Well, I'm not done with the other arcade project just yet. I've just gone into a slump trying to get anything video game related worked on. I kicked into gear this last weekend by cleaning up some very old sticker residue from one of the panels of the arcade project, as well as some wood work done. But beyond that, nothing else.
I managed to find a decent (or what I thought was decent) Xbox 360 S while digging at Goodwill sometime last year. It's really rare to find console there nowadays that I took advantage of that when I saw it. In fact, it still had the original hard drive in it, still working!
I set it aside after initial testing, thinking that I was just going to use it as a backup console or maybe something else. It sat in my office for several months before I decided to do something with it. I first started by cleaning it, scrubbing the case as I usually do with thrift store consoles, and dusting the main board. While I had it apart, I decided to look into doing the Reset Glitch Hack, or RGH, on this Xbox 360 S.
I watched several tutorial videos about the mod. The only thing I wasn't looking forward to was the soldering to the small VIA point for one certain connection.
Can you see it in this picture?
This is the best macro pic I could take. If you look to the tiny diode array, there is one VIA that is exposed that I needed to solder to. That was not the easiest thing to do. All the other points were just as small, but for some reason, this VIA was tough getting my solder to stick to it.
Anyway, I went ahead and also ordered the required firmware flashing module that many modders recommended: The Xflasher 360.
I followed The Weekend Modder's video tutorial when doing the mod. I also has another modder's visual tutorial on a different screen, which The Weekend Modder also follows for the tutorial.
I did manage to get the pesky point to keep solder and the wire connected to it. Followed the flashing tutorial and ended in...disaster. Although the flashing program was able to detect my Xbox 360's board, it would not let me get a program that needed to be ran on the 360 to run.
It turns out that on a certain connection on the board, a resistor is needed. All the tutorials that I've looked at all say that you can uses a 3.3k or a 10k ohm resistor and it should work fine. I only had a 3.4k resistor, which wouldn't work at the point that it connected to. Luckily, there is an alternative point that worked with the resistor I had. After moving the connection, I was finally able to get the program to run on the 360.
But, because of the error, I couldn't get the flashing program to move forward and complete the process. It just didn't like the serial number from the main board.
...
Long story short, I had to do some extra steps with the flashing program to work. The serial numbers won't match with what's on the case, but everything finally worked.
I was able to format the internal hard drive and load the apps that were needed to play games off the hard drive. It took some time, getting the app to automatically run when the system boots up, getting the games list to update, etc.
Eventually, I was able to get it to run games directly from the hard drive. I had a few games uploaded to the internal hard drive and they all played fine. I then wanted to test the ability to rip disc games to the hard drive through one of the apps that I loaded on the Xbox 360. I put a game into the disc drive and...
...nothing... The disc wasn't being read.
I thought that the disc might have been dirty, so I cleaned it the best I could. Put the disc back in, and again, nothing.
I opened up the console again and opened up the disc drive, thinking that the lens of the reader might be dirty. After cleaning the lens with isopropyl alcohol and putting it all back together again, I tested the disc again. As before, the disc I put it wasn't being read.
I checked the disc with another 360 that I had. As soon as the disc drive spooled up, the game loaded just fine.
The disc drive on the newly modified 360 was dead.
At this point, since I was just playing backups on it anyway, I decided not to fix that disc drive. Instead, I modified my other Xbox 360 S...because I could.
I think I may do more RGH mods in the future, but not without using a quick solder board (QSB) to solder points.
...The computer that I'm using to type this is an old laptop that a friend gave me. I didn't like how slow Windows ran on this, so I ended up installing Linux Mint on it. Works a bit faster than Windows.
I just wanted to type something out on this laptop without needing to send out an email or something. Why not blog something, right?
I did try Chrome OS Flex, but it didn't work the way I wanted it to. I may try that again on a different laptop next time.
