Just Uber

First of all the sombre warning. Don’t rush into this, read around. Use this article as a basic guide and check around on the ‘net for more info to pad it out. You can totally knacker your Xbox by softmodding it if you’re not careful. This is my experience of having a bash with one Xbox. YMMV and you take full responsibility for all of this!

To save headaches later, I’ll give you a list of everything you need now. The nature of some of this software is a bit dubious, and I’ll only link to anything I know to be legal. Don’t worry though, there is enough info here for you to figure out what you need…

Psst – I’ve also included the stuff you’ll need to install a bigger hard drive in the next tutorial. These items have an asterisk * next to them. If you simply want to softmod your Xbox then you can ignore them.

1) USB to Xbox cable
2) Torx 10 & Torx 20 screwdrivers *
3) Blank CDs and a CD rewriter *
4) PC with Windows XP (Just to set it up, Linux is fine for the day to day running)
5) Large hard disk drive *
6) Action Replay for Xbox software (Search the net)
7) Microsoft USB View
SID5 Softmod Installer
9) UnleashX (If you want to use a drive bigger than 137 GB) *
10) xboxhdm 1.9 *
11) Compiled copy of the Xbox Media Centre (XBMC)
12) Original copy of the old ‘Splinter Cell’ Xbox game

Phew, OK – Lets get started!

Install the Action Reply software onto your Windows XP computer but don’t start it yet.

Turn on the Xbox and insert your homebuilt Xbox USB cable with the USB memory stick attached into the Xbox. Navigate to memory settings on the dashboard. The Xbox should display a message indicating that it has formatted your memory card.

Remove the USB stick from the Xbox USB cable and insert it into your Windows XP computer.

Run the Microsoft USB View executable. Locate the USB stick that you just inserted and locate plug in usb stick and locate the idVendor and idProduct settings.

Now navigate to the folder in which your Action replay installed and locate the drivers subfolder. In it you should find a file called xbreader.inf

Check out the format of the file. You will notice a section called Devices (just like the example below). You need to ‘con’ Action Replay into believing that your USB stick is an Xbox memory card device, and you’re going to do this by inserting the idVendor and idProduct settings you discovered earlier into this file.

Insert the last four digits of the idVendor (VID) and idProduct (PID) codes into file as show below. In this example my VID is 07AB and my PID FCF6 (Although yours will more than likely be different)

[_Devices]
%S_DeviceDesc1%=_Install1, USB\VID_07AB&PID_FCF6

OK, so if everything worked out OK you should be able to open up the Action Replay software and see your USB stick as an Xbox memory card. If it didn’t work, check that you followed the previous steps correctly. If it still won’t work you may have found a USB stick that doesn’t like being treated like this. Try another one.

You now need to take two files from the softmod installer kit you should have found earlier. These are SID5.Installer & SID5.Loader.SplinterCell.PAL. Copy them to your USB stick using the Action Replay installer.

Remove the USB stick from the computer and reinsert it into the XBox USB cable which is should still be connected to your Xbox.

Behold! You have now reached the step of reckoning!

To make your life easier, it’s suggested that you use the latest version of the Xbox dashboard. My fingers hurt, so I’m not going to tell you exactly how to do that (it’s covered on a thousand sites on the ‘net) but make sure you have version 1.00.5960.01 installed. If you don’t insert a game like Halo 2 and it should update it for you.

If you’re happy with how everything is going, then now is the time to copy the specially crafted files from your USB stick to the Xbox hard disk drive. You can do this in the Xbox dashboard.

Now start the Splinter Cell game selecting the save game called LINUX. Select a checkpoint.

Your Xbox will now restart. Don’t worry if the screen goes black. It may take 15 seconds or so for it to do anything. If all goes well, you should see the softmod start screen. Hurrah!

Before you do anything else backup your C drive, Eeeprom and MS from the backup menu. Now set the network settings and FTP the whole backup file to your PC where it’s snug and safe. If you screw your Xbox up now, you have much more chance of recovering it if you have these files.

Finally you can install the softmod. If I remember correctly I chose hacked dash/softmod dash option with an EvolutionX dashboard. You should have received a PDF as part of your softmod package so check out the description of what each option does to ensure you get what you want.

When the installer has finished, you can restart your Xbox. It should now start up to the EvolutionX or UnleashX dashboard (depending on your choice).

To get the Xbox Media Centre application working, simply upload it to E/Apps and restart the Xbox. Now when you navigate to the Applications menu on the dashboard it should start up the Media Centre.

Once you have established that XBMC is working correctly, changing the configuration of a few files will make it the default dash. You should find a _tools folder inside the XBMC distribution with a couple of files inside it. Locate the .xbe file which starts your current dashboard. Mine is E/evoxdash.xbe. Rename one .xbe file in the _tools folder to evoxdash.xbe and the config file to evoxdash.cfg. Edit evoxdash.cfg so that it contains one line containing the location of the XBMC dash. For instance:

E:\Apps\XBMC\default.xbe

Rename the original evoxdash.xbe file (the one on the Xbox at E:\ ) to evoxdash.xbe.old, and upload your new evoxdash.xbe and evoxdash.cfg files in it’s place.

You should now be able to reboot and the XBMC app should boot as you dashboard. Don’t panic if something goes wrong. Simply turn the Xbox off, and turn it back on again by pressing the CD Eject button as opposed to the power button. This will get you back into the original softmod dash where you can revert any changes you have made via the built in FTP server.

Right then. I’m knackered now, so can’t be bothered to write the ‘how to stuff in a massive hard disk drive’ article. I’ll write it up later in a separate post so until then – have fun – and remember, if you bugger this up it wasn’t my fault!

Post to del.icio.us

Post to Slashdot

Digg this

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 31st, 2008 at 11:45 pm and is filed under Tags: hardware, XBMC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.