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Games Entertainment

Xbox Mod Chip in Beta Testing 296

Posted by timothy from the matter-of-time dept.
Odinson writes: "Well it looks like a modchip design has been completed for the Xbox. The most interesting thing is that 'Modified XBE's and custom code can boot' with the chip The chip costs $65 list in U.S. dollars." Wake me up when standard X86 code can run on the Xbox :)
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Xbox Mod Chip in Beta Testing More

Xbox Mod Chip in Beta Testing

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  • Linux port anyone? (Score:3, Funny)

    by PepsiProgrammer ( 545828 ) on Saturday May 25, 2002 @01:54PM (#3584430)
    Someone should attempt this and make it easily available, just to piss microsoft off, by beating them to the punch (for a 'family pc console') on their own Platform!

    • Re:Linux port anyone? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Check out http://xbox-linux.sf.net/ .
      They're working on the port of linux to the xbox. Don't get to excited, though: they haven't surpassed the planning stage yet.

      Bye,
      yota
    • would also be interestign to put some console emulators on it after that, your xbox can double as a nes, snes, sega genisis, n64, playstation.... on a regular tv, with a console like controller, interesting hack it would be

      • Re:Linux port anyone? (Score:5, Informative)

        by brunes69 ( 86786 ) <[slashdot] [at] [keirstead.org]> on Saturday May 25, 2002 @02:50PM (#3584597)
        Yeah, just like a Dreamcast! Seriously though, every single platform you mentioned already has an emulator on the Dreamcast, plus many others (oringinal Sega Master System, Coleco...), plus it runs Linux and NetBSD and can play DivX files and VCD's and MP3s, and is only 50 bucks!
        • How do you do DivX on the Dreamcast? That would rock (considering I few over 100 of them)!

          I know you can do mpeg files (Ep2 on TV I have done) but I thought DivXs wouldnt work
        • The only problem being actually FINDING a dreamcast for 50 bucks. Enough people know that this is a great deal that virtually noone has them for this price. EBworld was (and still is)selling USED dreamcasts for 70 dollars a pop. This is without any games or any other such things. If you can actually FIND a (working) Dreamcast for 50 dollars, I would be happy to buy it from you for 60. (Despite the fact that I already own one)
    • ...but, what family do you know that would be able to sit down in front of any current Linux distro and find it useful?

      I know this was modded "funny", so I'm hoping you weren't serious, but I'm just trying to be realistic here for all the "LINUX ON EVERYTHING!" retards out there.

      - A.P.
  • for me to buy an xbox. 199 price and mod chips on the horizon, is there anything better?

    Yes there is, Halo for the PC... the absence of which is going to force me to buy an xbox.
    • And it is called "Tribes 2". Even has a linux port.
    • for me to buy an xbox. 199 price and mod chips on the horizon, is there anything better?

      But why?

      You clearly have a computer - how else do you post to /.. Do you need another one? Well, buy a dual processor one on ebay, much better.

      What to improve your skills? Get a Dreamcast - dirt cheap second hand - or a PS2. At least then you're just not churning out more ia32 code.

    • I totally agree with you. If you thought you might buy an X-box anyway, you really should do it now. There won't be another price drop for a while, but the longer you wait, the more time MS will have to streamline their manufacturing process and lower production costs. If you hit them now, their loss on the unit will be at its higherst.

      Another thing to consider is that MS will probably try to tweak future X-box wiring to disable the current modchips. Sure, modchip makers will eventually adapt, but it will be a source of FUD against the whole practice of chip-modding. Basically, what I'm saying is that X-boxes will never be easier to crack than they are now. That's another reason to buy one now. The only problem with the plan is resisting the urge to buy games for it while you're waiting for the right modchip and software to come along. Still, it's possible. Just buy it, stick it in your closet, and take it out when you can cheaply modify it into a living room Linux machine / DivX movie player / downloaded-games machine. Hey, it will cost $199 when all this stuff is ready, and it costs $199 now. Just buy it now!

  • Dirt cheap (Score:2, Funny)

    by HellHobbit ( 580007 )
    200$ for the Xbox, 100$ for the Modchip, Dunno how much for the DVD writer and DVD-Roms...

    Guess I'll stick with originals :/

    Anonymous Cowards blow.

  • "Only 29 easy to solder wires" (Score:5, Funny)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Saturday May 25, 2002 @01:59PM (#3584447) Homepage
    You have to really like soldering to do this.
    • All wiring points are VERY easy - no IC's to solder to - all presoldered pads.
    • You have to really like soldering to do this.

      Don't be such a puss. Did you look at the photos? This mod doesn't involve cutting tiny PCB traces and reworking fine pitch ICs. All the connections are to clearly marked vias which already have solder plating. Just press each wire to the board at the point shown in the photo, and heat it up. Takes a couple seconds to connect each point.

      Don't be afraid - go to rat shack and pick up a $6.00 soldering iron. This is not hard, even for a beginner.
    • From the article"

      All wiring points are VERY easy - no IC's to solder to - all presoldered pads.

      Anyone knows what an IC is?
      • anyone knows what an IC is?

        IC == Integrated Circuit, the little (or big) black things with all the little tiny pins. they're tough to solder to, unless you've had some practice.
      • It's an Integrated Circuit. Basically, integrated circuits are little silicon things wrapped in plastic with pins on them that perform a specific task, instead of the manufacturer having to make a circuit to do that specific task. Plus, most IC's are only a few cents, making it much cheaper than buying the wires, resistors, capacitors, and what-have-you to make up the circuit.

        Visually, IC's are those little black things with pins on them.

  • Linux on the xbox? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This could be helpful for the Xbox linux project [sourceforge.net], if x86 code could be run then it will be easy to complete this project.
    • But those people always make it for the money...

      It's the same like people hacking around SIM-Lock here in Europe to get cheap phones that are no longer bound to a specific service-provider.

      I think it's sad, because I would be way more interested in the technical aspects of phones and maybe the X-Box's internals than in the stupid mod-chip itself.

      In the X-Box case I would be interested in how they manage to modify the X-Box: Do they alter some bits on the BUS while the X-Box asks for it's identity or is this just a ROM which's contents somehow get executed upon boot? (Or both?)

      [The same holds for the phones, I really don't like expensive closed-source software, I want descriptions of serial protocols et al...]

      And when you look at those chips: These people know *a* *lot* about the X-Box's internals and it would be absolutely trivial for them to make Linux/NetBSD/WinXP/DOS run on a XBox.
  • Well, it DOES have an Intel processor (Celeron I think).

    Therefore, "standard" x86 code should run just fine.

    One only runs into problems when trying to do stuff with the rest of the hardware, since, I imagine, the I/O ports would be different, the memory map is probably different, etc.
    • Nvidia Make a EV6 bus Nforce chipset for the Athlon.

      The Xbox has a GTL+ bus Nforce chipset.

      The logic on both are the same, the only differance is the main CPU-RAM-chipset bus type.

      I think even the joystick ports on the Xbox are just USB ports with a different plug on it.

      AFAIK all that needs hacking to load a X86 OS onto it would be its ROM BIOS. Mind you I'd assume only X96 OSes that support the NForce chipset would work.

      Which I assume most of the current ones, that is if Nvidia wants to sell many Athlon chipsets.

      Yes it would be good to turn a XBox into a x-box, especially with MS subsidising the cost of each Xbos by $200 or something.

  • Could we use this to make a render farm? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by pubjames ( 468013 ) on Saturday May 25, 2002 @02:10PM (#3584479)

    Could you use this to make a graphics render farm? A rack of 25 X-Boxes all running Linux - let me see that would cost just $5,000 for the X-Boxes - the same as a high-end graphics PC. That would be sweet - you'd have your own powerful personal render farm and the warm feeling inside from knowing that you've cost Microsoft over a couple of thousand bucks.
    • Good video cards are completely useless for render farms.

      Render farms don't do anything in RealTime, and need much much higher quality than an NVidia can put out (shortcuts in logic to up the FPS above 0.01)
      • You're wrong about render farms and video cards. The GPU's on 3d accelerators can be used by software to do vertex calculations and whatnot faster than a cpu on its own.

        High-end workstations are usually fairly specialised, but if you're planning on building a farm of pc's, gpu's in those machines can make a world of difference.

      • Not the GPU, the CPU (Score:4, Informative)

        by crisco ( 4669 ) on Saturday May 25, 2002 @04:05PM (#3584851) Homepage
        I don't think he's talking about using the 3D chip for a render farm but the CPUs. 25 733 MHz Pentium IIIs with some fast memory.

        I think your biggest limitations would be the memory available on these. 64MB doesn't hold much of a scene and texture information and swapping out to hard drive completely destroys the fast memory advantage. Still, they might be useful. How about a video encoding farm? 64 MB of frames to each XBox with a few frames of mpeg or divx or whatever coming back?

        Maybe someone that knows a bit more about clustering can contribute, after all, this is basically a "Hey, we can make a Beowulf cluster of these after all" kind of post.

        • because I remember when I was in college working for a production company called "digital fx" (in oregon) we produced all kinds of really complex animations mostly on amiga computers (some running lightwave) - the most memory we had in any machine was 96 megs of ram - most of the computers just had 16 fast.

          The most complex scene we made was a chessboard on a coffee table with the camera rotating around some chess pieces that were playing a game - as I recall it took around 72 megs to render and that includes memory needed for the OS.

          I think if it was done right 64 megs would be more then enough for most television type applications.
          • I think if it was done right 64 megs would be more then enough for most television type applications.

            Be careful there - wild statements like that tend to come back to haunt you years later.

            Besides, 640K should be enough for anybody.

      • GPU Useless - Maybe Not!? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by slithytove ( 73811 ) on Saturday May 25, 2002 @05:24PM (#3585096) Homepage
        The Xbox has a unified memory architecture, which for those who don't know, means that the cpu and gpu share the same 64M.
        Furthermore, the GPU in the Xbox, like the Geforce4, has two programmable vector units. I'm not an Xbox developer, and I havent written any vertex programs yet, but I think it may be possible to use them in custom HPC apps because of the unified mem.
        The limiting factor in using Xboxes as cluster nodes to me is the 64M of ram, but there is a spot for another RAM chip (which is used in the Xbox dev kit), so that may be correctable.
        As to whether just the 700Mhz cpu, ram, hd and nic are worth it for clustering at $200, I havent done the math, but I would certainly guess so. I cant think of any system I could buy a bunch of identicals of for $200 a piece regardless of speed.
      • need much much higher quality than an NVidia can put out

        It's more about technique than quality. 3-D hardware cranks out texture-mapped triangles. Rendered films tend to use raytracing and/or radiosity to get more interesting shapes and more realistic lighting. Rendering farms also spend plenty of cycles on physics simulations -- rendering water or smoke or flame involves as much particle simulation as it involves thinking about pixels.

        --Patrick

    • Remember, you also need the 65$ per chip -- makes it closer (with tax) to about 7000$ (tax on xbox, shipping for mod chip).. not to mention the fun hours of tearing apart 25 xboxes.

      Of course, to each his own :)
    • and the warm feeling inside from knowing that you've cost Microsoft over a couple of thousand bucks.

      No, that's just the CPUs warming up...

  • Notice of Cease and Desist of practices (Score:5, Funny)

    by Netw0rkAssh0liates ( 544345 ) on Saturday May 25, 2002 @02:16PM (#3584490) Homepage

    Dear Timothy and everyone else,

    I consider it a violoation of MIT X Consortium's copyrights and intellectual property to continually lable and presumably agree to the naming convention and usage of the X Box strictly as a utility of instrumentality with disregard to previous works that have been retained by MIT.

    An "X Box" is a computing device that provides client or client and server resources within the X Window System. The Letter "X" was brought to you by MIT and it is a violation to use the letter "X" in any advertisement or naming convention of a computing device that does not involve the MIT X Consortium and its intelect.

    This is just a notice. If this notice's requirement of cease and desist of practices, within 30 days, involving the terms "X" and "X Box" and "X Terminal" and "X Computing Devices" and "X Console" and not limited to the terms, we shall submit a notarized affidavit and a court order unto you in understanding that you must obey FRC and USC. Thankyou for your time and the clock is ticking. ;)

    Sincerely,

    Bob Johnson

  • Another ModChip (Score:3, Informative)

    by Krilomir ( 29904 ) on Saturday May 25, 2002 @02:39PM (#3584550)
    The Xtender [xtender.info]!

    This one is also real. Heard about them a few weeks ago... Looks identically (Xtender and Enigmah), except that the Xtender has a flash-upgradeable firmware.

    • If you notice the pads on the back of the enigmah board (6 on the top right) -- these are to program the part (probably an FPGA or an PLD). These wires don't go anywhere else, so I doubt the part would be able to be programed from software loaded onto the xbox... so the enigmah is also upgradable, but it would require extra cabling/equipment (maybe as simple as a parallel port cable)

      I wonder if the Enigmah makes use of the extra images of firmware that bunnie found [mit.edu] in the xbox's on-board flash?

  • this is the final step... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by NotAnotherReboot ( 262125 ) on Saturday May 25, 2002 @02:40PM (#3584555)
    ...for people who have been downloading x-box games to actually get to play them. for about a month a couple of "groups" have been releasing x-box titles (some of which they say can be played on cd-r's although dvd's are suggested). however, apparently the only systems they work on are x-box "developer" systems (I'm assuming the console that game developers get to test on) and "prototype modchips."

    the price does seem a tad high considering what playstation modchips cost now-adays, however, you pay a premium for the newest and it appears that playstation 2 modchips still cost ~$50.

  • Modchip? Whah? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Compuser ( 14899 )
    Can anyone please explain what a modchip is,
    what it does, and how are you supposed to
    install it (do you need to make your own
    pcb for a daughtercard, do you need to
    unsolder something and then solder this in
    place), etc.?
    For the record, I have never owned a console or
    a console game (nor obviously pirated any) but I
    am interested to know what hack value consoles
    have in general and in this case Xbox.

    • Re:Modchip? Whah? (Score:2, Informative)

      by zaffir ( 546764 )
      A modchip is something you solder into a console that disables the copy protection. The first ones i can think of were for the Playstation. They let you play imported and burned games.

      As far as WHY... well, if you have to ask, you'll never know =). If you want to do some homebrewed developing, play imported games, or (heaven forbid) pirate games, modchips will let you do that, whereas those things are impossible on a "stock" console.

    • Re:Modchip? Whah? (Score:5, Funny)

      by spektr ( 466069 ) on Saturday May 25, 2002 @04:33PM (#3584948)
      Can anyone please explain what a modchip is

      Modchips fix hardware-bugs in game consoles: e.g. inability to play backuped games or DVDs.

    • Re:Modchip? Whah? (Score:5, Informative)

      by cowbutt ( 21077 ) on Saturday May 25, 2002 @04:49PM (#3585003) Journal
      Can anyone please explain what a modchip is,

      A modchip is usually a PIC [robotbooks.com] or ASIC [techtarget.com] programmed/designed to be used as a hardware "patch" for mass-produced hardware.

      what it does,

      The original Sony Playstation popularised them; they were used to defeat the copy protection used on Playstation games whereby extra sectors were included on the CD that were unreadable by non-Playstation CD drives. The modchip intercepted the protection check and spoofed the Playstation BIOS into believing a copied disc with missing protection sectors was legitimate.

      and how are you supposed to install it (do you need to make your own pcb for a daughtercard, do you need to unsolder something and then solder this in place), etc.?

      It (potentially) varies from modchip to modchip, but these things are designed to be installed by (almost) Joe or Josephine Public, so typically it's just a case of soldering some wires from pins on the modchip to specific points on an unmodified motherboard. Sometimes these are the legs of ICs (fiddly), sometimes actual tracks (fairly fiddly) but in this case, it's "vias" - the small circular solder pads that link different layers of a PCB (many PCBs are 4+ layers these days, both for reasons of size and to improve their radio emission and acceptance characteristics).

      For the record, I have never owned a console or a console game (nor obviously pirated any) but I am interested to know what hack value consoles have in general and in this case Xbox.

      The potential here is an easy way to bypass Microsoft's "only boot purchased game DVDs" protection and use modified Xbox consoles to boot copied DVDs or even home-made discs, such as Linux or *BSD.

      --

      • A modchip is usually a PIC [robotbooks.com] or ASIC [techtarget.com] programmed/designed to be used as a hardware "patch" for mass-produced hardware.

        I seriously doubt anyone have made the investment of doing a asic of a modchip.

        Considering that even a very simple design will cost you several $100K, I doubt if the mod-chip-makers have that kind of funds or are able to recover such costs (not to mention the difficulty of getting a design house to accept such a low-income, high-risk job)

        More likely candidates are flashable microcontrollers (not just PICs, though those are very popular) or FPGAa.

  • My XBox Dev experiences (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Straight x86 code porting is not really well done on XBox Dev. My crew and I spent a few weeks trying to port Linux to the Xbox and we just ran into way too many problems -- including trying to get the Xbox file system to work and destroying one dev unit by formating the drive -- oops. We were able to get a CD demo kernel booted but past that we couldn't do squat - eventually we just gave up.

    I would not get your hopes up for an linuXBox any time soon
  • More usefully, has anyone developed a way to run XBox games on PCs? Since the XBox is basically a Wintel PC running a modified Win2K with a GeForce 3 (and developers develop on PCs running Win2K with a GeForce 3) this should be possible.

    Since the console is underpriced and the games are overpriced, Microsoft shouldn't even object.

    • Last I heard, the spiral on the DVD ran the other way so no, you couldn't.

      I have to say I can't see what the problem with this would be but MS seem not to want it. S'pose it could provide a support headache and damage the image, but can't be _that_ bad...
  • So much for MS's hardware encryption, finally it got cracked. Expect the site to disappear as soon as MS Lawyer XP slap the DMCA on them. This hack will probably help boost Xbox sales because everyone will be getting one to run a real OS them (assuming that the modchip makes it possible). Is that's good or bad for MS, depends. It will look good on sales figures "Most popular console!", but bad on their bottom line "500,000 game titles and 2 million X-Box consoles sold: $ -100 million profit. Uhm, what was that question, 'what are the 1.5 million owners doing without X-box games?', Uhm...".

    Gotta wonder if MS has seen this coming. Their "BIOS" could (and should, IMO) still have a few things up its sleeves, it would be cool if the EEPROM code is self-modifying and can make the modchip useless or blow up the modded Xbox and leave its owner warranty-less? This could be triggered perhaps by instruction codes that can be embedded onto newer game titles.

    Have to wonder too, who was behind the design and manufacturing effort, shouldn't it take a lot of money to get ICs printed and tested? I wonder if anyone at Sony HQ spent $100,000 on a "toilet seat" lately.
    • IC's don't cost TOO much if they're not of the .13 micron variety that you see in the CPU's. Small runs of a small die size will cost a few hundred $$$'s each, but that drops dramatically with larger runs. The designer doesn't need his own fabrication plant and can probably do all the prototyping necessary for a few thousand dollars or less. Not chump change, but certainly not out of the range that your dedicated individual couldn't create and market them. Don't forget that most of the cost involved with creating new chips is the R&D costs, which is mostly labor, which can be written off as sweat equity depending on the size of the orginization thats producing them.

      -Restil
    • "...shouldn't it take a lot of money to get ICs printed and tested?"

      This is entirely dependant on the type of IC you are producing. Take the modchips for PS, for example. They are all PLDs of some variety. Some guy just buys 100 of them and a programmer. With that, he is spitting out $30 chips at a cost to him of $2/chip. I very much doubt anyone with the resources to fund having a mask'd ICs would do a modchip. The offended company would probably go directly after them for the lawsuit.

      My guess would be these are just a cheap FPGA or PLD that can be programmed by a PC or a gang-bang programmer. Cheap to design, build, and test.
  • Well apparently I was 100% wrong on several points in this post [slashdot.org].

    Perhaps the XBox might be on its way to iOpener-dom thanks to these chips. The macrovision fix and DVD region code fixes especially make this worth the price of admission.

    If this works, I might just eat some more words of mine...that I won't buy an XBox but instead look to places like half.com to get a used PS2.

    Hopefully work will also continue on indie servers for XBox multiplayer play in spite of MS starting their own network. The XBox was *made* to be a LAN Party box. Microsoft just didn't know it when they were designing it.

  • Divx - The Real Xbox Killer App (Score:5, Interesting)

    by donnacha ( 161610 ) on Saturday May 25, 2002 @04:00PM (#3584839) Homepage


    All Hell is going to break loose when it becomes possible to play a CD holding a Divx film on the Xbox.

    And here's something I'll bet MS already know: they're going to sell a lot more Xboxes when that happens.

    With Divx, you can cram an absolutely fine rip of a DVD onto a single CD-R. That incredibly compact size also means that they only take a few hours to download. The downloadee can then churn out copies for his friend at about 25c a shot, as opposed to $1.50 or whatever for blank DVDs.

    The only hurdle to widespread casual distribution channels evolving is that watching films at your workstation is uncomfortable and cabling the signal to your main television is a little too messy, unsightly and expensive for most people.

    Find a way for people to play Divx on their Xboxes, however, and the situation reaches the momentum it needs to really take off.

    Then the shit will really hit the fan and the studios, the premium channels and Blockbuster all have a HUGE problem.

    Which isn't entirely unfunny.

    So, is this likely to happen anytime soon? Well, I think this is what they meant on the Xtreme-Xbox site [xtreme-xbox.net] when, while listing this mod chip's features, they stated:

    Modified XBE's and custom code can boot (This is a HUGE feature - as you'll all see soon)

    I may be wrong but I'm pretty sure that the whole copyright situation is about to explode.


    • Um.. I'm going to break the rules a bit and post a reply to my own, previous posting because I've found some more info.

      The following was on XboxMods.co.uk [xboxmods.co.uk], a well-respected site:

      After chatting with the Enigmah coder - he tells me they are at an advance stage with a DiVX player addon !! sounds like fun :) Bottom line - homebrew is gonna rule the XBOX !

      It's not clear as to whether that add-on will be hardware or a software upgrade (is anyone out there in a position to take an educated guess?) but, either way, it looks as if the Divx explosion is coming soon to an Xbox near you.


    • The appearance of Divx as an unofficial but nonetheless killer Xbox App is going to make it particularly attractive to broadband Internet consumers, a demographic that MS is already betting heavily on.

      Obviously, the ability to download films in a few hours, burn them using a regular CDR (as opposed to an expensive DVD-R) and go play them in a more comfortable environment is going to be pretty attractive to people who are already paying for broadband. No doubt, it will also attract a tremendous number of subscribers to broadband.

      This, in turn, will benefit the introduction of the Xbox's extended functionality [slashdot.org] that MS is anxious to keep under wraps for now but that is far, far more important to them than games or protecting content owned by the film studios.

    • watching films at your workstation is uncomfortable and cabling the signal to your main television is a little too messy

      If connecting video and sound cables is too messy, how do you intend to handle the 29 solder points for the X-box mod chip?

      the studios, the premium channels and Blockbuster all have a HUGE problem

      Only if people decide that it's cheaper to spend $200 on an X-box, $60 on a mod chip, $25 on soldering equipment, $500 on a computer with a CD-R drive, and $50/mo on a cable modem connection than it is to spend $4.25 to rent a DVD for 5 days at Blockbuster, all while putting up with the fact that DivX quality is noticeably worse than DVD.

      Me? I've got the computer, the soldering equipment, and the cable modem connection, and I still think it makes more sense to rent DVDs.

      --Patrick


      • If connecting video and sound cables is too messy, how do you intend to handle the 29 solder points for the X-box mod chip?

        As you'd expect, a vast army of techie hustlers, with varying degrees of ability but all sharing a rapt interest in easy money, will emerge, wraith-like, to meet the demand. In most cases these same kids will hope to continue pocketing a nice profit far into the future by selling the same customers a variety of pirated music and movies. Perhaps they'll even take a leaf out of Microsoft's book and sell the mod-chip at a discount today to reap extra profits tomorrow.

        Only if people decide that it's cheaper to spend $200 on an X-box, $60 on a mod chip, $25 on soldering equipment, $500 on a computer with a CD-R drive, and $50/mo on a cable modem connection than it is to spend $4.25 to rent a DVD for 5 days at Blockbuster,

        You're missing the point. The kid selling the modding service and the pirated movies and games will need the $25 soldering equipment, the broadband connection and the $500 computer (which, presumably, most tech-inclined kids already have).

        All the customer needs is their $200 Xbox, a TV and $2 dollars to buy a film or a game.

        ...all while putting up with the fact that DivX quality is noticeably worse than DVD.

        Actually, it can be a lot better than you'd imagine, depending largely on the source material; if someone has gone into a cinema and videoed it straight off the screen, well, obviously the quality is going to be crap. Equally, if someone has compressed a film down to 500mb to facilitate faster down and uploading, that's going to suck. If, however, the film has been ripped straight from DVD and sized to the very limits of a 700mb CDR, the quality can be absolutely great, far superior to VHS. I'm quite fussy and would never desecrate my favorite films by watching sub-par copies of them, so it says a lot than I'm perfectly happy to watch a downloaded Divx of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Tiger [imdb.com], one of my favorite films of all time.

        Me? I've got the computer, the soldering equipment, and the cable modem connection, and I still think it makes more sense to rent DVDs.

        Sure, and that's your choice. Many people, mostly the same people who can afford to buy a lot of albums, movies and games today, will, like yourself, opt for the convenience of continuing to do so. The real benefit will be to younger and less well-off people who don't have that kind spare cash; they'll now be able to enjoy as much of the culture as they want, at no real loss to the producers.

        Although I took the opportunity to laugh at the media industry grease-balls, I expect that, as with MP3, the overall result will almost certainly be more profits as the Warez kiddies mature, get proper incomes and feed their pop culture appetite from official, licensed sources.

        • The kid selling the modding service and the pirated movies and games will need the $25 soldering equipment, the broadband connection and the $500 computer (which, presumably, most tech-inclined kids already have).

          All the customer needs is their $200 Xbox, a TV and $2 dollars to buy a film or a game.

          I doubt that people will make much of a business out of selling DivX CDs. It's already possible to rip DVDs to a VCD, which will play in most DVD players. This practice is common in southeast Asian markets, but it doesn't fly here, because the content industry has done a reasonable job of cracking down on physical piracy.

          like yourself, opt for the convenience of continuing to do so. The real benefit will be to younger and less well-off people who don't have that kind spare cash

          I'm not quite as overwhelmingly wealthy as you seem to think, and I'm pretty stingy with what money I do have. I just see DVD rentals ($1.75 apiece if you know where to buy perfectly legitimate prepaid Blockbuster cards) as a better deal than pirated DivX disks, whether I'm doing the downloading or whether I'm paying some street merchant $2 apiece for them.

          If, however, the film has been ripped straight from DVD and sized to the very limits of a 700mb CDR, the quality can be absolutely great

          It varies. I've seen 10-15 DivX movies. The theater-rip ones are, without exception, utterly unwatchable. The DVD-rip ones vary, but they all -- even a 1.4 GB, 2-CD copy of "The Pledge" -- show visible color banding and edge rippling that's very distracting if you know it's there.

          I have no doubt that people will download and watch DivX disks. I just think it's more about subversion than about economic sense, and I don't think by any means that it spells the end for retail video channels.

          the overall result will almost certainly be more profits as the Warez kiddies mature, get proper incomes and feed their pop culture appetite from official, licensed sources

          Quite probably. File-swapping is a much better grassroots promotion scheme than anything else the movie industry is doing. Shareware is to software as radio is to music as libraries are to books as perhaps DivX is (or will be) to movies.

          ... as the Boston Strangler is to the woman alone. ;)

          --Patrick

  • alt.binaries.cd.image.xbox

    http://www.binnetwork.net/
  • The chips are shipping though...

    2002-05-06 10:30:25 Xbox Hacked? (articles,games) (rejected)

    Many console warez groups have been doing this for a while. The story I submitted even had a link to a video of people playing ripped games but I guess it was to "weak" for the Slashdot editors.

    A quote from a console site I visit:

    Enigma Xbox modchip - 69.00 USD (~47.39 GBP)
    Xtender xbox modchip - 79.00 USD (~54.26 GBP)
    And this:

    Xtender ModChip Specs!!!!!!

    The chip is made up of a lattice chip and an eeprom and is much like the neo4 in design

    31 wires

    Plays imports and backups

    no dvd multiregion

    cdrw / dvd-r/ dvdrw work (certain cdr work too)

    works on ALL consoles

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