New XBOX360 be modded?

[akhlaq768]

finally got round in softmodding my new black wii, thanks for the help form you... so now onto the next challenge

wondering if the new xbox360 can be soft modded in a similar way, so games can be loaded on a usb hard drive?

thanks in advance

[chroma]

No, this time its going to be a hardware mod and theres no way as of yet to play games from your hard drive using a new slim, just install and use a disk check as standard once the mod eventualy gets released.

[akhlaq768]

thanks for the quick response, i thought it would be the case...

save me the disappointment, what are the likely hood a softmod being released....

I prefer taking the softmod route as i can do it myself and the console will still be intact!!

[chroma]

nill i should think.

The standard mod is to extract the dvd drive, read the firmware from the eeprom and extract the DVD Key (dvd drives are paired with the CPU with keys to make sure its the original drives) and then flash that chip with firmware injected with your DVD Key allowing you to run backups.

The newer drives have a different chip in them, they use older "Masked Rom" as opposed to newer EEPROM thats on the other drives.

EEPROM (Electricaly Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory) is a simple chip that allows the user to flash new information on to it by increasing the voltage into it and reconfiguring the transistors inside it. Simply put you can apply more voltage and reprogram the chip over and over again.

Masked Rom on the other hand is a simple transistor chip with fuses in between, this has an overlay mask placed over it in the factory and is then placed under a UV light source where the light shines directly onto the silicone around the shape of the mask burning out all the required fuses, this is then encased in ceramic and soldered to the board, it cant be overwritten.

So in order to install new firmware on the newer drives you would need to cut the traces suplying the original chip with power and install a new chip alongside it thats flashable.
A setup thats simmilar to the old xecutor chips in the original Xbox

To make things worse the original chip is expoxied into the board mening that in order to get at the pins directly you need to spend a few hours carefully dremmeling the expoxy away, the only other way is to scrape traces comming from the pins and solder directly onto the board with micro solders, not an easy job for a novice with an iron.

The bypass is the easy part of the mod, anyone can do this with existing parts and a little dedication. The hard part is getting your DVD Key off the old chip so that you can pair the new firmware with the CPU. I dont know that this is even possable at this point as the chip is archetecturaly different from existing drives so the debug calls are likely to be completely different if they exist at all.
There should be a way to extract the entire chip from the board and attatch it to play nicely with a willhem or simmilar, but its hardly a simple mass user soloution...

So nope theres not likely to be an easy software mod this time around.