Gaming my modded xbox 360, can i play games from china on it?

[rubberboy456]

I have a few questions. I have a modded xbox 360 that i bought in america in nov. of 2008. It hasnt been banned before and the drive is a liteon. Im not sure exactly what the firmware is on it but last time i got it updated was after cod:mf2 came out, so whatever firmware was available in early 2010.

So to the question...I went to china and i picked up a bunch of games for 60 cents a piece. They are burned and some of them say ntsc on them and some don't. So i was wondering, is it safe to play those games on my xbox and go online??

I know there are ap25 games now which are unplayable but are the chinese games effected by this? If so, which games are unsafe to play? Also, i heard i need a jtag to play the games. Is that only if they are pal? If they say ntsc is it okay to play them? And what about games that dont say ntsc do i assume they are pal?

 

[FAST6191]

Burned discs found in China- if they are half as good as the burned DVDs I see come out of China/what I saw in the PS2 era I would be half inclined not to put them in an already banned 360..... still probably a few things

Region locking- technically there are three regions on the 360 (North America, Japan and everywhere else) but China sometimes varies from Japan which it usually gets bundled with. Not all games are region locked or fully region free, if it is not locked out of your region or it is region free then it is only any quality issues that will hold you back. As the sentence a few back said China does have a 360 model to itself but much like everything in China stuff that is locked out still appears as quick if not sooner than it does on the streets anywhere else.
Fire it through ABGX360- it is about the only way you are going to find out.

To my knowledge there are only three AP25 games at present- Assassins creed brotherhood, fable 3 and Need for speed hot pursuit. This number gets multiplied a few times when you account for regions but it is still just those three games. Current versions of ABGX360 should tell you what goes here though.

As for JTAG yes they can bypass region protections, there are hacks for the 360 but I have not really followed the Chinese 360 scene so I do not know if there are any translations or stuff like that. Assuming it is not a truly new game then ABGX360 will be able to tell you (given there have been no big 360 games released for weeks now anything you have is probably in their database). I am not sure about the situation on the ground but I doubt there are enough JTAG 360s in China for the street level guys to consider them.

 

[rubberboy456]

Burned discs found in China- if they are half as good as the burned DVDs I see come out of China/what I saw in the PS2 era I would be half inclined not to put them in an already banned 360..... still probably a few things

Region locking- technically there are three regions on the 360 (North America, Japan and everywhere else) but China sometimes varies from Japan which it usually gets bundled with. Not all games are region locked or fully region free, if it is not locked out of your region or it is region free then it is only any quality issues that will hold you back. As the sentence a few back said China does have a 360 model to itself but much like everything in China stuff that is locked out
Fire it through ABGX360- it is about the only way you are going to find out.

To my knowledge there are only three AP25 games at present- Assassins creed brotherhood, fable 3 and Need for speed hot pursuit. This number gets multiplied a few times when you account for regions but it is still just those three games. Current versions of ABGX360 should tell you what goes here though.

As for JTAG yes they can bypass region protections, there are hacks for the 360 but I have not really followed the Chinese 360 scene so I do not know if there are any translations or stuff like that. Assuming it is not a truly new game then ABGX360 will be able to tell you (given there have been no big 360 games released for weeks now anything you have is probably in their database). I am not sure about the situation on the ground but I doubt there are enough JTAG 360s in China for the street level guys to consider them.

ok awesome. ya i got abgx and some are clean and all of them are region-free and others are just unbelievable bad compared to the data that abgx has so i guess i have to test every game i have.

question about abgx, if it says caution u need ixtreme 1.4 or more is that just a warning or is the game bad? and ive had 1 game say splitvid is too small is that a problem or is it okay to play?

 

[FAST6191]

ixtreme 1.4 brought a few new features and fixed a few bugs. Older firmwares might not be able to run the games.

splitvid too small- LT requires splitvid but as for whether it works should it be too small I am not sure. Safe is a different matter entirely (I can not in good conscience say it is safe).

 

[rubberboy456]

ixtreme 1.4 brought a few new features and fixed a few bugs. Older firmwares might not be able to run the games.

splitvid too small- LT requires splitvid but as for whether it works should it be too small I am not sure. Safe is a different matter entirely (I can not in good conscience say it is safe).

yeh im somewhat confused cause i have games from china that come up with some things wrong but i also have games i have from a professional modder that i have played multiple times online and come up with a few cautions so idk lol

 

[FAST6191]

Cautions are one thing, requirements are another. LT and LT+ have dropped all checks from the firmware (aside from splitvid which unlike older firmwares became mandatory) meaning you have to use ABGX or similar if you want to be able to say I played it safe.

Off the top of my head cautions-
angles- will say something like needs ix 1.41 or something. Long story short there was a bug in an older firmware (or more accurately the stealth technique it used), you could mod the iso or upgrade the firmware. It is no longer a problem but the warning is still there.

wave- a problem of the past. MS has changed certain aspects of the disc over the years (these tend to correspond with dashboard updates carried by the games). In older firmwares these changes might have been seen as errors (it gets more complex than that but that only fractures things). They never were errors but some firmwares were unable to play the games none the less.
On the subject of wave it should be good as of the current versions but older (official) ABGX360 versions did not have all the wave versions programmed into them and they might throw a caution.

You can often fix isos but burned games being well burned means you can not touch them.

It would take many paragraphs to cover errors that cause coasters but generally the big ones are

wave patching- the waves mentioned above. Rather than wait/upgrade firmware some people patched to an older wave, this you can see from far away but it did allow games to boot. Some P2P releases and scene repacks of them have used odd waves as well (mainly when a new COD game or something hits 3 weeks ahead of time from a random p2p group- related to this I have seen bad stealth used).

anydvd corruption- MS added a DVD video section to allow people to see something when they placed 360 games in a DVD player. Anydvd sees a normal DVD and gets to work- MS then get to see a modded DVD video section which would never happen in normal use. The vast majority of nukes these days are for this or p2p repacks.

splitvid- an old technique to work around an old bug but one that returned for LT and LT+. Long story short the video sections are on both layers in the original but some hacked firmwares failed to redirect second layer reads to the first and splitvid was made. It returned for the LT and LT+ releases presumably as part of stealth (the public changelogs of LT and LT+ are very vague).

In the end it comes down to how much you trust your sources- the man on the street not necessarily having the best quality control. It is not hard to dump games but they are not always dumped properly (often they are dumped piece by piece* and assembled which is where screw ups seem to happen and as we already covered there is a difference between "works" and "worth using if you care about continued access to XBL" (China not having much in the way of XBL means this concern is not necessarily that pressing). 360 isos are something of a moving target (see SS having several versions and the return of splitvid) too.

*not necessarily 50 megs by 50 megs but game then pfi then SS then DMI then video and the like.