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[DeepBlue]

Hey all,

I've had an Executer2 mod (v2.2?) for about 1.5 years now...all has been well until this past weekend. Plugged in the old xbox up at the cottage, and "Stranger" from Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath is all sparkly and shimmery!

Kind of a hard one to explain...it isn't pin point sized artifacts on the screen, the entire "Stranger" creature that I'm moving around is now made up of mirror-like shimmering blocks. Additionally, some of the background textures chunk up a bit and display similar shimmering qualitiies.

I've checked the fans, and all seems normal.

The only change that has happened is that I run the HD pack at my home, into a widescreen tv....and I was running it on the cottage tv which is a regular non-hd 4:3 rear projection television. I double checked the native MS dashboard settings, and they had already reverted back to the standard tv settings when I hooked it up.

To make things even weirder...this only happens on some games. So far it happens every time I run Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath and Halo 2, but doesn't happen when I run Rallysport Challenge 2, Mercenaries, POP2 or DJ:FFNY?

I'm at a loss as to what to check next, outside of calling my mod installer to take a look under the hood. Anyone else have any ideas?

Thanks.

[cracksmoke]

I had a similar problem and I found out that if I switched TV's and cords from HD to SD then it would look funny   not mirror like you said but just meesed up and I also have  X2.2 and I found that even though the settings are back to normal  it is still meesed up  

So I found out if I hook it to the HDTV then turn off the settings for HD and put it back to default   then when I hook it up to the SDTV it looks fine

I guess that it must be that you have to set the settings before you unhook the XBOX from the HDTV and put it on the SDTV  (SD=standard deffination)

[DeepBlue]

cracksmoke, thanks so much for the reply.

This is exactly what I was thinking could be the issue in the back of my head. What I noticed is that when I have the HD cable plugged in, I can not only choose the aspect ratio of the TV, but also pick what scan level the tv can work with (ie. 420p, 720p or 1080i). When I popped in the RCA cable, the scan selection menu disappeared....so perhaps it is still trying to display in a high resolution?

Is a big relief....appears my box is still working fine.

Out of curiousity, is a firmware upgrade or dashboard upgrade to the Executer 2.2 worthwhile? My dashboard has no selections for HD modes, I need to boot the Xbox in the Standard M$ mode to make the selections, then reboot in Executer2 mode for it to take effect.

Again, thanks much for the reply.

[Mr Ed]

It's normal to use the MS Dash to make the HDTV setting selections.

[DeepBlue]

Sorry for being not replying to this thread for a while, but I'm still having this issue.

It only occurs on some games, so I've tried to live with it, but now it is happening on Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, so I'm tearing my hair out trying to figure out what's going on.

As states above, I'm getting weird texture flickering, etc. but it only happens in GAME PLAY mode for Splinter Cell...it the title and option screens don't flicker at all. As soon as Sam Fisher starts off on the beach though, the background starts flickering in big large, dark chunks, and make it really crappy looking.

I still believe this is somehow related to the HD settings, but I've tried setting the MS Dash back to standard mode (ie having no HD enabled) and the issue still persists (even in non progressive scan). I've flicked the settings back and forth over and over, and still no dice.

So I suppose I'm looking for someone who wants a challenge to assist me here.

Is it possible to make the Xbox do a full reset back to factory settings without messing up my mod chip? I can't help but think that the issue has to do with part of my Xbox still "thinking" it is in non-HD mode when it is trying to display, or having some kind of crossed settings. I've also wondered if the games that I play cache some of their texture files somewhere on the drive, and that these are being corrupted because of the bad settings?

I'd appreciate it if some knowledgable person could give me some suggestions here.

Let me know if posting a video of what this looks like, or images of the issue will help.

Thanks.

[DeepBlue]

Well, here's some pics and a video of the problem.

I popped in Splinter Cell 1 to see if it also has the problem, and it does.

Here's an image that freeze frames the issue. The first frame is "correct" or "normal", the second shows the first block discoloration, and the third frame shows another block of discoloration.



If you watch the movie (sorry for two things here, one it is dark, and two it is Quicktime), you can see how this appears and disappears, and "flickers". You can also see that when I move around that the issue stops, and then quickly reappears again.

Movie Here:
Movie of the flickering Issue above

I've done some additional testing, and discovered that this issue happens when I have the mod chip turned on or off, and on games played from the drive or original DVD. It seems to me (I could be wrong) that the issue is more pronounced when playing from DVD.

Is it possible my GPU is damaged? Can this be replaced?

Again - appreciate any input from the experts.