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What is the practical use of a BFM bios?


Edge
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So I recently learned a valuable lesson about TSOP flashing when I flashed my 1.0 with iND-BiOS.Beta.Feb-11-05.67.bfm.bin rather than the non-BFM version of the bios. I was wondering what the practical purpose of the BFM (Boot from Media) bios is, and how one would even use it?

I'm assuming it is a BIOS that something can load AFTER the Xbox as already booted and initialized all hardware?

Edited by Edge
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You can also load a debug BFM BIOS to change your console from a retail device into an Xbox Debug Kit.  Operation of a retail console as a debug kit works better if it has an additional 64MBs of RAM added (v1.0-1.4 consoles only) bringing in par with a Debug Kit's 128MBs of RAM.  I'm not exactly sure how limited a retail console is when being used as a debug kit with the stock 64MBs of RAM.

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  • 10 months later...
On 3/2/2021 at 12:53 PM, KaosEngineer said:

You can also load a debug BFM BIOS to change your console from a retail device into an Xbox Debug Kit.  Operation of a retail console as a debug kit works better if it has an additional 64MBs of RAM added (v1.0-1.4 consoles only) bringing in par with a Debug Kit's 128MBs of RAM.  I'm not exactly sure how limited a retail console is when being used as a debug kit with the stock 64MBs of RAM.

I've actually been wondering the same thing regarding 64mb debug consoles. Does anybody have an answer?

On topic, why would one use a bfm? Why do newer installers use them?

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There are some reasons to use a BFM bios for an installer.

Mainly, you can make use of things which are not supportet by the bios the user have on his mod chip or are not active. You can make sure it's a .67/FG bios in case the user uses a old bios which dosn't support partition 7 (Happends every now and then). You can make use some gimmicks which would not be possible without a BFM bios (Disk swap for example which is usefull if you like to make an addon disk which can be side loaded in the main installer (Damn spoiler :D )).

And like Kaos already wrote, you can use also a debug bios to run an debug dash on your console which for the most pll doesn't make any sense.

Over all, for 98% of the users which just like to use there xbox to play games, a BFM bios has no use.

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17 minutes ago, sweetdarkdestiny said:

There are some reasons to use a BFM bios for an installer.

Mainly, you can make use of things which are not supportet by the bios the user have on his mod chip or are not active. You can make sure it's a .67/FG bios in case the user uses a old bios which dosn't support partition 7 (Happends every now and then). You can make use some gimmicks which would not be possible without a BFM bios (Disk swap for example which is usefull if you like to make an addon disk which can be side loaded in the main installer (Damn spoiler :D )).

And like Kaos already wrote, you can use also a debug bios to run an debug dash on your console which for the most pll doesn't make any sense.

Over all, for 98% of the users which just like to use there xbox to play games, a BFM bios has no use.

Okay, makes sense. Thank you very much.

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