what comes to my mind when i think about this month is mostly soldering and console repair so i thought since i haven’t said too much about that outside of the gamecube, dreamcast and the 3 original xboxes i’d talk about that for this month.
after doing the xboxes i naturally thought the next step would be the 360 despite the added difficulty of some very small soldering points and on the 360 S systems (my personal favourite model) having to scrape some solder mask off a via to expose a point. at first i had a look on ebay and found one with a trinity board for cheap that had a burn mark on the front panel. i thought i’d do that one cause as i’d go on to say to a friend i borderline felt sorry for the xbox but the day after i bought it i got refunded with the reason being that it was out of stock or damaged. that led me onto cash converters who were having a flash sale on another trinity that i bought instead.
i then had to have a look online for the things i’d need to try and pull off this rgh. finding smd LEDs and a craft knife etc. was easy and rather boring so we’ll skip past that and then i found a local site selling 360ace v3 chips for a really cheap price with a high quantity in stock (500+) which surprised me because apparently the xilinx xc2c128 CPLD that powers the chip is no longer being manufactured and because of that we’d run out of them at some point. i suppose they were talking about a lot further into the future than i thought this would actually occur at given the current state of the economy lol.
anyway i feel it’d be valid to ask something along the lines of “360ace? rgh1.2? why are you doing that? doesn’t the rgh3 exist?” to which my answer is that i wanted to install a viper dual nand v2 to switch between stock and rgh on the system. installing one with one of the nands flashed to the stock image on an rgh3 from what i understand would cause that stock image to red ring when you try to boot into it as the stock software doesn’t like having an rgh in place and the viper is unable to disable it like it can with the chip because what’s doing the glitching on rgh3 is the 360 itself (specifically the smc which is part of the southbridge). now why i wanted to do this when stealth servers exist is that i personally don’t trust the majority of them. (i won’t name any except for my mention of proto later on because i feel proto is cool despite these beliefs of mine, nor will i provide any proof as that’ll cause services to be named but i’ve seen) paid ones using dodgy payment gateways that have horrible ratings online, the abundance of stealth servers that provide you with easy to access cheat menus, the fact that none of them are open source especially, and not to mention petty drama between services that i believe is completely unnecessary and in my mind only serves to make me think that the operators of one of these services caught in the conflict are just one day gonna take everyone’s keyvaults and fuck off. similar things have happened before in other homebrew scenes (see this vice.com article, ctrl+f and search for “DAuther”). keeping the software closed source would make total sense if it were 2011. you have a piece of software that allows you to bypass a load of challenges that the microsoft servers will give to your system to determine if it’s modded or not. of course you wouldn’t want to make that open, they’d patch it immediately. but it’s not 2011 anymore, that was 15 years ago as of the time of writing this and it’s clear as day microsoft do not give a fuck about the 360 servers anymore. a bug in the cloud save system for 360 games has just been fixed after at least a month of game data showing up as corrupt for some users, they do not care anymore and i’m sure that if something like the completely free proto stealth server were to go open source the tricks it uses to present your system as stock to microsoft would not be patched at all.
now that i’m done ranting though let’s get to the install. i try to open the system up and manage to do it after the xbox managed to slice 2 of my fingers. i sort my fingers out, clean it up a little, get the board out, take the heatsink off with an x-clamp removal tool, and flip it over. the first thing i do is scrape the solder mask over the pll_bypass via because i figured that if i fucked that up everything else would be for nothing anyway. after maybe 10-15 minutes and this mrmario2011 tutorial i somehow have the solder mask scraped. copper’s all nice and exposed and i didn’t accidentally cut the trace below the pll point (which for those of you who don’t know would make the system unbootable until you repair it). i then solder my nand programmer to the board (god the yellow point is so fun to work with), power the board and connect the programmer to my computer to dump the nand then flash xell. after that i solder a wire to my now exposed pll point then solder a wire to everywhere else, the post and reset points at the bottom, the clk point next to the hana, and 5v and ground. that goes onto the glitch chip that i prepared by soldering a pin header to the programming points, flashing a timing file, then mounting it in the space just in front of the heatsink. i start the system and holy fuck i actually did it. i’m in xell. after that i take the cpu key and use that to make myself a 17559 glitch2 image with smc+ and the nohdmiwait patch applied. that gets flashed to the system and yeah it boots great.
next it’s time for the viper dual nand. i flip the console over, position the qsb, tape it into place temporarily and get to work. soldering those points is something that i honestly found really fun and once it was done i soldered in the 4 extra points and set the jumper on the dual nand. next is the rf board. i take the plastic led diffuser off the board and scrape a space near the light that corresponds to the third player when the system is stood up to solder the negative point of an smd led that’ll be used by the viper to tell me what nand it’s on when i tell it to switch. positive goes to an unused point on the connector that you can use for this led and after that i just take some time to be genuinely surprised at the fact i managed to do any of this. after resoldering the yellow wire from the nand programmer (we love you yellow point) and flashing the stock image back onto the stock nand and the rgh image onto the dual nand chip, it all worked great.
…or so it seemed to. later on in the day, once i was back in my bedroom and the xbox was put back together, i was configuring dashlaunch. i accidentally reinstall dashlaunch thinking for some reason it wasn’t preinstalled on the system before actually having a config it could use and even after noticing the install button’s current description said that pressing it would uninstall dashlaunch. reinstalling it for no reason seemed to go well so i rebooted and the system wouldn’t glitch. i assume i must have bricked it then and leave it be, planning to flash it again tomorrow. a few hours later i turn it back on just to see what would happen and it actually glitches fine again. i then start to set up xbdm so i could replace the bootanim.xbe file stored in the nand with the old 360 boot animation and after rebooting it wouldn’t glitch again. this leads me to believe the timing i flashed wasn’t as consistent as i first thought it was which ends up being correct. after flashing the right timing file for that system it works great. most of the month later after plenty of use it still works great. i’m happy to be able to say i own an RGHed 360 now because i remember absolutely ages ago trying to load xexmenu on my old stock 360 E thinking it’d just work lol, now i actually get to see it work. even more happy that i actually managed to do it myself really.
edits
(2026-03-01: i realised i didn’t explain the purpose of the smd led so i’ve added a sentence to do that)