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Author Topic: Chip For Tight Mod  (Read 86 times)

obcd

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Chip For Tight Mod
« on: November 19, 2009, 01:55:00 AM »

What can I say? A lot has happend in 5 years.

I am unsure what you mean with a tight modchip.
Maybe it's one of those things that need like 28 wires to function properly.

It will be a good soldering practice, but most people don't succeed in making something reliable when they need to connect 28 wires to small test points on a pcb. Don't understand me wrong, I am not saying that you won't be able to do the job.

Modern modchips use the LPC bus to interface to the xbox. It requires far less connections, and the xbox has a LPC debug header on the mobo. The only homebrew alternative I am aware about for that bus is the cheapmod. It's actually a special St flashchip that has an embedded LPC interface. It was used in low budget pc boards as bios flash chip.

Commercial modchip use a piece of programmable logic to interface a standard flash chip to the LPC bus. They usually divide the flashchip in multiple banks, and allow the selection of the boot bank.

Softmodding has become mature as well. The clock loop doesn't exist anymore, and the 137GB harddisk limit is gone as well. Pretty much everything that can be done with a modchip, can be done with a softmod as well.

Maybe you are just doing it for the challenge of doing it. In that case, ignore this writing.

I prefer to softmod my xboxes. I extract the xbox eeprom contents with an eeprom reader so that I can easily unlock the harddisk on an old pc with the xboxhdm package. There is no risk to damage things like with hotswapping, and you don't need an original exploitable game for which they ask astronomical prices if they now it's exploitable.
No matter how bad you mess things up, if you have a working lockable harddisk and the xbox eeprom.bin file, you can always make the system work again using this method. This can not be said from a game exploit or a hotswap, which is probably why this forum is still so much alive.

regards.


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