New unmodable 360 has arrived!

witnessmenow

as above, very large thread about it here

Here's a summary of the thread:

• New type of phillips drive that does not let you read the firmware
• At first they were putting them into consoles when they were repairing them, now new 360s are being found with them
• Doesn't seem there is anyway to get around it at the moment (mod chip or otherwise)

I can confirm the worst: These type drives are in xboxs being sold in Ireland, tried to flash an new xbox today and was unable to read the firmware on the drive (same as all in that forum)

There is a way to tell if you have that drive before you brake the warranty seal. If you take the faceplate off and look through the hole above the sync button you should be able to see two wires, if they are yellow, kiss your chance of modding that xbox goodbye! (its a pity i didn't know about this before i broke the seal on this one:()

Any one else come across these yet?

Nick_oliveri

Who bought it? Wasnt you was it? If so... thats nasty.

Im actually kind of amazed at the fact most of the focus is being put on running backups other than homebrew or a modified kernel. (XBMC360;) )

I was pure raging when GTA4 was leaked, knew someone with it. I wanted to slap him silly..... Anyhoo, people seem to be convinced that the firmware is read only! (if thats possible)

witnessmenow

I dont think homebrew is an option at the moment. The only thing flashing the drive gets around is it checking to see if its an origianl or not, it still needs to be signed in a certain way, and as there is no way to sign your own isos homebrew is not an option. (take all the above as afaik, if somebody know otherwise please correct me)

Actually if it was read only it would be so bad, you could read the firmware and replace it with a diffrent drive... for some reason people think this is write only! As i said i was unsuccesful in my attempts to get the drive into a state where i could read or write the firmware.

Its not my 360, its a friend of mine, I feel awful bad though as i told him to buy it as i would be able to flash it "piece of cake" ... i guess there's no cake here either.

weeder

i got one of these drives last week in gamestop

Calibos

This was something that always annoyed me. The 360 was hackable enough to run game backups, that really hurt MS's bottom line and yet not hackable enough to run the kind of Homebrew (XBMC360) that would have 360's flying off the shelves and $$$ flowing into MS's pockets.

How much 360 hardware and copies of MCE have they sold off the back of the 360 extender abilities.

Sure they wouldn't sell any copies of MCE if XBMC360 was available but they sure as hell would make up for those small loses with massive sales of 360 hardware and a few more game sales off the back of that, ie people who were only interested in XBMC360 might by the odd game now too.

Now of course they can't be seen to support video piracy and natively support Xvid etc but they could easily do it without getting their own hands dirty by 'Accidentally' leaving a server unsecure with the SDK needed by the hackers open for download.

I can see how that would permanently leave the door open for backups and if this new philips drive permanently closes that door then we can kiss the above idea goodbye, but if this new wall is broken down by the hackers, then MS should just give up trying and open the whole thing up, massively increase their hardware sales and start devoting their security efforts to the xbox 720 which must be only about 2 years away now.

If the 720 was never hackable I couldn't care less. The 360 should be powerful enough to play 1080p H.264 smoothly. I can't see anything 'Higher' Def on the horizon. Sure the need for 1080p on anything less than a projector size screen is very arguable. All this talk of Super High def trials in Japan is moot. It simply is not needed in the home and never will be. We have reached the zenith of human eye resolution perception on Home sized screens with 1080p. You might need the power of an xbox 720 for some new super efficient 1080p compression codec but I don't see one on the horizon nor do I see the need with Storage space getting larger and cheaper.

witnessmenow

Calibos wrote: »

This was something that always annoyed me. The 360 was hackable enough to run game backups, that really hurt MS's bottom line and yet not hackable enough to run the kind of Homebrew (XBMC360) that would have 360's flying off the shelves and $$$ flowing into MS's pockets.

How much 360 hardware and copies of MCE have they sold off the back of the 360 extender abilities.

Sure they wouldn't sell any copies of MCE if XBMC360 was available but they sure as hell would make up for those small loses with massive sales of 360 hardware and a few more game sales off the back of that, ie people who were only interested in XBMC360 might by the odd game now too.

Big problem with this, Microsoft dont make any money out of selling 360s, if im not mistaken they make a loss on each console. Never going to happen unfortunalty, well at lease not anytime soon I'd imagine

thenightrider

Dont be worrying

From c4eva himself and if you no about moding you no who he is

<c4eva> i have found some things that are not yet known about the lite-on, it will be done!
...
<c4eva> lite-on is no longer a question of if but when

silvine

Am I correct in saying there is no way to install XMBC360 or something similar on the 360 yet then?

b0bsquish

Nope, its a long way off too silvine

Snake Plisken

So these are the Liteon drives, but say you have a Benq drive you can flash them correct?

daveharnett

witnessmenow wrote: »

Big problem with this, Microsoft dont make any money out of selling 360s, if im not mistaken they make a loss on each console. Never going to happen unfortunalty, well at lease not anytime soon I'd imagine

There is money to be made there, down the line when manufacturing costs reduce and the console can be sold at a profit. I've never owned an XBox nor wanted to, but i'm looking for one now for the sole purpose of running XBMC.

The trouble is that MS has seen the popularity of XBMC, and has produced it's own proprietary knock-off for the 360. MS WILL do it's best to protect it, regardless of how much the open source rivals wipe the floor with it.

weeder

http://www.xboxhacker.net/index.php?PHPSESSID=ef83a2509aab0673970a7cfbd23a5388&topic=9647.msg66010#new

looks like the tables are going to turn

ROC1977

Snake Plisken wrote: »

So these are the Liteon drives, but say you have a Benq drive you can flash them correct?

BenQ is flashable. Did mine Sat night.

As for the new drive, give it time. The BenQ was unflashable when that came out too.

As for XBMC360, never had it on the first Xbox is it just a media extender? At the moment I'm streaming all my HD MKV files etc on my 360 using Tverity. The only problem is you need to pause the HD movie for about 10-15mins before watching to give it a good chance to buffer. So it doesn't keep buffering during playback.

Nick_oliveri

Tversity is good for streaming but it means ya gotta have the compooter on to do so. XBMC360 would render that obsolete, be a great library etc minus the 360 HD size limitations. The new XBMC is multi platform and even runs as a live CD, im sure they could possibly apply thier software to whatever version of linux that works on teh 360.