As many of you will already now, mrmodchips a.k.a Niel Higgs from the UK was arrested in 2007 and charged with 26 various counts including ‘possessing’ chipped xbox games consoles and also of possessing Xecuter modchips.
These charges have now all been dropped on appeal with the judge deciding that the copyright offenses were committed in copying the games, rather than fitting and possessing a modchip.
Although Mrmodchips was probably one of the most well known Modchip resellers, his reputation has taken a few hits recently. But reputation and reliability aside, the win on appeal will certainly put UK based modchip resellers at ease.
Not surprisingly, ELSPA’s representative Michael Rawlinson who has been so vocal throughout the case was unsurprisingly ‘unavailable’ for comment. Probably nursing his bruised ego……
Keep on chippin……….
With Nintendo’s Wii games console still dominating the market, behind the scenes they have been locked in a constant battle with the hardware hackers that just can’t resist a challenge. Here’s a quick history of this battle and an update on the current state of play.
The way all current Wii modchips operate is to patch the chipset on the DVD drive to fool the Wii into thinking there is a genuine game inserted, this exploit has been patched by Nintendo several times and in a number of different ways. First they produced a new version of the DVD controller with a new chipset, then when that was compromised, they came up with the bright idea of sawing the legs of several legs on the chip, thus stopping someone from soldering to the needed points. A Nintendo cost saving excersize that was quickly defeated by grinding away some of the plastic from the chip to reveal the soldering points. A low-tech solution to a low-tech fix 
Nintendo again responded by producing yet another board, this time with a troublesome chip known as the D2C. These new unbreakable versions began showing up everywhere, but it was only a matter of time.
The race to crack this new version was won by the D2Ckey team who managed it with a whopping 28 wire install, this looked like a daunting task to a beginner but seasoned console modders managed to pull off with some tidy looking installs like the one in the image above.
Further advancements with the D2C chipset allowed for a 13 wire install, and now that has been reduced to 9 wires for mod-chips such as wasabi, d2ckey and Infectus2.
To date there have been 5 hardware revisions, named GC2-DMS, GC2R-D2A, GC2-D2B, GC2-D2C and the new as of yet nameless revision.
This new revision that Nintendo have released defeats all current modchips. These have yet to be cracked so the bar has been raised again.
As ever hack247 do not condone piracy, everything you read here is for informational purposes :) Make sure you check out http://www.tehskeen.com/ for all the latest up to date news from the world of console modding.
Found this over at the Benheck forums, it’s a DIY Nintendo 64 ROM Dumper built using a PIC16LF877. It outputs its signal via a serial connection and is powered by 3.3v. The creator also explains his plans to build a custom flash cartridge that would plug into the unit. Allowing you to copy games to a blank cartridge. Seems like a good weekend project to get all those dusty N64 ROMS transferred to your PC, might take some time doing it at serial data rates though The project in its current guise seems to have been abandoned now with the creator attempting a new version using an off-the-shelf USB chip, should make transfer speeds improve at the least…. On his site at http://retroactive.be/ you can also find an attempt at translating the PCB to schematics for a Homebrew N64 Cartridge with 2-4Mb capacity. It uses a 5V Atmel chip to store the data.
If this has got you in a console kind of mood then it’s also worth checking out the CopyNES Its a DIY NES ROM Dumper, in an easy to build kit, let’s you convert a standard NES into one that lets you dump cartridges inserted into it - It even includes an LCD screen to let you know the current status of the ROM dumping process!
A couple of extra links for today…. SNES cartridge dumper schematics + Flash Cartridge schematics Dumper - Interesting universal cartridge dumper
Obviously the original xbox is not being manufactured anymore, but for anyone who’s interested heres a glimpse inside the Hungary Flextronics factory during the original Xbox’s heyday.
Heres a quick historic overview of the original Xbox for anyone who has been living under a rock for the past 7 years….
Xbox was the first console to incorporate a hard disk drive, used primarily for storing game saves compressed in ZIP archives and content downloaded from Xbox Live. This eliminated the need for separate memory cards (although some older consoles, such as the TurboGrafx-CD, Sega CD and Sega Saturn had featured built-in battery backup memory prior to this). Most of the games also use the hard drive as a disk cache, for faster game loading times. Some games support "custom soundtracks", another unusual feature allowed by the hard drive. An Xbox owner can rip music from standard audio CDs to the hard drive and play their custom soundtrack, in addition to the original soundtrack of Xbox games that support the feature.
According to the Xbox Wiki original Xbox manufacturing stopped when Nvidia cease production of the GPU in August 2005, and in September of the same year Microsoft announced that they had lost Four Billion dollars selling the Xbox Console.
The Xbox will live on due to the huge homebrew and linux scene that allows people to use the Xbox as a powerful media center amongst other things.
All in all its got to be a hardware and software hackers wet dream, a games console that runs on PC hardware. Its worth checking out http://www.xbox-scene.com for loads of great tutorials on modding the hardware and software of the original machine, they also have a large and active forum dealing with both the Xbox and the Xbox360
Click here to go visit the full set of pictures from the wiki and loads more information
This has to be the ultimate Wii experience, playing Wii sports on a 344″ cinema screen.
Jon Peck’s friend is the manager at his local cinema, they use a digital projector to show adverts on the big screen and he managed to plug his Wii into it.
He then built a wireless sensor bar inspired by Doctabu’s design, the results speak for themselves….
You can check out Jon’s original blog entry at http://jonpeck.blogspot.com/2006/12/wii-diculous.html
And if you want to build your own wireless sensor bar the the Nintendo Wii then check out Docatabu’s excellent design at http://doctabu.livejournal.com/64758.html
Now this is cool, the guys over at Virtual Cogs have designed and produced an open source portable gaming platform and produced the PCB’s to go with it.
It uses the Sharp 24-bit 4.3″ 480×272 LCD, as seen in the Sony PSP and is able to prduce stunning photo-realistic images. They haven’t got anything running yet but have managed to get it to display jpg’s and colour bars…
- MX21 ARM9 266MHz processor with 64MB SDRAM and 16 MB of FLASH
- Stereo audio CODEC
- Stereo speakers
- Headphone jack
- Microphone
- Couple of joysticks
- Loads of buttons
- Battery pack
- SD/MMC slot
The unit is also expandable, allowing you to add GPS, Bluetooth, Ethernet, Camera, Accelerometers and Gyros, etc…
This looks like a project to watch, can’t wait to get some emulators running on this little baby…..
To find out more then check out their wiki at http://wiki.virtualcogs.com/tiki-view_blog.php?blogId=1
Originally featured over at www.hackaday.com
Interesting if not long-winded explanation of DVD Security on Nintendo’s Wii
Cover’s everything from Nintendo’s original flaws in the Gamecubes copy protection and extensively covers the Wii’s security procedures, well worth a watch if console hacking is your thing…..
The inclusion of the handily labelled modchip socket on the Wii motherboard kind of hints at the fact that maybe Nintendo wanted you to hack the console…..
Running homebrew code is not working yet, but as with everything in the world of console hacking, it’s only a matter of time!
Expect to see modchips popping up everywhere around about now!
Ben Heck has gone and outdone himself this time, in response to an Iraw war veterans request he has produced this amazing one handed xbox controller.
He used an original controller and changed the locations of the entire right side and relocated them at the bottom. Allowing the operator to operate an entire xbox pad using just one hand!
If you want to find out more about this hack then check out Ben’s site at www.benheck.com
Heres a quick hack showing you how to convert your existing XBOX360 AV Cable to output VGA, you don’t even need to open the box! Microsoft kindly left all the pins active on the AV Output socket at the rear of the 360, allowing us to use these pins to output VGA Using VGA as opposed to component for High Defintion output should give you a much clearer and sharper picture.
If you want a more in depth look at creating this cable then check out Ben Heck’s tutorial over at Engadget
Remember a while back when we reported on the Xbox-360 DVD Drive mod chips that were availiable? Well now theres an easier cheaper method to get your x-box 360 to play burned games This is not meant to be a step by step guide for hacking your Xbox 360, it is more of an overview, if you want to know more then follow the links and find out. Google is your friend
The video above was provided by Textbook from www.360mods.net If you want to find out more from him then check his tutorials out at this link
By opening you xbox 360 and connecting its DVD-Drive to your PC you can extract the firmware of the drive. First of all you need to identify the drive model of the 360 Once you have this firmware you can then patch it to remove the media lock allowing you to boot backups. All the dics you burn have to be Dual Layer, even if the burned image is only 3gig, it must still be on a dual layer DVD.
These aren’t the cheapest of things but make sure you stick with a good brand such as Verbatim, this way you’ll be kinder to your Xbox DVD drive laser and your games will last longer, check out W2W.com for a cheap supplier of Verbatim Dual Layer DVD’s
Also check out the video below for a more in depth look at dissasembling your Xbox-360
Here’s a couple of links worth checking out for more information
www.xbox-scene.com - Must see forums for tutorials and help
www.llama.com/xbox360/ - The original X-Box hacking site, full of great tutorials
We’re not about to tell you where to get the required files to pull this off and we don’t want the comments section to become a link request section. Again, hacking you Microsoft Xbox-360 console will void your warranty, you carry the procedure out at completely your own risk!
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