GPU Cooling To Fix RRoD

March 22, 2010 by Mike Szczys 64 Comments

[Rbz] fixed his friend’s Red Ring of Death stricken Xbox 360 by improving the GPU cooling. Because an overheating GPU is a common cause of the failure, he first tried to replace the thermal compound for better heat conductivity between the chip and the heat sink. This helped a bit but within two hours the problem was back. Troubled by the heat discoloration on the bottom of the DVD drive, he removed it and screwed a cooling fan to the GPU heat sink. That did the trick, so he moved the drive to the outside of the case with the aid of a longer SATA cable. It’s not pretty, but it worked.

Xbox 360 Laptop More Laptop-y Than Ever

March 16, 2010 by Mike Szczys 30 Comments

[TheTwoJ] and his friend built a laptop-form-factor Xbox 360. Their extensively documented process was inspired by [Ben Heckendorn’s] work. The result is a brick when folded up but a good-looking (albeit loud with 8 fans) gaming rig. There’s everything you would expect; LCD screen, integrated WiFi, camera, optical drive, and a full keyboard. These poor saps seem to have spent a portion of their student loan on the build but we understand how easy it is to let your budget get out of hand. They’re trying to recoup through eBay auction.

Take a look at the walk through after the break. If you’ve got the spare dough, you can try your hand at this with our three part series on building an Xbox 360 laptop.

Continue reading “Xbox 360 Laptop More Laptop-y Than Ever” →

Bike Controller For Xbox 360

January 13, 2010 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

ProjectExciteBike is on its second iteration of an exercise bike controller for Xbox 360. The controller takes pedal input from the cranks of the exercise bike. The sensing is handled by a ring of five hall effect sensors that detect a passing magnet attached to the crank. The sensor data is collected and processed by an Arduino which connects to a wireless Xbox 360 controller for output.

This version of the gaming device includes a fine adjustment widget. It uses a row of LEDs to represent the speed of the pedals and has a slider to adjust how much of an effect this has on the game. This is what we envisioned for the trainer computer we saw yesterday. Take a look at some game play video after the break and dig through the code if you have an exercise bike waiting to be recommissioned.

Continue reading “Bike Controller For Xbox 360” →

PS3 Wireless Visual Interface

December 29, 2009 by Mike Szczys 26 Comments

[Technott’s] at it again, this time extending the Playstation 3 with a wireless interface. This handheld isn’t actually a PS3. It provides a wireless connection to your PS3 to receive audio and video, as well as to manage controller data. Think of it as a wirelessly tethered handheld that allows you to play Playstation when your wife is watching the Real Housewives. This is similar in size to his Xbox 360 WVI but the case shape and appearance are a big step up (not that we disliked that one). We’ve embedded a video tour of the device after the break.

Continue reading “PS3 Wireless Visual Interface” →

Recover Borked HDD After Xbox 360 Ban

November 25, 2009 by Mike Szczys 33 Comments

[Incudie] tipped us off about a method to fix a borked HDD in your Xbox 360. Many of the one million consoles banned earlier in the month also had the hard disks scrambled making off-line gaming impossible as well. It turns out that this is caused by having a ban flag in the NAND chip on the motherboard. It has been discovered that because of wear levelling, the NAND will have two copies of the “secdata.bin” file which stores the ban flag. Please note, this will NOT allow the console to use Xbox Live, it just re-enables the HDD.

The quick and dirty of the fix is as follows: First the NAND is dumped from your Xbox 360 to a computer. After verifying the file, it can be opened in a HEX editor and the two copies of “secdata.bin” located. Once identified by date, the older version is injected on top of the newer to overwrite the ban flag.

Looks like this is not for the faint of heart, but if you got banned for modding in the first place this should be easy to pull off.

Update: Looks like xbox-scene now has a collection of apps to help you with this process. [Thanks CollinstheClown]

Banned Xbox 360’s – Boon Or Bust?

November 17, 2009 by Mike Szczys 103 Comments

We’re sure you’ve heard about Xbox 360s facing an other round of bans from Xbox Live last week. It seems that living in a hole, or even in Grenora, North Dakota couldn’t help you escape hearing this from every news source possible. Apparently, this has caused a slew of banned consoles to go up for sale in a buyer-beware quagmire. This is a joke in several ways; didn’t the hardware problems of the machine already make the used market risky enough? Now consumers will be even more wary, losing game sales because less people are buying used consoles.

If you have just the right kernel, and a copy of your CPU key, and a second unbanned Xbox 360, you may be able to reactivate your machine. But how many people have those things available to them? Undoubtedly an Xbox 360’s desirability is greatly diminished if Xbox Live is removed from the equation. This is something Nintendo could learn from when it comes to the Wii (no online multiplayer with New Super Mario Bros Wii?… Really?). So whether you are the one who was banned, or you decided/were tricked in to purchasing a banned console, what are you going to do with it now that online play is out of the picture?

We’ve seen the console emulating SNES games and even XBMC run with the help of Ubuntu. Leave us a comment and tell us if you are planning to just go without Xbox Live, use the machine as a desktop running Ubuntu, or spearhead the effort to repurpose this powerful (and flawed) hardware platform. Will you go out and capitalize on cheaper hardware, or have you been burnt by the grim reality of a crippled rig?

FreeBOOT Gives The Xbox 360 JTAG Hack New Life

October 20, 2009 by Mike Szczys 39 Comments

xbox360-freeBOOT-exploit

There has been another development in the never-ending battle that is Microsoft trying to keep its gaming system closed to unauthorized use. Xbox-scene reports that a new hack called freeBOOT v0.01 allows the Xbox 360 to upgrade to the newer kernels, but allows the option of rebooting to an older kernel in order use the JTAG exploit and gain access to the hardware.

In case you missed it, the JTAG hack is a way to run homebrew code on an Xbox 360. Exploiting this hack makes it possible to boot a Linux kernel in about five seconds. We’ve long been fans of the homebrew work done with XBMC on the original Xbox and hope that advances like this will lead to that end. We want this because the older hardware cannot handle high definition content at full resolution but the Xbox 360 certainly can.

This exploit is still far from perfect. It currently requires that the Cygnos360 mod chip be installed on the system. A resistor also needs to be removed from the board to prevent accidental kernel updating. That being said, this is still progress. If you’re interested in step-by-step details, take a look at the text file instructions provided.

[Thanks wdfowty]