big F

I know the market can potentially be massive, as stated above a netflix style model, could be a good cash cow. Its likely though the whole ilegal download bit will still be there, afterall its not been ever removed in the history of gaming, but the console vendors could make coin from it. As far as my time at Nintendo I worked for the division that repaired the consoles and games that were sent in by the retail outlets and customers, so in my time there I worked on the Nes the SNes and the OGGameBoy. On top of that we had a small part of the RnD in the same building and would often see titles months before anything was near retail. Mostly when they were still at the port stage to translate it to Engrish, often the carts were just open boards with serial ports. So very likely in that stage highly copyable by todays standards. Saw the colour game boy prototype years before it came out, at that time the larger than final release screen cost thousands to make. It was so cool to see Mario in colour albeit 16 colours, over the mono we were all familiar with at the time. I wasn't alowed to play it but was shown it being played, it had its own minder. 2.3 million of the classic rebooted console sold, LOL thats tiny compaired to the original release, the factories ran 24/7 and still couldnt keep up with demand. Of the popular Nes and GB games we had stacks of them palleted up on 1metre by 1metre pallets which were shipped out on a daily fleet of trucks, as our warehouse space was used for Emea distribution. That would have been 10 of thousands a day of several titles at the peak of popularity / Christmas

Nintendo has successfully brought down two websites that were hosting old Nintendo Roms for Nes ans SNes games. It seems this may be in part to Nintendo wanting to clear competition for a planned release of official retro roms for their current console. I can see it from their point ( I used to work for them in the 90's) but as the games mostly in question are in some cases approaching 30 years old, you have to ask why. They already made millions back in the day, the retro rom market cant be that lucrative surely. I know 80's and 90's retro is cool but a lot of the retro rom market is a nostagia thing for us old farts who were there when it was current, and want to remember our spotty teenage years. Link below for a more indepth report. https://www.polygon.com/2018/7/22/17600008/nintendo-roms-lawsuit-cease-desist

Its supposed to be faster, I didnt really notice the difference but now only use 80 wire. using the sata adaptors you'll find it works more readily as some of the adaptors only seen to work correctly with 80 wire.

Oh no I meant my usual route of an executor or such, it seems the Aladin chip are pretty much the only chips to find, unless you want to pay a heavy nostagia tax on eBay. Anyhow bought some last night so will post here to advise how it goes etc.

I too have seen these up on evilBay and was thinkng of just getting one for every 1.6 board I have yet to mod, as they are the only boards that I cant mod, and chips are getting hard to find. Anyone know if they actually work on 1.6's?

This is something that if you can get it to work would sell without question, weather its a kit of parts thst you need to apply to your own previously bought controller or as a finished product.. I'd buy one or more even though I have one of the Logitech wireless ones.

Back in the day I bought a few 360's that had Issues, fixed them except one which with the help of cad models of both the original Xbox and 360, worked out how to cram an xbox in the 360 case with moded connections to give it the original 360 look. I also looked at the reverse. Never actually got down to doing it but once my work shop is finished that exactly the sort of old school hacking I going to be up to.

Mine are the same as the pictures minus the explody caps. The theory of HDE stitting on a ton of these for years would fit. All us old computer/console owners know all about the sub par caps that were used back in the day. Over the years I have replaced ones in Vintage calculators and Amigas as well as Xboxes and random electronic stuff. Thankfully the modern metal ones are much better.

I have a few of those adapters knocking around none of which seemed to work on any Xbox I own. I always cover the power solder points as this is very badly designed and really shouldnt have been left like that by the manufacturers. That said the Startec ones do the job.

Superb idea. Very usable and also could be used for other non xbox projects i have.

I have some chips waiting for me to get round to it at some point.

I had so many links to tutorials, guides and info. All lost to the sands of time. Its a shame. Hope fully this site will bring some of that old knowledge back.

We have used them at work, provided the unformatted size is the same it should work if there are no bad sectors etc. Pc wise we also cloned 1tb to a 1.5tb, the 1.5tb ends up with 1tb and the 500 is wasted. Not sure if this would work on the xbox, or if Xbox HD tools could get it back and make a new partition afterwards. worth a try though imo.

Acronis has a full disc copy mode, so as long as the two drives are the same it should be fine. The full copy mode doesnt care about formats and file types.

Welcome! If it's anything other than a 1.6 then soldering is not so much of a thing provided you can get it to read a disk. You may find there's members near you that could help if you are not up to the soldering.

Quite a few more I didn't know existed, thanks for sharing these with us, great info on them also.

I have some ph paper somewhere and at least one crusty Xbox I can test it on. Curiously I have a 1.6 that sometimes won't boot or turn on. every part in it works correcly in other Xboxes so it got to be the board, there's no damage no leaking caps , in fact it's one of the most dust free Xboxes I have ever bought second hand. The trick with this particular box is unplug the HD and DVD and rep plug the power, turn it on and it will error. Then plug it all back in and it's ok. Sometime another 1.6 I have won't turn on with that its a case of removing it's mod chip and powering it on which causes it to throw a tantrum. Then put the chip back in and it's ok. The chip works fine in another 1.6 and has one of those removable pin header things. I put it down to mass produced ten plus year old electronics that for the most part have probably not had the greatest of life's best treatment, and weren't really built to the best standards. These boxes we love so much are no more reliable than old cars, so I expect to have to tinker with them, it's all part of the fun. Buy em cheap and if you break one "fixing" it no worries just break out another and use the spares.

You could also try a bit of sewing cotton wound onto the screw thread, it should hold it in a bit tighter as the thread in the hole won't be completely gone unless you've forced a bigger screw into it or drilled it out etc. Used to do this as an energency fix when I used to race RC track cars and got crash damage I couldn't fix with spares when at a meeting. If it can survive in a car traveling at 30mph plus on a bumpy track, an Xbox should be a cake walk.

I've had a couple recently that were "fully" working but in reality the DVD Drives were toast. Oddly one that was listed as faulty just need a dust.

One thing I found is compiling the Zips did require a bit of time, even on my system, there were two or three files that were corrupt, I downloaded the pack affected again and it's fix pack but it was not any better, managed to get one off a rom site and the other seems to have the same issue where ever you load it from. It's for one of the laser disc games. Now that it's recompiled I just store it on a USB drive ready to ftp across to any Xbox I want it on. Much quicker to transfer to a new Xbox like that. Nearly 100gb of downloading, good job my ISP like me.

This is the same circuit I have in the one I have, bought on eaither XBox-scene or eBay can't remember which, it has worked flawlessly each time. Even used it once to read out a rom on a control board at work. in my experience the USB to serial adaptors are meh when it comes to this kinda thing. Tried so many over the years with varying success. I have an old Dell notebook that runs XP purely for uses like this and the diagnostic software for my car, which will run under Win 7 but not as well, The Pi option looks interesting, an excuse to buy another one maybe.

Well I just downloaded the massive pack a few weeks back. I read that it's quite easy to install more games, something I plan to do, therefore it can't be to difficult to remove them. There's a few in the massive pack I don't care for and also quite a few I have that are not in there.

Be good to see another method to achieve this.

I think I may revisit my generic adaptors, my new chip has drive tools onboard where as before it was down to the DVDs when setting up the drive. It may well work this time. I only have one 250gb ide drive left so need to get a solution for SATA drives.

These are light years ahead of the tat I have for UnleashX. thankyou so much for sharing them with us.