Hello guys 👋
I have two Xbox consoles - a 1.6 PAL unit and a 1.4 NTSC-J unit, and both of them are chipped but have stopped working.
The 1.6 PAL unit can no longer power on. It was working fine for two weeks, before it suddenly stopped working one day. I suspect the PSU's the problem.
The 1.4 NTSC-J was working fine, but I think I killed the Winbond modchip after flashing it with the wrong BIOS image fro, the Hexen disc. The EvoX badge no longer appears when I power it on, and I am always getting error 05 from my unlocked hard drive.
I just ordered this item (https://www.ebay.com.my/itm/193680862468), it's a 1.1 motherboard with XeniumICE modchip and 128MB RAM upgrade.
The seller assured me I can transplant this to either one of my Xbox case.
I read somewhere (I forgot where) that 1.6 Xbox cases are different, and will short circuit motherboards from earlier revisions, but I was unable to find concrete evidence of this.
Can anyone confirm this?
Also, what else can I do to try to revive my NTSC-J 1.4 console? I don't have soldering skills.
I've two 1.0 motherboard sets (ie. motherboards, controller daughterboards and power supplies) for sale. Both have clock caps removed. Both working - no issues.
One of them has some clock cap damage (namely C7G6 missing). That cap (C7G6) is part of clock circuit so as long as you don't plan on bringing back the clock cap it's not used and not needed.
Price for the lot: 50 Euro plus shipping (I'm in Ireland). Shipping to UK should be around 5-10 Euro max. Other EU countries - please ask.
I know people get really tired of hearing this debate, but I'd like to make my position as clear as possible once and for all.
First and foremost:
The reason the LPC exists on the Xbox motherboard is because the TSOP is soldered to the board blank, and programmed via the lpc port later in the manufacturing process. When the TSOP is blank, the xbox then looks to the LPC for a bios image to boot. This is because a pre-programmed rom is more expensive than a blank eeprom (TSOP in this case). It also allowed Microsoft to more easily update the bios image in new Xboxes for whatever reason.
So we know that they would have to retool the LPC programming device if they disconnected some LPC points. This new tool would need to be incredibly fine because the point it needs to make contact with is no longer a nice big pad.
Since nobody can find a 1.5, this retooling would have been for just a handful of motherboards. So they would have gone through this expense of retooling for such a tiny amount of boards it wouldn't have made any sense.
Next, what exactly did the alleged 1.5 board prevent? It ONLY would slow down mod chip installation. I say slow down because any knucklehead with a DMM could figure out how to get it working again. It does absolutely nothing to stop soft modding or TSOP flashing. Why would Microsoft go to such an expense to stop only one method of modding the Xbox? I don't doubt that people have found LPC points that show no continuity. This could be because of the very programmer I mentioned at the beginning of this post. It could be due to trace rot. It could be due to operator error in measuring the components. Whatever the reason for a person measuring this situation, I don't believe it was a particular version of motherboards that Microsoft intended to put out.
We saw with the 1.6, where it DID come with a pre-programmed rom (so no TSOP) on the board that they could finally disconnect the LPC. That's why we have to rebuild it there. It is perfectly consistent. It stops TSOP mods. It stops modchips for noobs. It required a new bios that supported the new video encoder. I think they believed they could use updates on game disks and Xbox Live to patch the softmods. So they thought they had all the bases covered with 1.6.
I got my information from the Xbox-Linux Project. They published an article on Xbox Security which I preserved on this site.
"Now other people found out that, if the flash chip is completely missing, the Xbox wants to read from a (non-existant) ROM chip connected to the (serial) LPC bus. This is of course because of the manufac- turing process: As it has been explained before, the flash chip gets programmed in-system, the first time they are turned on, using an external LPC ROM chip. Modchip makers soon developed chips that only needed 9 wires and connected to the LPC bus. It was enough to ground the data line D0 to make the Xbox think that flash memory is empty.
Lots of these “cheapermods” appeared, as they only consisted of a single serial flash memory chip. They could be installed within minutes, especially after some companies started shipping chips that used pogo pins, so that no soldering was required.
Some groups wrote applications like boot menus that made it possible to copy games to hard disk and run them from there. Patched Xbox kernels ap- peared that supported bigger hard disks. Making the Xbox run copies from DVD-R or hard disk as well as homebrew applications written with the official Xbox SDK was now easy."
https://www.ogxbox.com/archive/xboxsecurity.html
It's under the "Modchips" heading.
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I have two Xbox consoles - a 1.6 PAL unit and a 1.4 NTSC-J unit, and both of them are chipped but have stopped working.
The 1.6 PAL unit can no longer power on. It was working fine for two weeks, before it suddenly stopped working one day. I suspect the PSU's the problem.
The 1.4 NTSC-J was working fine, but I think I killed the Winbond modchip after flashing it with the wrong BIOS image fro, the Hexen disc. The EvoX badge no longer appears when I power it on, and I am always getting error 05 from my unlocked hard drive.
I just ordered this item (https://www.ebay.com.my/itm/193680862468), it's a 1.1 motherboard with XeniumICE modchip and 128MB RAM upgrade.
The seller assured me I can transplant this to either one of my Xbox case.
I read somewhere (I forgot where) that 1.6 Xbox cases are different, and will short circuit motherboards from earlier revisions, but I was unable to find concrete evidence of this.
Can anyone confirm this?
Also, what else can I do to try to revive my NTSC-J 1.4 console? I don't have soldering skills.
One of them has some clock cap damage (namely C7G6 missing). That cap (C7G6) is part of clock circuit so as long as you don't plan on bringing back the clock cap it's not used and not needed.
Price for the lot: 50 Euro plus shipping (I'm in Ireland). Shipping to UK should be around 5-10 Euro max. Other EU countries - please ask.
First and foremost:
The reason the LPC exists on the Xbox motherboard is because the TSOP is soldered to the board blank, and programmed via the lpc port later in the manufacturing process. When the TSOP is blank, the xbox then looks to the LPC for a bios image to boot. This is because a pre-programmed rom is more expensive than a blank eeprom (TSOP in this case). It also allowed Microsoft to more easily update the bios image in new Xboxes for whatever reason.
So we know that they would have to retool the LPC programming device if they disconnected some LPC points. This new tool would need to be incredibly fine because the point it needs to make contact with is no longer a nice big pad.
Since nobody can find a 1.5, this retooling would have been for just a handful of motherboards. So they would have gone through this expense of retooling for such a tiny amount of boards it wouldn't have made any sense.
Next, what exactly did the alleged 1.5 board prevent? It ONLY would slow down mod chip installation. I say slow down because any knucklehead with a DMM could figure out how to get it working again. It does absolutely nothing to stop soft modding or TSOP flashing. Why would Microsoft go to such an expense to stop only one method of modding the Xbox? I don't doubt that people have found LPC points that show no continuity. This could be because of the very programmer I mentioned at the beginning of this post. It could be due to trace rot. It could be due to operator error in measuring the components. Whatever the reason for a person measuring this situation, I don't believe it was a particular version of motherboards that Microsoft intended to put out.
We saw with the 1.6, where it DID come with a pre-programmed rom (so no TSOP) on the board that they could finally disconnect the LPC. That's why we have to rebuild it there. It is perfectly consistent. It stops TSOP mods. It stops modchips for noobs. It required a new bios that supported the new video encoder. I think they believed they could use updates on game disks and Xbox Live to patch the softmods. So they thought they had all the bases covered with 1.6.
I got my information from the Xbox-Linux Project. They published an article on Xbox Security which I preserved on this site.
"Now other people found out that, if the flash chip is completely missing, the Xbox wants to read from a (non-existant) ROM chip connected to the (serial) LPC bus. This is of course because of the manufac- turing process: As it has been explained before, the flash chip gets programmed in-system, the first time they are turned on, using an external LPC ROM chip. Modchip makers soon developed chips that only needed 9 wires and connected to the LPC bus. It was enough to ground the data line D0 to make the Xbox think that flash memory is empty.
Lots of these “cheapermods” appeared, as they only consisted of a single serial flash memory chip. They could be installed within minutes, especially after some companies started shipping chips that used pogo pins, so that no soldering was required.
Some groups wrote applications like boot menus that made it possible to copy games to hard disk and run them from there. Patched Xbox kernels ap- peared that supported bigger hard disks. Making the Xbox run copies from DVD-R or hard disk as well as homebrew applications written with the official Xbox SDK was now easy."
https://www.ogxbox.com/archive/xboxsecurity.html
It's under the "Modchips" heading.
Board Life Status
Board startup date: April 23, 2017 12:45:48