Hacking the Xbox

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Hacking the Xbox: An Introduction to Reverse Engineering
Wire Color
Description
+12V Yellow
GND Black
GND Black
+5V Red
Table F-2: Hard disk power connector pinouts.
Video Connector Pinout
The video connector pinout is a little bit of a mystery because some of its
signals show no obvious or recognizable signal patterns when probed, and
because multiple display modes are supported by a single connector. There
are a few websites that post pinouts for the video connector, but crosschecking
the posted information with measurements reveals some discrepancies.
I have done my best here to piece together and reconcile two separate
postings from the XboxHacker BBS and the ucon64 web page at
Sourceforge.net. The original postings can be found at http://
www.xboxhacker.net/index.php?do=article&id=10&page=1
and at http://ucon64.sourceforge.net/ucon64misc/
conn.html. The definition of all eight video modes selectable by the
MODE1-3 signals is listed on the XboxHacker BBS web page. My measurements
indicate that all of the composite video and audio signal mappings
are correct, but I was unable to verify the SDTV, HDTV, and RGB mappings
as given by the Xboxhacker BBS posting. I apologize in advance if any
of these signals are incorrect.
Note that pins 12 and 24 have longer pins on the Xbox’s connector, which
indicate that they are used to supply power to peripherals attached to the
video connector during hot-insertion events. The longer pins allow a
peripheral’s circuitry to power up before receiving signals in the event that
the peripheral is connected while the Xbox is powered on. This helps
prevent a potentially destructive situation inside the peripheral’s chips called
latch-up.
12
13 24
Figure F-1: Xbox audio-video connector, as viewed while looking at the Xbox
back panel from the outside.
1