[Xecuter 3 Box Restoration Worklog]

Nice! I need to do one of those at some point. I really like the button assembly and lighting. LCD panel too. Honestly the whole front panel design looks awesome. 
 

The third one you have to work on looks a little worse for wear though. Lol. A fun project at least.  

[1.6 boots to dash but dvd drive eject button flashes green]

I’m kinda wondering if the bios is failing on these or there is some corruption. They both still boot to the original Xbox dashboard. I wonder if a hard mod would resolve this issue or if there’s something else on the mobo that’s causing the issue. Just sitting here looking at both of them and pondering the issue. Hoping to have a eureka! moment. Lol

[1.6 boots to dash but dvd drive eject button flashes green]

So I still haven’t figured out what the hell is wrong with this one. Now I’ve run in to another except it’s a 1.0. Same deal as the 1.6. Eject button flashes green non stop even after it boots. Changed ide and power with no change. None of the caps appear to be bad (though I know they need to be replaced). No trace rot that jumps out at me. I am reticent to throw another dvd drive in to test since the last time I did that with the 1.6 with the same problem seemed to screw up the working test dvd drive. There has to be some commonality between these causing this issue but I haven’t found it yet. 
 

If anyone has any ideas let me know. It was strange enough to have one doing this but now two is really weird. At least I have something to compare it to I guess. Lol

[Fun Little Green Controller Restoration and Lighting]

25 minutes ago, Bowlsnapper said:

It IS in the dongle, yes. The controller ports are already lit, and it bothers me when the 1st port is occupied, which blocks the symmetrical 4 port glow. So I just put an LED in the Dongle so that all four ports are still lit and nicely symmetrical.

The port lights are definitely cool. I have to say though I’m a big fan of the light in the dongle itself.  It gives it something extra and has a crisp vibrant look about it. Great work all around!

[Fun Little Green Controller Restoration and Lighting]

That looks awesome dude! The lighting really compliments the casing and controller. I actually think I have one of those green controllers (sans the light mods). Is there also a light in the controller plug or is that from the Xbox plug side?

[SmartXX V2 Modchip and big Hdds (2TB drive)]

46 minutes ago, Bowlsnapper said:

looks like @SoftMachine here had the same idea

 

Cool.  I’d love to do some that were oriented correctly (for the Xbox) without having to do the twisted around connection at the dvd drive. Other than that they fold fine. Unfortunately it looks like his link for the ribbon cable on that site is out of stock. Maybe there’s another source out there though. Digikey has ribbon cable but I haven’t looked specifically for the 80 conductor 40 pin type. If you run across one that looks decent let me know. I’d definitely be up for making some custom ones on my end to play around with on my systems and others I’m doing hdd upgrades on. 
 

I would imagine the same adage is true for this cable though. You get what you pay for. The cheap spools of ribbon cable will be similar to the garbage cables you buy from Ali and other places. Hopefully there’s a happy medium for spooled ribbon cables that isn’t cost prohibitive.  

[SmartXX V2 Modchip and big Hdds (2TB drive)]

11 minutes ago, sweetdarkdestiny said:

 

Thanks for that video post Sweet! That helps illustrate it much better than my description. Seeing that brought back some memories and reminded me of also making old coaxial network cables and serial cable pin outs for old TI systems. Lol. Good lord that was a long time ago now. 

 

 @Bowlsnapper This is what I was referring to in the first post. You can see what I was talking about with alignment. It’s really not too difficult. 

[SmartXX V2 Modchip and big Hdds (2TB drive)]

28 minutes ago, Bowlsnapper said:

The cramping tool aligns the connectors to the ribbon, correct? I've disassembled a 40 wire before and I can't imagine doing it by hand with dependable accuracy.

No. You just line it up in the connector. It’s really not too difficult after you do a couple. The ends make it much easier to line up than you’d think. 

[SmartXX V2 Modchip and big Hdds (2TB drive)]

On 10/6/2023 at 5:07 AM, Bowlsnapper said:

 

How difficult would it be to build a custom IDE cable? Can these connectors be crimped onto a cable with any accuracy? Are parts and tools to do so even available? Using upsidedown, backwards IDE cables is both difficult and messy, making for a pretty tough fit.

I remember making them back in the day with ribbon cable. You basically just cut your ribbon cable to length then used the two part end to make each connector. One part secured the end and the actual connector end had little teeth that bit in to the cable and made the connection to the wires. We had a crimper to help with this but it could usually be done without one. I haven’t made one in many years but I’m pretty sure you can still buy both cable and ide connectors. Oh and when you made a secondary connection on that cable you just crimped in place obviously. It’s actually all pretty easy. The biggest thing you had to worry with is making sure the connector was aligned correctly on the ribbon cable before you crimped/pressed the connector on. That and straight cuts on your cable (assuming you didn’t need a special angle or something). 

[My xbox XBMC dash is glitching after tipover accident]

13 minutes ago, Bowlsnapper said:

That's a new one. Interesting...

Indeed. I was thinking maybe the fall jarred the ide cable loose just barely or maybe a connect on the mobo video connection. On cold boot it would show up but after the system heats up and metal expands slightly it goes away. You’d think that would affect everything though and not just the xbmc dash. Weird. I wonder if the problem would show up using a different dashboard. 

[The next EEPROM Reader/Writer (picoPromSD)]

I just have seen this entire post. This looks awesome! I am definitely interested in it when the time comes.  

[SmartXX V2 Modchip and big Hdds (2TB drive)]

On 10/2/2023 at 9:02 PM, valdan said:

I'm having the same issues as OP. Drive reads discs fine with original drive, new drive + 80pin cable (Manhattan) + IDE2SATA (Startech) makes the disc drive whir and not read the launch disc. I put the OG hard drive back in, it's fine. Have tried multiple drives from 1 TB Blue, 2 TB Green, and another 2TB Surveillance drive to no luck.

Setup: SmartXX modchip on 1.0 box.

I've checked the cables and jumpers several times, but I'm going to order another Startech and see if that works. I'll also load up the Cerbios6 for 1.0 in the interim. 

Any other things I may have missed along this journey??

In addition to what @KaosEngineer suggested checking on the sata adapter the 80 pin cables can sometimes be faulty. I’ve run in to that a couple of times. It looked fine but replacing it with another 80 pin fixed my issues. Anyway, I just thought I’d throw it out there if the sata adapter isn’t the issue. 

[Ftp transfer fails when I transfer xbmc4xbox.]

8 hours ago, TheXboxMessiah said:

Hey guys so anyways, when I try to transfer xbmc4xbox via my windows 11 laptop, it gives me an error. The error says something about 255 or something like that, so how do I get rid of this error? 
PS: my Xbox IP address is configured on the laptop btw.

Are you sure it’s set to ftp and not sftp?

[[Split Thread from] Compatibility of insignia project with nulled hard drives copied from a single source]

13 minutes ago, KaosEngineer said:

A WAG - Wild Ass Guess.  Happened to me. UnleashX changes the Network Configuration used in the MS dashboard.  Thus, you have to manually reset the DNS server to the correct IP address, 46.101.64.175, once you run the MS dashboard to test the connection to Xbox Live/Insignia.

I’m glad to know it has a name…WAG. I’ve been making those here and there for years in IT. Lol.  Now I know what to call it.

[SID 5.11 Help needed if you know TYVMIA]

11 minutes ago, biddle said:

One other question - is a 256MB thumb drive large enough to build a rescue boot drive for this system or should I find an old 8GB or 16GB or would those larger ones not work?

I don’t recall for sure about the rescue/boot size. I want to say that may be too small. I can say, from my experience, the Xbox gets real bitchy about thumb drives. I went through a handful of old 256mb and only had one it liked. Also I’ve never run into one that liked anything over really 1gb. I’m sure there are a few but I think 2gb is about it. Maybe a few 4gb. There are some compatibility lists out there on brands and sizes. I just had a bunch of old ones ranging from 256mb to 1gb with no useful purpose anymore so I just started trying them until I found a few the Xbox would recognize and format. Finally a new use for the 256mb flash drive. Lol. I know I’ve gotten 1gb to work but I unfortunately don’t recall the brand. I want to say it was an old lexar. 

[iso to xiso]

26 minutes ago, lopenator said:

I haven't tried that yet 

If you’re interested here’s a link for the dd utility 

http://www.chrysocome.net/downloads/320aa26606746a0d65a73087cadb45a3/dd-0.5.zip

 

If I remember right the command line is this:

dd if=yourIsoNameHere.iso of=YourNewXisoName.iso skip=387 bs=1M

 

It takes a little time but once it kicks back results you should be good. I don’t remember any taking more than 5 mins or so. 
 

there are some links for the C-Xbox tool here should you need it to unpack or repack. 

Hope it’s as helpful to you as I found them a while back. I want to say I just wrote up a little bat file or Perl script for dd to process multiple ISOs. I had it doing some other stuff after each as well (dirs, moving files, etc). As for C-Xbox I used the gui and just batched all of it there. There may have been a command line version of it though. I can’t recall. 
 

Edit: Quick note. C-Xbox tool will complain if you try and open a straight iso. Once you do the conversion to xiso it’s cool. 

[iso to xiso]

I like using dd to convert from iso to xiso. It’s basically just a command line argument and once it’s done it’s converted. Have you tried that before?

 

Oh and I just used the C-Xbox tool for unpacking and repacking if I needed to after it was already an xiso. There may be a better way but those two worked well for me in the past. 

[Need Help with OG Xbox]

30 minutes ago, fox said:

Same, they sound dumb. More modern terms and slang though...too many of those have a downright Idiocracy feel to them, and I don't care to live in a world like that, or at least to be exposed to it. Those get filtered. There's enough stress in a day without the news or a blogger or someone talking to me like I'm a retard. Didn't wanna derail things with a rant but it seems OP's problem is practically solved, so yeah...

I had no idea other people hate that dumbass word. No joke I was genuinely taken aback.

Agreed! It certainly does feel that way and nope it’s not just you. I consistently find myself shaking my head sometimes. Lol

 

Yeah hopefully the OP’s problem will soon be remedied. As long as OS, adapter, and software play nice (though a tweak will probably be needed from what I recall) he will be back to normal. 

[Need Help with OG Xbox]

2 hours ago, Bowlsnapper said:

Oh my fuckin' GOD Frosty. The term "cloud" is one of the most user-friendly, retarded tech terms there is. "I have it on the CLOUD, man." Oh! You mean you have it on a server? I guess the industry wanted a term and concept that people could easily grasp, and they decided that the term "Remote Server" just wasn't very marketable. 

Damn, the internet is fuckin' LAME now...

I remember when the “cloud” was just a symbol on our network topology diagrams and no one referred to it as the “cloud”. Lol Yes it certainly seems like we dumbed down a whole lot of things that were already pretty self explanatory for marketing purposes to make them palatable to folks that don’t really want to learn even the basics. Now I feel old. LOL

[Need Help with OG Xbox]

42 minutes ago, fox said:

yeah it's foxreplace,  I uh....have problems

I remember somehow editing XBMC to change it to applications, but on topic I fudged a softmod like OP once and the dash fix for error 21 with halo 2 didn't work, I wonder how he fared

He messaged me and was able to get it softmodded after which he did a null key but didn’t lock the hdd. You can guess what happened then. He’s getting an adapter that supports locking commands so he can hook it up to his computer and lock with fatxplorer or Xboxhdm. 
 

Don’t feel too bad about about the word replace. I used to cringe when people would say “surf the web” and “the net” back in the day. Also “in the cloud” still just kind of irks me for some reason. Lol

[Need Help with OG Xbox]

3 hours ago, Bowlsnapper said:

But how was a softmod accidentally done? That would mean that he already copied over the install/exploit files from a memcard to the HDD. And he then accidentally selected "Linux" in the game save menu in the game. Can you install insignia on a non-modified Xbox? I think you can, but it's a pain in the ass because you have to register the serial with the app, correct?

Maybe that's why the exploit was present... to run the Insignia application.....

NOT "App"! Fuck that term. I remember when Applebees ran a commercial advertising free "Apps!"... fucking appetizers. I was like uh, no, dude. I miss the days of Windows 95, when we used to run Applications... God those were happier days.

I’m not sure on that part. Like you I assumed it was there for him to do the insignia install. I’ve never installed insignia itself so I’m not positive. 
 

That’s hilarious about that Applebees commercial. I remember that and cringing when I’d hear them say it. Lol

[Need Help with OG Xbox]

9 minutes ago, sweetdarkdestiny said:

You missed the best days with c64 and Amiga. BABY!

I used to love the amiga and the commodore. All the old Interplay games like Wasteland. I remember thinking the amiga was awesome when I heard it play a song I’d heard on the radio and it sounded the same. Lol. Not to mention all the different programs and games around for it back then.

[Why does the HD AV pack usually cost so much?]

Just now, Marty said:

No one is going to make a high-ticket aftermarket accessory for a gaming console that has been out of production for over a decade and a half.

That's not how "economies of scale" operate.

Very true. Just wishful thinking. Lol. Did anyone ever make one outside of Microsoft? I honestly don’t remember. I never saw one but that doesn’t preclude it from existing. 

[Why does the HD AV pack usually cost so much?]

25 minutes ago, GoTeamScotch said:

I've yet to encounter new aftermarket Xbox component cables that are good quality. All the cheap ones I've tried usually have some kind of issue, often fuzzy lines in video signal or something. Hoping that won't always be the case. Seems like an opportunity for a company to make some money since OEM cables are often hard to come by at a decent price, and not everyone is willing to make their own modded cable.

Yeah you’d think there would definitely be a market for a higher quality aftermarket cable. Maybe one day a company will make one. Even if they just wanted to make a quality clone of the old HD AV pack. 

[Need Help with OG Xbox]

1 hour ago, Bowlsnapper said:

I'm confused... How was this console modded exactly?

It sounded like the initial goal was to install insignia but he accidentally started a softmod using the SC exploit but killed it before it was done. After that the error 21.