So I ordered this Xenium mod chip for my XBox last week. It arrived yesterday, and I attempted to install it. What a trial!
Here are the lessons I learned…
[pictures at bottom]
The Xenium arrived in a plastic, bubbly FedEx envelope. I was expecting a box or something, but it turned out this was sufficient protection. I ordered my chip through ModWhiz, who was an authorized seller as listed on the ozXodus site, the people who make the chip.
I’ve been researching this for quite a while, and I settled on the Xenium chip because it seemed to have the right combination of features. Of particular interest to me was an easy, no-switches way of disabling the chip for use with XBox Live. The Xenium can be disabled from it’s boot menu, or by turning the system on with the power button as opposed to the eject button, which is pretty nice.
Anyhow, I ran out to Home Depot and snatched up a Torx screwdriver set. They didn’t have any like the size 15 I already have, which look just like a regular srewdriver except the head. The thing I got for $9 looks like one of those multi-allen wrench things, with lots of Torx heads on it. It had the size 10 and 20 that I needed to disassemble the XBox.
I recommend this modding procedure to friends. My XBox probably differs from most of yours because it’s out of warranty. So when yours expires, you’re free to experiment. If I had known at the beginning what I know now, the whole install process would have taken less than a half hour. But…
I got the Box apart and located the LPC port. This port is a place on the motherboard of the XBox that a device can be attached to perform diagnostic testing. The Xenium chip uses it to integrate itself into the workings of the XBox and change certain behaviors, like the code that the XBox uses to start.
It turns out my XBox was a version 1.0. There are 6 different versions of XBox and you need to know which one you have (to some degree) to install the mod chip because of the placement of what they call the d0 lead. It turns out that the d0 lead is a very small hole on the motherboard that seems randomly located. I have no idea how the mod chip manufacturers located the d0, but I’m sure it required hours of fooling around and quite a few toasted XBoxes.
Like I said, my XBox is a 1.0. You can tell because the LPC port contacts are filled with solder, which only happes on a 1.0. Other XBoxes have large holes that are unfilled, and sometimes require the use of these extra rivet things that came with the Xenium. I didn’t need those.
I bought the solderless bracket for the Xenium. Basically, you have three install options when you install this (and most others) mod chip. You can use the quick solder method, which is a neat idea on the part of the mod chip maker that allows you to solder the mod chip circuit board directly to the face of the motherboard LPC. You can use the pin header method, where you solder a set of pins into the LPC holes and attach the mod chip to the pins via a socket. And you can use the solderless install method, which uses this little blue arm-like gadget with pointy spring-heads that gouge into the LPC holes when you screw the arm to the main board.
The solderless adapter has a little wire that sprouts from it that is in generally the right place to poke it through the d0 hole. You pasically place the “pogo pins” on the bottom of the arm so that they contact the LPC holes (in my case, they were nicely soldered over), screw the arm down on the motherboard to crush the points into contact, then slip the wire into the d0 hole. Simple.
I set up the adapter and plugged the Xenium into the pin header that it exposed. I put the dvd drive and hard drive back in, and powered the whole thing up…
FRAG.
“FRAG” is a technical term in XBox mod chip install that stands for “Flashing Red And Green”. It’s what happens to the power light on the front of the XBox when something is wrong during power-up. Uh-oh.
I fiddled with the connection for about two hours. No matter what I tried, I could not seem to get the connection set so that it would work. The XBox seemed to reboot twice then FRAG every time I turned it on. The red light on the Xenium that indicates correct operation would flash when the Box rebooted, but wouldn’t stay constant. Real bummer.
I was getting tired, and as such, more stupid and bold. After trying pretty much everything else, I decided to flip the Xenium around on the pin header just to see if the whole thing would catch on fire. I turned it on and, voila! Xenium-OS appeared on my screen.
So here’s the lesson learned- When installing the Xenium chip with the solderless adapter, put the chip board on the pin header so that the LED on the board faces the closest side of the XBox. Or, if it’s not working, just turn it around.
I looked through the installation manual again just to see how I could have missed this, but there was only one close-up picture of the installed Xenium on the pin header, and it wasn’t really clear about which direction the board should have been attached. I recommended the change on their message board.
So with the Xenium installed, I proceeded to perform the OS upgrade and install the new EvolutionX dashboard. For some reason, after searching for quite a long time for the files, I feel compelled not to tell you where I got them. But I will anyway. Go to EFNet on IRC and join channel #xmods. Follow the instructions there and you’ll be on your way to downloading working binaries in no time.
Another weird thing is that I needed WinRar to extract the files. BitZipper wouldn’t do it. BitZipper would show the directories, but not the files. BitZipper has been annoying me lately, especialy with its lack of bz2 support. I’m going to have to write Bitberry.
Anyway, in short order, I had EvoX and XBox Media Center installed. You can now boot my XBox to EvoX without using a boot disk. It’s pretty sweet. Sometime soon, I plan on setting up the SMB shares in the XBox Media Center so that I can display files (pictures, music, movies) directly from my computers on the network.
I’m so close to playing pirate movies on my livingroom TV that I can smell the sea air.
