Hacking Got a 360. No freaking clue what to do.

[Rydian]

Did some computer work while I was away, got given a 360 as payment. I wanna' know about hacking it for various things. Softmod versus modchip, what will or will not work, what the best approaches for this model are, stuff like that.

I'm interested in homebrew and stuff as well as the games, but if there's only piracy available for this model then I'll have to check out the exclusive games for it to see if I want to keep or sell. Not really caring for the home theatre stuff, since I'm likely just going to have it hooked up to my monitor in my room anyways (at least for the next few months).

Anyways I know squat about this, so here's some pics of the fancy hindu-aribic numerals and roman-based letters etched into the back with what I assume is modern magic that didn't exist the last time I touched a console.

Spoiler

 

[pgimps]

It appears to be a zeypher. You RGH it or JTAG it, but it wouldn't be worth if unless you don't really care for it. it has a 90nm architecture and more than likely die soon D: . So do the 12v fan mod by pulling the power and ground from under the psu connection on the board and you should be ok for a while, maybe do the hybrid Xclamp fix if you wish?

 

[pgimps]

Or it could be a falcon..I can't really see the psu connector. If so it uses the 65nm CPU architecture and the 90nm GPU (not sure :/ )

 

[Snailface]

It looks like an early Jasper model?
And the power supply is rated at 198W.

Nevermind, I was under the mistaken impression HDMI automatically means Jasper or later motherboard. My system was manufactured 10-2008 and is Jasper I'm pretty sure. I need to hack it so I can give people advice.

 

[pgimps]

oh and soft mod vs hard mod. Softmod is the RGH its about 40-70$ to do and you have a lot of soldering to do, but you get JTAG equivalent and no xbox live . Hardmod you only have ODE's and they're about 100$ and you need a separate HDD to run the games, but you kinda get live..its like backups...you possibly get banned for them

 

[Fudge]

A Zephyr as far as I can tell. You can flash it and play burned games, only things you'll need are a SATA chipset and a t10 screwdriver. For homebrew and the like, you can RGH, but that requires a lot more stuff to do, including soldering, LPT port, NAND flasher, Coolrunner (or other similar chip)

 

[DinohScene]

Tbh. it's not really worth RGHing a Zephyr.

I'd rather flash the box and keep it alive with a fan mod then push it to it's edge.

Anyway like Fudge said.
Flashing only requires a compatible SATA chipset.

RGHing will set you back ~40 or 90 bucks (40 for the chip + programmer) (90 for the same + USB SPI flasher)

USB SPI is way faster then a LPT but it will set you back more.

Note on the soldering.
Points are very tiny and are likely to screw up.
A small 1mm tip and a low powered soldering iron would do the trick.

 

[Rydian]

From glancing over the 360 homebrew available it looks like the jobs of most (media, emulators, ports) are best done on the PC anyways (in fact that's where most originated)... so it looks like piracy will be all I care about here, for once.

For flashing I assume I just need to take the thing apart (and perhaps do a cooling upgrade like mentioned while I'm there), hook an SATA port on my computer to the disc drive, and run some magical fairy dust program on the computer?

And that brings up the question of where I can run games from, as this thing appears to just have one of the stock 20GB drives, and it looks pretty damn proprietary. I currently lack an external drive, but I do have a spare GigE port on my PC if that's usable for sharing the images (as I use wifi).

I'm going to need to get cables/adapters to hook this thing to my monitor anyways (no HDMI input, likely going VGA+RCA adapter to line-in) and such, if this gets too expensive I just might not bother. XD

 

[DinohScene]

You can burn games on a Dual Layer DVD.

Yep disassemble the 360 and hook up the DVD to your Sata port (if you got a compatible SATA chipset)
SATA chipset list here
You can use the 360 as a power device.

For flashing just download Jungleflasher.
It comes with a manual on how to identify the drive + how to flash it.

The video cables would probably cost around 20 bucks...
I hope xd (new that is tho)

 

[C-Kronos]

If you're looking to just flash the drive, you're going to be running discs from a DVD+R DL, preferably Verbatim branded. If you want to run games from an HDD, there's a couple drive emulation options that are over-priced, or you could perform the reset glitch hack..

There's plenty of information on the internet, why not head over to xbox-scene and read their tutorials? Take a better picture of the power port, because it's either a Zephyr or Falcon.. Before anyone goes "16,5A = Zephyr, ALWAYSSSS," I've seen a few mis-labeled Falcons, including one that I've owned (Bought it myself, it had the case it came with out of the box, since I bought it brand new at the time).

In terms of emulators and media, that's always best done on a PC, since pretty much every emulator that runs on this generation of consoles is a port.. Same with the previous generation. Also, your SATA port on your motherboard may not even have the right chipset to recognize the 360 drive to flash it, and it depends on what drive it is.

It's not an Opus or Xenon since it has HDMI, remember that.. Also, if you're going to perform the reset glitch hack, then you're not going to be able to use Xbox Live.. You can with a flashed drive, but it's only a matter of time before you're banned.

 

[Rydian]

• OH RIGHT.
  DVDS.
  YEAH.
  THOSE THINGS EXIST.
  Yeah I'm going to go sit in the corner pretend I didn't just forget about that.
  
• Also I checked on monoprice and the VGA cable's $7.10.
  http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=108&cp_id=10830&cs_id=1083005&p_id=4010&seq=1&format=2
  And the RCA->3.5mm adapter's $0.61.
  http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=102&cp_id=10218&cs_id=1021804&p_id=666&seq=1&format=2
  So it looks like I'm good for hookups, since I can wire both my PC (via DVI) and 360 (via VGA) to the screen and use the swap button and not have to mess with the cords since the computer speakers will just play the line-in stuff... assuming there's not a noticeable delay in the audio.
  
• According to CPU-Z my motherboard's using an Intel ICH7/R for the southbridge, so it looks like I'm good on that side.
  
• The power plug has no middle prong, and the bar at the top is solid (not broken), so it looks like it's Falcon (given that the manufacture date is in 2007, that looks like confirmation).
  
• I don't care about xbox live, it looks like I'm just going to use this for single-player games that are exclusive to the 360 (or have batshitcrazy DRM on the PC).

I'll head on over there and see what's up, thanks for the info guys!

 

[DinohScene]

Good luck on the flashing.

If you follow Jungleflashers manual pretty close then it should be no biggy.
Just be sure to KEEP your DVD key SAFE!.
It's your 2nd holy grail of your 360.

You're welcome any time ;]

 

[C-Kronos]

• OH RIGHT.
  
  
  
  DVDS.
  YEAH.
  THOSE THINGS EXIST.
  Yeah I'm going to go sit in the corner pretend I didn't just forget about that.
• Also I checked on monoprice and the VGA cable's $7.10.
  
  
  
  http://www.monoprice...&seq=1&format=2
  And the RCA->3.5mm adapter's $0.61.
  http://www.monoprice...&seq=1&format=2
  So it looks like I'm good for hookups, since I can wire both my PC (via DVI) and 360 (via VGA) to the screen and use the swap button and not have to mess with the cords since the computer speakers will just play the line-in stuff... assuming there's not a noticeable delay in the audio.
• According to CPU-Z my motherboard's using an Intel ICH7/R for the southbridge, so it looks like I'm good on that side.
• The power plug has no middle prong, and the bar at the top is solid (not broken), so it looks like it's Falcon (given that the manufacture date is in 2007, that looks like confirmation).
• I don't care about xbox live, it looks like I'm just going to use this for single-player games that are exclusive to the 360 (or have batshitcrazy DRM on the PC).

I'll head on over there and see what's up, thanks for the info guys!

Yeah, looks like it is a Falcon, thanks for confirming another mislabeled Falcon. The cool thing about Falcons is the CPU glitches the fastest and the best in terms of RGH.

Good luck on the flashing.

If you follow Jungleflashers manual pretty close then it should be no biggy.
Just be sure to KEEP your DVD key SAFE!.
It's your 2nd holy grail of your 360.
You're welcome any time ;]

There's ways to retrieve your DVD key if you lose it Performing the reset glitch hack and booting into XeLL will give you the CPU key and DVD key for your 360. When the demon chip is out, if you plan on going the RGH route at some point, that's what you're going to want. It's a NAND programmer and glitch chip in one, supports a dual NAND setup, and it's amazingly sexy.

 

[DinohScene]

Not on a phatty with the 1471X update atm ;o

But yep that's the only way of retrieving it.

Btw do you know any news on the DemoN?

 

[C-Kronos]

Not on a phatty with the 1471X update atm ;o Okay

But yep that's the only way of retrieving it.

Btw do you know any news on the DemoN? If I knew anything, I certainly wouldn't be posting information that TX hasn't publicly released.

 

[Fudge]

Not on a phatty with the 1471X update atm ;o Okay

But yep that's the only way of retrieving it.

Btw do you know any news on the DemoN? If I knew anything, I certainly wouldn't be posting information that TX hasn't publicly released.

Kronos is right. RGH 2.0 is out, so yeah

 

[DinohScene]

Hmm could be that you knew anything new ;p

I hope that they'll release the RGH 2.0 soon tho.

Hmm seems that the 1471X is glitchable on Phats.
Didn't knew it so my bad.

 

[C-Kronos]

Hmm could be that you knew anything new ;p

I hope that they'll release the RGH 2.0 soon tho.

Hmm seems that the 1471X is glitchable on Phats.
Didn't knew it so my bad.

No reason to apologize, lol. The 360 scene is constantly changing as of late, so it's difficult to keep up to date unless you're a frequent visitor to xboxhacker, or you hang out on various IRC channels.

 

[Rydian]

One quick question here, do I still have to worry about bitsetting? I saw mention of that once or twice, but none of the recent guides I've come across (such as the jungle guide and the recent stickies on the xbox-scene forums) mention it, so I wanna' know if it's still a concern before I commit myself to hacking this thing.

EDIT: And is there still a need to mod or buy a specific DVD burner to get the latest games to work, or was the big LT3.0 update I keep seeing people celebrate a fix for that?

 

[FAST6191]

Bitsetting has not been a thing 360s have anything really to deal with for years now.

Special DVD drive means $20 or so on amazon for one of a fairly common series of quite nice drives you can still use as a DVD burner but the rest probably wants explaining

LT3.0 defeated AP2.5 which was a protection method MS cooked up to detect copies once and for all (no need to reburn or custom burn every dash update and occasionally in between which is what the previous AP2.5 workaround required).
It also brought proper support for XGD3 disc formats. This is a slightly larger than standard ISO which MS introduced a while back (remember that beta where they gave away copies of reach and reflashed drives? it started then but only took off late last year), for a while you could overburn/cutoff on a standard burner but MS soon introduced checks for it so the PC drives were hacked to burn things properly (on a basic DVD hack you can not break signing which is why JTAG and RGH are so nice).
You can burn all old games and games that do not use XGD3 on a standard drive but just about every new game worth a damn is on XGD3 now though whether they need the extra space or not.

Also nobody asked yet so what dashboard is it on? It is old enough to support JTAG if the dash has not been updated past 11th August 2009 (old guide but nice pictures https://docs.google.com/View?id=dnfmv5h_30dw33vpf4 ). If it was just stashed in a cupboard as given in lieu of payment it might well still be good for it and JTAG is far nicer to sort out than RGH in terms of soldering and it can be done with a parallel port and a few basic things you can pick up at any electronics shop.