XBox Exploits

Side stepping a little bit from regular FlightSim updates, today i am going to talk about the xbox mod i did over the weekend.

Even before the construction of our new home two years ago, i always dreamed about an integrated, networked multimedia system in our house and thought a lot about it. As a first step, during construction, i have installed a whole house audio system which will allow us to access and control music from every where in the house. But I always wanted and on the look out for a system that will allow me to access all forms of digital media (mainly audio (MP3, WAV, Real, Windows media), video, digital photos and internet audio steream) directly from the family room. As part of the plan, i turned my age old dell 64 MB PII computer into a Linux based file server in the basement and started ripping my CD collection onto the 120 gig hard drive that i installed on it. But in my search for a networked media server, i found that the market is not yet mature and the first generation consumer systems that are coming out are either expensive and still limited in features (for example they will handle only a limited media formats). Some mature systems like Audiotron are audio only and doesn't handle video and photos etc., At one point i was about to buy audiotron, but then enter Xbox....

Xbox hardware packed under the hood is really a powerful computer with excellent video and audio handling capabilities and can be used for more than just playing games. But naturally, microsoft doesn't want you to do that (instead, they wish you buy XP-Media version) and made sure that they locked the xbox hardware such that unofficial apps will not run on the box. But then some curious mind at MIT hacked the hardware and found a way to bypass the default microsoft bios by installing a mod chip. Once you install a mod chip and flash it with a hacked bios, your xbox turns into a powerful low cost computer and you can install a variety of apps or even an xbox version of Linux on it!!

The hardest part of the xbox mod is soldering the mod chip, in particular the dreaded d0 point. The moment i looked at the motherboard and the tiny d0 point that i needed to solder, my heart sank with fear. I remained staring at the soldering points through a magnifying glass for a looong time. To make it worst, this is my first real soldering job, though as a kid i might have soldered one or two wires. Installing rest of the modchip hardware such as flash programmer and jumper switches etc., turned out to be trickier than i thought. It took me couple of hours to finish the job carefully. And i was not sure whether it will work or not until i flashed the newly installed chip and switched the power on. But anyway, finally it was all successful and i can't wait to hook it up to my network.

Next day morning, when i first connected to the xbox over the network from my office room via ftp, it was exciting. Next couple of hours i spent configuring samba on my linux box as well as my other xp computer to connect to the xbox. Once that is done, I hooked up xbox to the family room AC3 receiver and i am ready to stream all my digital media (audio, video, photos) directly into the family room from my basement file server and another computer in my office room.

Trust me, having all photographs in the digital form and accessible at the press of a button is going to make a huge difference in the way and frequency at which you watch your long forgotten photos. I watched many old photos that were lying on my computer for a long time in a slide show mode while music being played in the background. Ofcourse, the quality of pictures on a regular tv tube is no where near watching them on a computer monitor (you can guess, my next wish is a large LCD or Plasma TV :-)

Another really cool feature with this setup is, i now am able to connect to internet broadcast stream (at present Shoutcast streams only) and listen to internet radio. Once again, quality of your audio will ofcourse depend on the bit rate of the broadcast stream. A 128 kbps station will sound way better than a 24 kbps stream.

Ofcourse, one other thing i have in my mind for this project is to write a wireless remote controller application to run on a 802.11 enabled pocketPC to control the media player. It will be a cool little .net app. Currently it is not high on my priority though.

Besides all the fun, this project gave me a swell in my confidence to handle other flightsim PCB soldering jobs.

back to flightsim...

sri