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[1nsan3]

well we already have a firmware that tells the system its an original disc when only a copy is inserted. There has to be a way to have the firmware tell the system the disc is still in the drive ( when of course it isnt ..)

i would play a game off of the hard drive for a good few hours.. ( take the disc out of course  without using the eject button) and see if and when it does another disc check... there may be more than 1 check through out the game or at certain levels or time intervals maybe during game play... lots of game time should be put into this before we just to HUGE assumptions.... But it would SEEM that some type of firmware or chip could be impimented into the dvd drive for disc checks.  or hell just a good old swap trick might just work.


M$ might require in the future for game devs to impliment  disc checks at any time of there discretion...

or hell just one premade disc to stay in the drive at all times some type of game backup.. with the right files to tell the drive YES you have the right game in..instead of putting your original in.

[torne]

QUOTE(1nsan3 @ Nov 15 2008, 05:19 AM)

well we already have a firmware that tells the system its an original disc when only a copy is inserted. There has to be a way to have the firmware tell the system the disc is still in the drive ( when of course it isnt ..)

i would play a game off of the hard drive for a good few hours.. ( take the disc out of course  without using the eject button) and see if and when it does another disc check... there may be more than 1 check through out the game or at certain levels or time intervals maybe during game play... lots of game time should be put into this before we just to HUGE assumptions.... But it would SEEM that some type of firmware or chip could be impimented into the dvd drive for disc checks.  or hell just a good old swap trick might just work.
M$ might require in the future for game devs to impliment  disc checks at any time of there discretion...

or hell just one premade disc to stay in the drive at all times some type of game backup.. with the right files to tell the drive YES you have the right game in..instead of putting your original in.

You have to have the right security info for the game you are currently playing, which means you can't just have one premade disc. You would need to switch disc for each game, at which point you may as well just use a full backup of the original, which already works fine.

The only way I can see to make it any easier is to construct the emulation device I detailed earlier in this thread

[BlackBelt110]

Someone should do an prove off concept,

this could be realy intresting if it worked

[torne]

QUOTE(mmeder111 @ Nov 21 2008, 08:50 PM)

So with a mod if I take the original game and load to the hard drive then go online with the backup of it in the drive there is still a chance of detection I assume because it reads it as if it was going to play it from the drive...

same as if you play the backup online I would guess.

Yup, exactly the same. Of course, if you made your backup yourself from a retail disc, and did it correctly, then you won't get detected either way (for now; they can implement new checks any time they like, obviously, which the modified firmware may or may not pass). The bans, to date, have come from copies with incorrect security info, the Kreon angle issue, and from people downloading review/beta copies of games that they shouldn't have.

QUOTE

which would lead me to assume that if one makes a dvd of all teh SS then loads thier originals to the drive and the firmware is updated to be able to tell which game it is and spits back the ss still the firmware would be able to be checked and banned or even the disk with the ss of course

You can't update the firmware to tell which game it is, as I've explained: you still need either a disc for each game, or a device which has some kind of control to select which disc to pretend to be. There's not really any more risk of banning, though, seriously: the device just has to do the exact same thing as the current modified firmwares do.

[Cheater912]

Or you hook up the SATA cable to your computer, load an ISO into a program and let it do it's work. The program would simply listen to that port and wait for the 360 to call a checksum. Then, it will simply send data from the ISO into the 360. That actually seems like a possibility... Would Windows be able to recognize the 360 itself? SATA to USB would be very useful too. Wiring it to the 360's front USB port would be good as well.

[torne]

QUOTE(Azag @ Nov 28 2008, 01:59 AM)

The mod could be some kind of pass through flash device thing that goes between the SATA drive, and the SATA cable.  When you copy a game to the hard drive the flash device saves the security info to itself.  When you try to run a game from the hard drive, with probably any disc in there, the flash device supplies the correct info and you're off to the races.  

I don't think that's sufficient: the challenge/response data that you see over the wire isn't enough, iirc. I could be wrong, I don't know the exact details of it, but I suspect you need to use a PC to rip the actual SS/DMI/PFI data entire and load it into the target emulator.

Toggling through games the way you describe is not too bad a thought, though, but it's probably easier to just slap a one-line LCD display on it and have a button to cycle through them quickly
The 'selecting which game' part is not the difficult part of this project, srsly.

QUOTE(Cheater912 @ Nov 28 2008, 04:41 AM)

Or you hook up the SATA cable to your computer, load an ISO into a program and let it do it's work. The program would simply listen to that port and wait for the 360 to call a checksum. Then, it will simply send data from the ISO into the 360. That actually seems like a possibility... Would Windows be able to recognize the 360 itself? SATA to USB would be very useful too. Wiring it to the 360's front USB port would be good as well.

SATA doesn't work like that: you can't connect a host port to another host port. You need a target emulator. Read the thread

[torne]

QUOTE(xboxpirate11 @ Feb 19 2009, 08:34 PM)

after reading the post, i love how everyone have great ideas.  please dont flame for i am not a hacker and dont know how everything works, just have an idea

I've tried not to flame anyone, but my patience is finite At least you're being polite.

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since the DVD rom and hard drive both use SATA.  Can we spoof the system, making it think a HDD is a DVD-Rom drive?

Yes, this part is possible but difficult: you could build a SATA target emulation device like the one I have previously described in this thread, which used a hard drive to store the game data and thus could emulate the entire disc, removing the need to install the game to the xbox hard drive. But...:

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maybe having some kind of chip to control the HDD spoofin it as a DVD-ROM.  write and burn our own game as a game selector.  The chip would mainly be used to control the data from the hard drive behind it.  The game selector user interfaced (UI) would be installed one time using XBE.  I know i might be kind of confusing sorry.

We can't write our own game. We can't make any programs which will run on the 360, because they need to be signed with Microsoft's key. Just having it be on a valid disc is not sufficient. So, you would still need some external interface on the emulation device to select which game to "insert in the drive".

Even then, this would have some advantages: you wouldn't be limited by the size of an xbox hard drive as to how many games could be installed, as you would be with a target emulator that just provided security sector information. But.. it would be more complicated and expensive.

Anyway, the fact that such a device is possible doesn't make it easy, cheap or worthwhile. Nobody has bothered so far

[torne]

Yes, that's the kind of thing you'd need

The problem is not the control to select the disc: making a device like the one you've mocked up there is not very hard to anyone with a bit of electronics skill. The problem is making the thing it controls, the actual DVD emulator. It's a tricky task requiring lots of time and effort on the part of someone who understands the Serial ATA wire protocol, microcontroller/FPGA development, and the DVD validation protocol for the 360. I have no idea whether people like team xecuter would have the skills or not: the devices they have built to date are not as complex, but that doesn't prove they can't do it...

So, if someone designed and prototyped such a device, and started selling them or releasing schematics/firmware to do it yourself.... there are still some issues.
1) It probably wouldn't be cheap or easy to build
2) Emulating the whole game disc would require a hard drive attached to the device, which in turn requires that it have a hard drive controller. This would further increase the price and complexity.
3) Emulating just the security info wouldn't need a drive, just a small amount of flash (you would then have to install the game to the xbox's own HD using NXE) - but this would be very easy for MS to detect in a dashboard update, as they could simply try to read various non-security locations on the disc and the device wouldn't be able to answer for any sectors it didn't have copies of.

It's a nice thought experiment but for someone to actually productise it would take a lot of determination from specific knowledgeable individuals: we are not achieving anything by having this conversation Recognising that it's physically and logically possible to build such a device is a very small first step.. it's not like I can actually build one, or would actually want to expend the effort if I could

I'm personally happy with just a modified DVD firmware and DVD-R DLs... it's a functioning backup solution

[syntaxerror329]

I had a few idea's come to mind after reviewing this thread.

First one was 360scrubber. (got the name from Wiiscrubber)

Basically as I understand it hackers have already made a device that sits in-between the DVDROM drive and the motherboard and looks at all the SATA commands and feeds them into a computer. Wouldn’t it be possible to put in a original disk and dump it to the hard drive and have a tool analyze what sectors of the DVD are the actual game. (as we know the games are often much smaller then the entire disk) We could then discard the unused sectors of the disk or replace them in the .ISO with FFFFFFFFFFFFF so that the .ISO size can be compressed into a much smaller size? (exactly like Wii scrubber is doing) ?

A lot of people have 20GB hard drives and the idea of emulating just the security data for diskless play isn’t going to be very useful without getting a bigger way overpriced hard drive from Microsoft. Sure we can get WD Bev series hard drives and make our own but then we will have tons of people on live with duplicate hard drive serial numbers and I am sure that wont make MS happy. Even then we are limited to 120GB

Further as it was already stated this emulating any part of the disk with hardware would not be a easy task. Also if there was hardware emulation of the security check then why not take it all the way and set it up so that a PC with much larger and cheaper hard drives is just loaded with ISO’s and have a Daemon tools for 360 type application running on the host computer. What really frustrates me about that idea is that everyone keeps saying how hard this would be yet this tool already exists for the Nintendo Wii…. From www.flatmii.com “Share any Wii supported format from your PC using High-speed 2.0 USB protocol . Play, and emulate any of your stored Wii/GameCube image discs . Soldering installation, clip or any software modification is not required for FLATMII. You can even use your Wii without a Wii DVD drive “

I unfortunately don’t have the technical knowledge to even start such a project but guys like C4eva and friends know these drives firmware inside out and clearly this should not be seen as mission impossible.

Has anyone even attempted such a thing?

[torne]

QUOTE(syntaxerror329 @ Mar 13 2009, 09:49 AM)

Basically as I understand it hackers have already made a device that sits in-between the DVDROM drive and the motherboard and looks at all the SATA commands and feeds them into a computer. Wouldn’t it be possible to put in a original disk and dump it to the hard drive and have a tool analyze what sectors of the DVD are the actual game. (as we know the games are often much smaller then the entire disk) We could then discard the unused sectors of the disk or replace them in the .ISO with FFFFFFFFFFFFF so that the .ISO size can be compressed into a much smaller size? (exactly like Wii scrubber is doing) ?

This increases the risk of being banned (new checks that look at the padding data), for little gain. You gain nothing unless you can squish the disk down to fit on a single layer DVD, but that changes a lot of details of the security stuff - the people developing the firmware modifications are not supporting single-layer 360 games for a reason.

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A lot of people have 20GB hard drives and the idea of emulating just the security data for diskless play isn’t going to be very useful without getting a bigger way overpriced hard drive from Microsoft. Sure we can get WD Bev series hard drives and make our own but then we will have tons of people on live with duplicate hard drive serial numbers and I am sure that wont make MS happy. Even then we are limited to 120GB

This thread was originally about that possibility, because it has the advantage of minimising the amount of storage needed by the device. You are correct that this is still a limited approach, and that emulating the entire disc is probably more useful (and not significantly more difficult, as the hard part is SATA emulation + security handling, which has to be done either way).

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Further as it was already stated this emulating any part of the disk with hardware would not be a easy task. Also if there was hardware emulation of the security check then why not take it all the way and set it up so that a PC with much larger and cheaper hard drives is just loaded with ISO’s and have a Daemon tools for 360 type application running on the host computer. What really frustrates me about that idea is that everyone keeps saying how hard this would be yet this tool already exists for the Nintendo Wii…. From www.flatmii.com “Share any Wii supported format from your PC using High-speed 2.0 USB protocol . Play, and emulate any of your stored Wii/GameCube image discs . Soldering installation, clip or any software modification is not required for FLATMII. You can even use your Wii without a Wii DVD drive “

I don't know what the Wii's DVD interface is, is it SATA, IDE, something weird? Whatever it is, then yes, presumably that chip emulates it, and provides fake data it gets from its USB host. Don't really know too much about the Wii. The fact that someone has already done it for a similar system doesn't make it any easier, though: lots of people have run 100m in under 10s but I'd still have to train for years to be able to attempt it myself

The differences between them would be the interface type, if the Wii isn't SATA, and the security challenges the 360 sends to the drive (no idea how the Wii authenticates discs but from the extreme simplicity of the drive chips that worked on earlier models it can't be that complicated). I can't tell you exactly how much work these differences would create. If it was trivial then the people behind the Wii device would have done it, and be selling a 360 device already, though, no? More money for them

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Has anyone even attempted such a thing?

If they have, they haven't discussed it publicly.

[syntaxerror329]

QUOTE(torne @ Mar 13 2009, 01:50 PM)

This increases the risk of being banned (new checks that look at the padding data), for little gain. You gain nothing unless you can squish the disk down to fit on a single layer DVD, but that changes a lot of details of the security stuff - the people developing the firmware modifications are not supporting single-layer 360 games for a reason.

The idea behind this was that the .iso would extract to its full size but in .rar form would be much smaller. This would really only usefull for something we don't discuss on xbox-scene forums and of course if MS ever wanted to check the padding then it would be a really bad idea.