DobaMuffin

Hello, I am writing this today to see about getting some help with my 1.6 Xbox and the Xeceuter 2.6 CE installed in it. I recently did this motherboard mod involving a resistor to extend the life of the board and the board works fine after the install. This is also where I managed to find an issue. With the mod chip enabled, both banks load up their respective bioses, but when I disable the mod chip using the front panel switch, the console Frags after 3 tries. When I disconnect the LFrame wire from the mod chip, the console boots up like normal to the stock dash using the stock bios. Before the mod though, disabling the mod chip using the front panel switch worked liked normal. So now I am a point where I made a modification to extend the life of the console, but lost some functionality in my mod chip at the same time. I am wondering if anybody knows what would cause the issue I described and if anybody else has ever run into similar issues. Though I know most don't tend to mod 1.6 consoles if the can avoid it. I'm also curious if anybody else happens to have an Xbox motherboard that is warped around the CPU and GPU area. By warped, I mean that I can see a curve in the motherboard around that area. Thanks, DobaMuffin

Thanks for that. It sucks that they degrade so much. I guess replacing the flash chip with a new one (huge risk of messing up) or chipping the consoles are the way to go. Though a modchip would be the way to go unless restoring the console to look stock. Though reflashing the chip will still work for a while wont it?

Hello everybody. I recently got to thinking about the data retention of the flash memory used in the original xbox. I purchased an original xbox not to long ago that was basically a coma console in that it would have a green light, but no audio or video. Turns out the bios was corrupted or something similar and that it would boot with extreme difficulties after pressing the eject button a bunch of times until the drive ejected. Basically these symptoms. I did manage to flash a custom bios onto the system and that solved the booting issues it was having, but that then leads me to what I have as a discussion today. Looking at the datasheet for the Winbond W49F020 series of flash memory used in my console, I notice that it has a data retention of 20 years. This means that it should hold the data for about 20 years no problem, but it seems like mine started having issues early. By what I can tell, to refresh this data and basically restart the countdown, I need to reflash the bios to the chip rewriting the data. This brings it back to a state where the data is properly stored and is ready to last another 15-20 years. My only concern about the whole thing is that flashing a new bios can go wrong and cause the console not to boot without a mod chip. My question to someone more knowledgeable than me in this topic is, are we going to see more and more stock consoles fail to boot due to corrupt bioses in the up and coming years? I know that 1.0 and 1.1 consoles already have some issues with their 1mb flash chips, but will all sorts of version have issues? ie, 1.0 - 1.6? Is this just a limitation of anything using flash memory in a component used to boot up? I know nothing lasts forever, but I do try to make it last as long as I can. Thanks for taking the time to read through this and I hope it can spark some good discussion on the topic. Also if anything I have here is incorrect, please let me know as I am still learning about hardware in general, and I try my best to be accurate in my information. DobaMuffin

This would have been lovely to have when my console had a really corrupt bios and would barely boot at all. I only found out stuff like this was possible after the fact and I struggled to get the console to boot so many times to go the tsop flash from softmod route. Hopefully this process, or similar, will come in handy in the future.

Hello, I always end up late to these modding scenes due, but I hope to learn about the original xbox and discover how much fun I can have modding these old things. I do have great memories though. Growing up with an xbox can do that sometimes. Hopefully you enjoy this as much as I do.