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[coolhp]

Good day all,

After months of waiting, I finally got my hands on 2 Chameleon chips last night... and I started playing around with them. Here is a little log of what I had to go through... might help some of you :-)

Let me start by a few facts :

1) Altough the chameleon can be plugged into your matrix programmer... it is not a good idea to do so... I'm not sure if its a WinLPC issue or just the fact that the connector is only meant to be used for the Matrix Addon installation procedure. Still, WinLPC will not detect the device and you wont be able to flash it. Furthermore, you might end up erasing the content of your chip so don't bother for now.

2) You REALLY dont wand to solder your D0, A15, E an P wires to the chip itself. Solder the mobo side but install some sort of header pins (or other solution that might come through your mind) so that you can unplug them easily... you never know what might happen, you might need to swap chips at some point (like I had to do :-) )

3) Although they say the chip comes preflashed with a cromwell bios, some of them come unflashed (I had one of these).. This can proove to be a pain when you start asking yourself why your box isnt booting.


Anyhow...

I started by attempting the Matrix Addon installation... just out of curiosity.
1 st issue... you actually have to cut 3 tracks on your good'old matrix... and that really sucks... but I can understand XODUS's Team's position (read the addon instructions for more details)... the chameleon should really be used as a full blown chip... not some backpack.
Still, I followed the instructions... and ended up with a Red/Green flash....
Since the TSOP on my mobo is busted, I'm kind of used to that... so I started looking for issues around the LPC connector or around D0... but NADA... ZIP... everything is connected properly.

Alright.. Maybe its the matrix addon part that doesnt work to good... Lets try it the right way.
I installed the header pins on the bus, soldered my D0, E and P (dont really need A15 if you dont want to flash your TSOP) onto the mobo, attached the chip and connected the 3 wires.
Again... Red/Green flash....

Hmmmm.... Is the chip functionning ?

I then tried to connect the chip to the Matrix programmer... see if winLPC would see it and let me read the chips content. Nothing... Device Not Found... again and again...

I ended up installing the other chameleon I had... and at last... it booted the Cromwell bios.

Now here's something else... THE CROMWELL BIOS WILL NOT BOOT EVOX.... it is not meant to do so.

Conclusion :

Ended up copying a 256k Evox d.6 file into a CDRW (rename as LINUXBIO.BIN and burn as ISO9660) and thanks to the cool flash feature included with this version of the Cromwell bios, I was able to flash my bank 0 with that evox bios.

Once evox booted. I hotswapped the chameleons in order the flash the unprogrammed one. It worked like a charm. (Thats where all the header pins come in handy).

Side note :

I had a few other minor issues along the way that you migh encouter so if any of you have issues with installing your matrix, let me know... I might be able to assist.

Cheers.

[matic]

i'm interested in your fact #2)... what did you do in place of soldering wires directly to d0, a15, E & P?  Did you use some type of header pin?  If so, what kind?

[Lordscr]

coolhp, too bad you had a bit of trouble, but the way you explianed your problems, it sounds more like the Chameleon is a POS and the majority of people would have the same problems.

[coolhp]

I basically took some 2mm single row headers, took 2 from a row, clamped them horizontally on the back side of the Chemeleons PCB in order to have the shorter part of the 2mm headers on top of the D0/A15 or E/P connetors and the long part of the header point towards the outside of the chameleon (towards the inside of the xbox when the chameleon is mounted)...
I'm trying to be as clear as possible... and I know a picture is worth a thousand words... but my digital camera is unavailable right now :-)
For the headers, you might want to check digikey item S2105-02-ND... might give you a better idea of what I'm talking about.

As far as the female connector is concerned, I didnt have any spare connectors so I used internal audio cables from pc cdroms/dvdroms... kepts the red and white wires, put them side by side on the female connectore, cut the extra other 2 holes from the connector. I then cut the cable at the desired lengeth (depents on if its D0/A15 or E/P) and soldered the white and red wires to the board on the appropriate locations.

....
I just reread myself and didnt even understand myself clearly ... LOL...
...

Let me know if my explanation helps... if not, I can try to take a snapshot with my webcam or something and post it here :-)

Cheers,

[coolhp]

Lordscr, I dont quite agree with your statement.
All in all, the Chameleon is a good chip... its got some awesome features that come in handy when you use your box for debug purposes.
I write quite a bit of software on my box (out of pure curiosity most of the time) and I must admit that being able to choose what bios you want to boot from the front pannel is a great idea.
I do agree however that the quality of the PCB isn't that good (looks like a piece of recycled card board).... but for 25 bucks, I'm not going to ask too much of it.
Its also true that they could have provided some sort of external programmer support.
The stealth technology is slick too, although I'm not too much of an XBOX Live buff.

Anyhow, for 25 bucks or even 39... I believe it to be a good Xecuter2 Competitor.

Coolhp.

[FIREitUP]

do you have any pics?? i would like to see how you did the header pin thing.

[coolhp]

Alright :-) As soon as I get home, I'll post them :-)
I just need to find some place to host them first... unless an admin or someone whould be willing to host them for me :-)

[Flanders1021]

Coolhp, if you ever attempt to fix your tsop with the chameleon, Im sure there are plenty of people(including my self) who would want to read the outcome of it.  Please let us know.

[FIREitUP]

cool thanks SOMEONE PLEASE PIN THIS!!!!!! gl all...

[angry pirate]

I have a similar problem as coolhp.

Opened the three tracks as indicated in the installation manual.  Reinstalled matrix chip no prob.  Attached Chameleon, power on and I get the three boots/bad bios dealy.  Checked everything again, reinstalled everything, still no go.  Tried each bank setting individually still no go.

No blue light- coolhp did yours turn on when you first tried it as an add-on?

On the not-so-negative side, the box still boots okay to original M$ bios when Matrix is in mode 1.

Anywho it's my theory that maybe there's no bios flashed into my Chameleon.  Sorta sux because I'm stuck with a stock Xbox until this gets resolved...

On the plus side, Matrix is a kick-booty product and I'm optimistic that Xodus Team will come thru.  Hopefully it won't take too long.

Anybody figure a way to program a chameleon via PC yet?

- Angry Pirate -

[coolhp]

Alright... I finally got to take some shots of the pins I installed.
Sorry about the quality of the pics. My digital camera is dead... I had to take them with an old crappy webcam.


Here's the chip :

(IMG:http://www.fr-luxurycouncil.com/img-mod/Chip2.jpg)

and the pins :

(IMG:http://www.fr-luxurycouncil.com/img-mod/Pins.jpg)

Here is how I hold the stuff together :

(IMG:http://www.fr-luxurycouncil.com/img-mod/Chip3.jpg)

Now what you have to do is this :

(IMG:http://www.fr-luxurycouncil.com/img-mod/Pins1-NS.jpg)

Then solder :

(IMG:http://www.fr-luxurycouncil.com/img-mod/Pins1-S.jpg)

Same thing for E/P

(IMG:http://www.fr-luxurycouncil.com/img-mod/Pins2-NS.jpg)

Then solder :

(IMG:http://www.fr-luxurycouncil.com/img-mod/Pins2-S.jpg)



Here's a pic of the headerpins on the mobo :

(IMG:http://www.fr-luxurycouncil.com/img-mod/Headerpins.jpg)

The chip mounted :

(IMG:http://www.fr-luxurycouncil.com/img-mod/ChipMounted.jpg)

And the chip wired :

(IMG:http://www.fr-luxurycouncil.com/img-mod/ChipWired.jpg)


Now... Angry Pirate....
You might want to try the technique above... The light wont turn blue unless you boot the cromwell bios so you cant realy rely on that.
I still havent found any way of externally programming the chip however, you might want to try to play with the dips and see if you get to boot a cromwell. Once you are done, just use the CDRW Bios Image trick to flash and evox or another bios of your choice.

Hope that helps.

This post has been edited by coolhp: May 28 2003, 12:50 PM

[coolhp]

Update :

I just finished configuring my chip in mode 4 in the following way :

0       ------

 EVOX D.6

256   ------

 Cromwell 1.8 (Chameleon Edition)

512   ------


 TATX Debug Bios


1024 ------


The setup rocks !!! And I can use the debug bios with the XDK Launcher + Xbox Neighbourhood + XDK Debug features etc etc etc....

I highly recomend it :-)

[coolhp]

Addenum :

Did you know you can hot swap a matrix and a chameleon...
That might help you guys that have an unprogrammed chameleon.
I replied to Angry Pirate in a this post :
http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?act...=ST&f=9&t=59371

Once again, I'm no expert and there might be an easier way to do this but it actually worked for me...

Enjoy.

[fldude2k1]

When u flash the bios how do u pick which bank it would go in?  Also, how do u keep an copy of the original XBOX bios in it?  

[explicitlyrics100]

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