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[Aggressive Taco]

I haven't been in the hacking scene for too long...mostly on xbins and xbins-help and recently fw on efnet.  I got in during the days of the splinter cell exploits on the original xbox and I've had experience hacking most 360 drives.  Most of that is besides the point, I don't really have hacking experience but I was thinking a few minutes ago and an idea hit me.

What of a possible device that could emulate the Xbox 360 DVD Drive, but connect to a USB port on a computer and read backup .dvd/.iso's.  Good backups are becoming harder and harder to make nowadays what with Verbatim moving their production to other countries and RITEK being what it is.

I have read numerous article on xbox 360 security, and watched the one video on deconstructing xbox 360 security, so I have some knowledge in the area - not a lot - but wouldn't such a usb device open up tons of venues for hacking?  Such a device could give us power to hotswap precisely, during specific routines, and possibly gain control over the machine.

I could be wrong, as I am no expert in Xbox 360 security but I'd appreciate the community sharing thoughts with me on this.  Even if the hotswapping possibilities aren't possible, would making such a device be possible?  The xbox 360 simply issues a command to the dvd drive to fetch data from a specific track on the disc, so a third party device could read that command and respond with the correct data (a section of whatever disc we want the xbox to receive).  We already have the dumps from every firmware (excluding lite-on of course whose code never leaves the drive) so all that would be needed is a set of drivers or a host application.

It would be pretty awesome to not have to worry about lasers going bad and to not even have to use a dvd drive, no more disc spinups and the load times would be pretty impressive I would imagine.  (Maybe a firewire connection instead of a SATA connection)

-Taco

[HackerSupreme]

Are you thinking of a Kreon drive? There are some Samsung DVD ROM drives that you can be flashed with a hacked firmware to rip Xbox 360 games.

[Perplexer]

QUOTE(HackerSupreme @ Jul 23 2008, 11:52 AM)

Are you thinking of a Kreon drive? There are some Samsung DVD ROM drives that you can be flashed with a hacked firmware to rip Xbox 360 games.

Hahaha, that's nothing like what the original poster was asking.

What he'd want is a hardware bridge between a PC and the SATA port on the Xbox360 motherboard.  Run a program on the PC which emulates a modded Samsung/Benq/Hitachi drive (i.e. punch in your DVD key and other drive parameters into the software), then point it at an .ISO file on your PC and stream the game to the 360.

As mentioned, DVD drives aren't very sophisticated, and the firmware has already been dumped and examined, so it does sound like a possibility.  However, I'd guess that not a large percentage of "modders" or "hackers" (and I use the term loosely here) would be interested in such a setup.

[scuba156]

a better idea would be to replace the DVD drive for a hdd, and emulate that as a DVD drive and run the iso's from there. its quite possible but firmware for the hdd would have to be written and no one is interested in doing it

[namgorf]

Something like this is actually a lot harder than it appears on the surface.

Not only would you have to create a device which would register as a native optical device, meaning it would be sata, but you would also have to create some method of loading and unloading the disk images. its not like the 360 is designed to have more than one disk in it at once.

Cool idea, but it would also prove too much for anyone in the scene now.

This post has been edited by namgorf: Jul 23 2008, 10:29 PM

[Aggressive Taco]

If you have control over the hardware design it wouldn't be very difficult at all to make it look like whatever you wanted....a usb hello kitty flash light even...they are simply parameters in the device.  The xbox 360 would not think it has more than one dvd in it at once, you would simply hook up the device so that it would recognize an open tray command (From the dash) as an "unmount iso and pretend im open" command and you would get some sort of popup from something in your start menu tray asking you which game to mount.  There would also be commands in the start menu tray such as eject which would set the dvd tray open state.

With clever coding this could even be done without a device....and just a sata to usb cable with some very clever driver coding.

Perfect Example: GPS Receivers for laptops and computers.  They are USB devices, however they act as COM devices, basically implementing an emulation of such a port.

@scuba: that is why I think it would be better to simply connect it to a computer - you would need to write no firmware -- only a driver that responds to the correct requests from the xbox 360.

For Example:
1. You tell the driver you want Ninja Gaiden loaded in the xbox 360.
2. You press the open tray button (since it is not on the drive itself).
3. The driver sends the 360 a 'tray open' state.
4. The driver loads a pointer to the Ninja Gaiden .dvd, which in turn points to the ISO.
5. You press the open tray button
6. The driver sends the 360 a 'tray closed' state.
7. [This is the hard part]  The driver must simply receive the xbox 360's requests from data from certain tracks and translate that into locations on the ISO.  This shouldn't be too hard at all because an ISO is in fact a backup of the actual SECTORS on the disc, not the file structure.   Just as imgburn takes sectors in the iso and puts them on a disc, reading sectors from the iso and providing them to the xbox 360 would be easy.

This would eliminate laser strain, disc spinup noise, increase loading times, possibly provide precise hotswapping hacking possiblities, and I don't know what else.

Imagine it like one of those car audio cassette tapes that have a cable coming out of them so you can play whatever you want except you are replacing the entire tape reading assembly.  This is basically the logical way to insert a magic dvd that has a cable coming out of it.

-Taco

This post has been edited by Aggressive Taco: Jul 23 2008, 11:06 PM

[HackerSupreme]

I think that I have asked this elsewhere. Computers and Xbox 360s are both host devices. You need to have a slave or w/e on the other end of one. Or something like that...

[syntaxerror329]

Something like this was created for the gamecube awhile back so there are people smart enough to do it.
Here is a link > Gamecube DVD Emulator/IDE Hard Drive Adapter


I am actually surprised it hasn't already been done. I am sure the firmware hackers understand every sata command and everything happening. It would be like Daemon Tools for 360.

I would love to have a cheap pc filled with iso's sitting next to my 360 feeding it game data.

[Aggressive Taco]

Any hackers out there willing to collaborate with me on this?  I have quite a bit of experience in C++, Java, and VB (C++ would be the obvious language of choice).  It shouldn't be too hard because I am not attempting to create a hardware solution, not something that will let you hook up a lone hard drive to the 360...syntax has put it in the best terms so far...daemon tools for the 360.

@hacker: that doesn't really matter.  A computer driver can emulate a slave.  It's almost like we are creating our own DVD Drive except instead of going a really expensive and painful route (assembling hardware and writing assembly for some VIA chipset) we are using widely known tools on a widely understood platform.

-Taco

This post has been edited by Aggressive Taco: Jul 24 2008, 07:06 AM

[Aggressive Taco]

Sorry for the double post.

I have started a post at www.xbox-hacker.net as well.  There is some more information in there (basically a to-do list)

link: http://www.xboxhacker.net/index.php?topic=10064.0

-Taco