Magicaldave

Welcome indeed! Side note: you don’t actually need to do a complete softmod if you’re gonna TSOP anyway. But this is its own topic altogether.

I don’t fiddle as much with Arduino as RPi but I think you might be right. The more I investigate it seems more practical to use the Pi as an onboard flasher, so I feel it could end up being a good complement to a modchip. But even doing that over LPC seems to have very limited info, and compatibility, due to the flash chips either requiring SPI or LPC. Doesn’t seem like you can get both. And why would you?

Ahh, yes, my mistake. The Aladdin chip has its own ground points for LFRAME. You cut the LFRAME trace on your board to make sure it doesn't fry your console's MCPX chip over time. So your console is looking for a BIOS, but it can't find one - because you essentially chopped its head off. No big! You can temporarily fix this with a little bit of wire and tape if you wish to use the console in the meantime, but you should be back up and running when you're able to supply it with a BIOS over the LPC port (aka, installing a modchip) FWIW, this is an optional step from what I understand. But it's certainly not one that hurts as replacing your MCPX chip... not gonna happen.

So the software appears to already exist for this! I think the problem in the original implementation is that it was intended to feed live data to the Xbox over the LPC interface and have the PI itself act as the actual modchip. But, https://flashrom.org/Flashrom supports LPC and the TSOP40/32 packages that seem to come typical with Xboxes (at least the 1.1 I’m basing this on) So from here I need to see if I can actually rig up a PI to run FlashROM over the LPC, at which point I can still just run a script to reflash whatever BIOS I want. This would still require the use of some kind of flash chip in 1.6 Xboxes, which would be ideal since only the v1.6 PSU supplies 5Vsb required for the Pi to be running at all times.

Same thing it did before. Without having a chip, or just a random wire installed, to pull the D0 line of the Xbox low, it’s just gonna boot from it’s internal ROM.

I’m a little busy trying to work through a bad flash and fix a console with no hdd. But according to the original author of this project the best he could get was 14Mhz - and THAT was while running machine code. So I’m thinking it may be a better option to jerry-rig an actual flash chip over the GPIO air USB. To this end, if anyone has a USB-programmable modchip, I’d love some information and pictures on it to try and work back wards from there.

I sent him an email to ask about it, but there seem to be conflicting sources on what the rates actually are. *one* guy reported ~66Mhz. But he wasn’t using python. So I’ll have to run the numbers myself when I get the chance in a day or two.

Lol of course that’s not going over the LPC bus, that’s a goofy idea. But it’ll go over a fast ethernet connection A-okay, which both the Xbox and RPi support. As for LCD, sure, but part of that is that the chips required to do it aren’t printed anymore and it’s kinda poorly documented in the first place. It’s no more niche than spending $400 or more on an X3. This is a community of Xbox modders after all. This is about as niche as it gets my dude. As for whether or not you’ll be doing this FROM the Xbox itself, well again - absolutely not. This could be done over WiFi, using a regular VNC connection. Or if you wanted to get goofy you could maybe work out a way to SSH it. But I don’t see any reason to put an RPi camera into my Xbox. Regardless, the open-ended nature of using this hardware is the point of using it as a chip.

Haha, no worries. It kinda illustrates my point though; if you’re willing to spend $5 and a few hours getting an Aladdin chip to multiboot, why not spend a few $10 more on a Pi that will mop the floor with some of the more expensive chips that you can barely ever find? But, to each their own. I have some curiosities about whether or not the Pi’s GPIO pins can or cannot actually poll at the necessary 33MHz, so I’m going to run the benchmarks on my Pi when I get a chance to see how far they can actually go. Depending on how close I can get with various libraries, a modest overclock might actually get to the desired speeds. But it honestly doesn’t look all that hopeful. Source: https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/87846/how-fast-can-gpio-pins-toggle

Nope, gotta do that yourself. https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/microchip-technology/SST49LF080A-33-4C-NHE-T/SST49LF080A-33-4C-NHE-TCT-ND/8547948 http://assemblergames.com/threads/and-the-aladdin-xt-became-a-decent-modchip.52234/

https://www.ebay.com/i/273421058433?chn=ps&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-117182-37290-0&mkcid=2&itemid=273421058433&targetid=503482152124&device=m&adtype=pla&googleloc=1024352&poi=&campaignid=1669934822&adgroupid=65058350059&rlsatarget=pla-503482152124&abcId=1139296&merchantid=113089587&gclid=Cj0KCQjwrdjnBRDXARIsAEcE5YlrryUWKerWekp0zmd0oIzJVc7qpblkp6PBC1s-q57p-0Mxg2UlIioaAnvTEALw_wcB

The whole point is that those modchips are useless unless you’re running a 1.6. If I wanted to switch BIOSES I can just hook a single wire up to my 1.1 and be done with it. An XT is not going to give me WiFi support, nor LCD and camera support, nor WOL, nor host a fully functional Linux kernel which I can use to watch my movies in full quality over SMB/ftp. This is why people like stuff like the X3 - because it actually has features you might use.

So a couple months back, I found this old thread detailing one user’s attempts to use an RPi as a modchip. I’m pretty sure this is the same guy who figured out how to dump the EEPROM using a Pi as well, so major major kudos go to him for that. Here’s the original thread: http://remnantmods.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2384 It looks like he actually made it pretty far along before getting hung up on low polling rates on the Pi’s GPIO. There aren’t any updates after this, but it seems like reworking the pi’s Linux kernel turned out to be a somewhat daunting task and went nowhere. Would anyone here be interested in picking up this project, or possibly pointing me in the right direction of doing so? I’m nowhere near being a software developer myself but I think this would be worthwhile and would be glad to learn! Imagine the benefits - WOL, easy wifi mods, full HD media playback, LCD, SSH, VNC, so on and so on and so on. If done properly I think this could make all this abandoned silicon (X3, anyone?) we’re all so desperate for completely obsolete. Responses and assistance greatly appreciated on this matter.

No, but compatibility issues mostly arise from drives that can’t be locked. This is actually part of the SATA specification, so I’m not aware of any SATA drives with this issue. If you TSOP/chip this is a moot point anyway as the drive doesn’t need to be locked.

How does the VGA mod work? Is there any additional hardware there or is it basically just a long series of wires jacked up the a vga port?

Glad to have ya! Would need to learn a bit more about your boxes to really provide anything useful. But you can find pretty much all of it here!

Double-check your LPC rebuild with above, and maybe also see if your particular chip has the extra pin sticking out for alternate 5V.

Nah dude, if it works elsewhere, that’s just your drive. If you are so inclined, this site hosts the “Xbox Repair Guide” which has really useful info on fixing DVD drives.

With all the work you put in, why not just solder the Ethernet cable instead of having it stick out like that? Pretty hard to find a base station these days that doesn’t support wi-fi. Also, how’s the Ps2 controller set up? I was actually thinking about doing a similar mod based on a controller adapter I’ve been using forever. Feels so much better than using an actual Xbox controller. Either way, incredible looking system! Great work man! This is exactly why we keep the mod community alive. Is this thing for sale or just sharing? Beautiful.

The MICROSOFT logo does indeed appear. It was NOT M8Plus.Bin. I flashed EvoXM7, apparently. This is the BIOS file that was packed with EvolutionX dash 3935. There is no big pink logo in the top left as would be expected. Even without a CFG file I’d expect IND to give an error but maybe it was just my revised version breaking. You know what? I can’t check right now but I think the hanging behavior may be caused by the fact that both drives are trying to run Rocky5 softmod on top of the modded BIOS. So I need to grab one, boot a HeXen CD and clean the thing.

Good guess! Lol. It is an ST chip and I flashed with EvolutionX’s dash tool.

Flashed the patched.bin. Both are stuck on X screen indefinitely after flashing the patched 5003.bin and EvoX.

This particular console is a 1.1 with an st chip inside. Hopefully I can just pull whatever is in the other bank(s) to resolve.

I noticed! I did manage to reflash to an older version of EvoX but this presents the exact same issue on multiple unlocked Hd’s. I’m hoping I can fix by installing my modchip which is equipped with the latest EvoX, then reflash IND and forget about injecting.

No issue. Just a bit slow.