solder up and install a new bios onto the xbox with, and once it's flashed, they remove it and can do another, and so on?

    I'm not understanding this question.

  4. 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.

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  5. 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:

    1. HDD flash does not work. The BIOS can't read the HDD.
    2. Net flash does not work. The page times out before the upload completes.
    3. 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??

    image.thumb.jpeg.4aaa18fd6ef7b1944c26616bbc258a67.jpeg

    • Like 1
  6. 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.

  7. 20 hours ago, Donnie-Burger said:

    This is correct.  The set I grabbed had 2 xbes and sometimes only one works or none do.  Not sure what was patched if anything etc.  Gonna try and get versions of all the games working.  I know crazy taxi loads then hangs.  Will see whats up.  I like to add Sega Chihiro games their own icon on main screen of XBMC4Gamers with nice box art n stuff.

     

    Edit:  So ghost squad loads then I froze after selecting mission 2.  Goin to try the test xbe now.  Edit2: Test xbe reboots me back into xbmc4gamers.  Gonna keep trying to figure this out as I thought all these games worked?

    That's the experience I had on my 1.6.

  8. 5 hours ago, Poll300 said:

    I understand my xbox 1.4 and which bios will be ok at the moment? I do not know and I have recently uploaded a few newest bios of IND Evox and cerbios if I can ask for information which bios supports 2TB and 128mb ram and it will be the best thank you

    You can try the ones from this post.

     

  9. 5 hours ago, Poll300 said:

    I understand and maybe it will work out with time, it would be something extra for the present times and back to my earlier question, is it possible to update emulators and roms including 2tb Origins - Original Xbox Fully Loaded via FTP? has anyone tried to update manually via ftp?
    And I have 128mb of frame and shows me 95mb / 64mb should it not be 95mb / 128mb?

    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.

    • Like 1
  10. It seems either the Chihiro games that are downloadable are unpatched or not fully patched for running on an Xbox. I tried:

    1. Virtua Cop 3
    2. Outrun 2
    3. Ollie King
    4. Ghost Squad
    5. 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.

  11. 58 minutes ago, KaosEngineer said:

    The input/output lines of the SDRAM chips are SSTL_2 compatible signals.  What type of input/outputs signalling does your logic analyzer support?

    See: SSTL Interface Description, Stub Series Terminated Logic for DDR, DDR2, DDR3 Electrical layer, SSTL-2, SSTL-18, SSTL-3 (interfacebus.com)

    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.

  12. I've been busy...

    image.thumb.jpeg.f68bc8bf2fe1b19fe9cc457c669e9a7d.jpeg

    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:

    image.thumb.jpeg.ac1f71f2382be49bd974991b43b12ebc.jpeg

    The Xecuter Live Config was also rather corrupted with the spinning logo having some crazy polygons.

    image.thumb.jpeg.b8a4878f7fe5a9f579fe1d35fb23bb68.jpeg

    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.

    image.thumb.jpeg.a5162d0133bdc3437a62bb27f82533c2.jpeg

    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.

    • Like 1

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