Hacking the Xbox

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156 Hacking the Xbox: An Introduction to Reverse Engineering Figure 10-2: The unpopulated memory footprints on the Xbox motherboard. Fiduciaries Look at an unpopulated memory spot on the Xbox motherboard. The silver dot surrounded by a dark annulus inside these unpopulated chip footprints is called a fiduciary. Fiduciary patterns are used by circuit board assembly machines as reference points for aligning large chips with many pins. They are designed to be easily recognized by the machine vision systems employed in board assembly machines. Specially shaped fiduciaries can also be used to enable automatic identification of the orientation and type of a circuit board.
Chapter 10 - More Hardware Projects 157 suspiciously like the spots currently occupied by memory chips. Flip the board over, and there are two more unoccupied chip footprints. These empty footprints are in fact for memory chips. The location of these blank spots is shown in Figure 10-2. The next logical question is, of course, “Can you double the Xbox’s memory size to 128 MB by soldering suitable memory chips into the open slots on the Xbox motherboard?” The answer is in fact yes, but the initialization code for the Xbox needs to be modified in order for the chipset to recognize and use the extra memory. In addition, the extra memory does not help graphics or gaming performance. Xbox games are not designed to take advantage of the extra memory, so the extra memory will typically sit around unused. The extra memory spots are provided primarily for the manufacture of special consoles for game developers. Game developers can use the extra memory to ease the transition of games into the Xbox’s relatively tight memory footprint, as well as for keeping debug, performance monitoring, and test utilities resident in memory that are not part of the game image. Note that the extra memory could be leveraged by home-brew software, but the difficulty of obtaining and installing the memory chips makes Xbox memory expansions more of an interesting soldering practice exercise than a practical modification. Xbox VGA There is a little bit of confusion about what an Xbox VGA adapter does. Many Xbox VGA adapters are actually TV-to-VGA converters. In other words, they take the low resolution TV output from the Xbox and run it through a line doubler to yield a low-quality VGA display. A true Xbox VGA adapter actually configures the Xbox to output a much higher resolution video output, yielding a better-than-TV quality display on a VGA monitor. The VGA adapter configures the Xbox graphics mode using designated pins in the AVIP (Audio Video I/O Port) connector. The main problem with this approach is that a game has to be specially written to support this higher resolution mode. As a result, some games will not work with a true Xbox VGA adapter, but fortunately going back to TV resolution is as easy as plugging in the standard TV adapter cable. The original Xbox-VGA adapter was developed by Ken Gasper. He sells a version of it on his website at http://xboxvga.xemulation.com. Currently, he offers the Xbox-VGA adapter in a “bare board” form as well as in a fully assembled form. If you are looking for an interesting hardware hacking project for the Xbox that is both useful and will hone your circuit assembly skills, it may be worth purchasing one of his bare boards and attempting to assemble the adapter yourself. Appendix F contains a pin diagram of the Xbox AVIP.
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Hacking the Xbox An Introduction to
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The US government is far and away t
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In memory of Aaron Swartz
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Acknowledgments I would like to tha
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CHAPTER 4 Building a USB Adapter Ca
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Strategy Chapter 4 - Building a USB
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Chapter 4 - Building a USB Adapter
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CHAPTER 5 Replacing a Broken Power
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Chapter 5 - Replacing a Broken Powe
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Strategy Chapter 5 - Replacing a Br
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Figure 5-6: The final cable assembl
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APPENDIX D Getting Started with FPG
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Appendix D - Getting Started with F
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APPENDIX F Xbox Hardware Reference
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Appendix F - Xbox Hardware Referenc
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Appendix F - Xbox Hardware Referenc
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DVD-ROM Power Connector Appendix F
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Fan Connector Appendix F - Xbox Har
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268 continuity mode, in DMMs 19 Cop
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270 Molex 76 Moore’s Law 5 Mosis
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272 Virtex-II FPGA 123 Visor 139, 1
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Hacking the Xbox

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