Not sure if it is possible or not, but I've been thinking about designing (with help of the community of course) a new xbox mod chip, one that was never released before. It would be based on two designs, one for the 1.0-1.1 and one for the 1.2-1.5 xbox...
obviously it is hard to find the cheap mod or tight mod BIOS chips since they were phased out about a decade ago, and mod chips are hard to find and never reasonably priced. I got this idea from looking at the 1.6 LPC rebuild chips that were popular for a while. basically a board with pins on it that is somehow anchored into the motherboard via a screw or soldered on.
My idea was to have a top mounting board that uses some sort of transparent or translucent board material (not necessary but helpful) and have it setup with the 29-31 pins needed to mate up with the various vias and test points on the board, leading to a ziff BIOS socket. a header for a switch could also be included for turning the chip on and off, running a switch out the side or front or even just having it internal.
There are several advantages to this:
1. there gerber files would be public, anyone could download them and have them printed off.
2. the size would be fairly small, I believe that all of the via are located around the D0 point on the motherboard. I would imagine that a fair amount of these could be printed off on a small budget. the only "expensive" part to the board would be the ziff socket for the bios and the transparent board itself.. which would only need to be transparent or translucent in order to make lining up the pins easier.
3. this method would allow easy re-flashing of the bios chip as well as the TSOP chip with the included switch.
4. it would allow for easy TSOP repair without the 29 wire method of replacement.
5. it would allow for a solderless TSOP flash, using the board to bridge the two connections using some of the alt points.
Obviously the first question to ask would be "why bother" when all of the affected xboxen are TSOPable. That's a fine question and my answer is that this would be handy for future modding/flashing of TSOPs, and for the 1.2-1.5 allow for the use of larger BIOS chips to facilitate the use of Xecutor 5035 rather than being stuck with iND.5003. On top of that, it allows us the opportunity to flash future TSOPs without any soldering, and in the result of a bad flash on the mod chip, presuming the TSOP is already flashed as well, the option to easily reflash the chip by booting in chip off state, and then switching to the chip - something that cannot be done with other mod chips - and reflashing.
Honestly I also think it would be kind of cool to develop the "final" mod chip for the xbox..
any thoughts? I have not looked at the 29 wire guides long enough to trace back every line bit it *does* appear that they all move up to top mounted vias and it would be kind of cool to be able to hard mod and TSOP without ever picking up an iron again..
obviously it is hard to find the cheap mod or tight mod BIOS chips since they were phased out about a decade ago, and mod chips are hard to find and never reasonably priced. I got this idea from looking at the 1.6 LPC rebuild chips that were popular for a while. basically a board with pins on it that is somehow anchored into the motherboard via a screw or soldered on.
My idea was to have a top mounting board that uses some sort of transparent or translucent board material (not necessary but helpful) and have it setup with the 29-31 pins needed to mate up with the various vias and test points on the board, leading to a ziff BIOS socket. a header for a switch could also be included for turning the chip on and off, running a switch out the side or front or even just having it internal.
There are several advantages to this:
1. there gerber files would be public, anyone could download them and have them printed off.
2. the size would be fairly small, I believe that all of the via are located around the D0 point on the motherboard. I would imagine that a fair amount of these could be printed off on a small budget. the only "expensive" part to the board would be the ziff socket for the bios and the transparent board itself.. which would only need to be transparent or translucent in order to make lining up the pins easier.
3. this method would allow easy re-flashing of the bios chip as well as the TSOP chip with the included switch.
4. it would allow for easy TSOP repair without the 29 wire method of replacement.
5. it would allow for a solderless TSOP flash, using the board to bridge the two connections using some of the alt points.
Obviously the first question to ask would be "why bother" when all of the affected xboxen are TSOPable. That's a fine question and my answer is that this would be handy for future modding/flashing of TSOPs, and for the 1.2-1.5 allow for the use of larger BIOS chips to facilitate the use of Xecutor 5035 rather than being stuck with iND.5003. On top of that, it allows us the opportunity to flash future TSOPs without any soldering, and in the result of a bad flash on the mod chip, presuming the TSOP is already flashed as well, the option to easily reflash the chip by booting in chip off state, and then switching to the chip - something that cannot be done with other mod chips - and reflashing.
Honestly I also think it would be kind of cool to develop the "final" mod chip for the xbox..
any thoughts? I have not looked at the 29 wire guides long enough to trace back every line bit it *does* appear that they all move up to top mounted vias and it would be kind of cool to be able to hard mod and TSOP without ever picking up an iron again..
