Category: consoles

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)

so that xbox from yesterday. yeah i seemed to be right about it not really being fucked as much as it was trying to boot from a source that had nothing to give it. i opened it back up today and one of the wires were magically disconnected from the LPC. so i took all those wires out and done a better job soldering it and who would have guessed, it boots now. since the issue with that one originally was the hard drive, i used the chip to lock the drive in there to that xbox’s key and it loaded the microsoft dashboard once i told the chip to just boot from the tsop. a fairly old dashboard it would seem, one without the xbox live option. i suppose expected since it is a 1.0. at first i thought there would be nothing on the drive and then i took a look at the savegames and noticed an xbmc save. that convinced me to boot it back up into the modchip’s menu to get an FTP server going so i done that and connected to it and did notice the old owner’s xbmc, avalaunch and unleashx installs among trainers and a dvd player software and a few other utilities. i then FTPed over the xcat launcher and cerbios, booted into cerbios to then open xcat and that found just under 2100 files of interest and uploaded 434 of them. i do wonder what happened to that xbox in its past life.

this month i’ve spent learning how to solder shit finally. so far it’s been an enjoyable process and i haven’t irreversibly broken any of my consoles (i say, sitting next to an original xbox that i’ve given the “christmas lights” frag error to, we’ll fix that soon i’m sure…) so why don’t i let you lot know what i’ve worked on so far.

first thing i done (after practicing of course) was my dreamcast. it just needed a replacement clock battery. soon i might do the resettable fuse mod but i’m not too concerned about that. it was easy enough to take out the old ML2032 and replace it with a vertical coin cell holder. clipping off the leg of the resistor next to it and soldering in the diode went well too. i popped in the new CR2032 and this is where the fun starts. so i plug it in, turn it on, and nothing happens at all. after loads of troubleshooting i give up and assume i’ve somehow broken my dreamcast while attempting to replace the clock battery. hours later i make a realisation though and go back to my work area to get the cable i was using to try and power the dreamcast. once i see the plug my realisation is confirmed. my smart ass used a cable that had no fuse in the plug. i put one in and who would have guessed that the dreamcast works fine now that i’m using a plug with a fuse in it. i take it upstairs and it does indeed remember the time now.

next was my gamecube. i take that apart, replace the power led with a green one, install a coin cell holder in place of its clock battery and tear it down to the motherboard to solder in a pi pico for picoboot. as the guide states it is one of the easier soldering jobs you can take on but it is still one that takes time, as soldering does indeed tend to do. it’s nice to have some form of magnifier to help line up and solder in the cables to the board too i found. once everything was soldered in and i was sure that it all looked good i put it back together and turned it on. this time it actually came on but it booted to the gamecube’s ipl for some reason and not gekkoboot (which would then load the first ipl.dol it sees, in my case swiss). i try flashing the pi pico again (fun tip, don’t do this with the pico’s power still connected to the gamecube. it will try to power whatever the pico’s soldered into and it was very weird seeing my gamecube to hdmi adapter’s power light coming on when i plugged the pico into the computer. it didn’t harm anything in my case but still it’s best to be on the safe side with these things as i understand it.) and that doesn’t change anything. and then i realise i’ve forgotten about their golden rule for the wire length. they can’t be any more than 10-12 cm long. the way i was trying to mount the pico meant that the wires were way over that so after referencing this video from macho nacho on the topic i mount the pico somewhere reasonable and the gamecube does indeed boot into swiss. a few days later once the parts arrive i bring the gamecube back in to install a set of green leds to the controller ports. i set up each led by clipping the leads, attaching a resistor to the positive end of each lead, adding wires to each lead, then using heatshrink on anything that needed it. i was having trouble putting the top shell back on and at that point i reference this video from MVG to realise that i put on way too much heatshrink. so i manage to get off the excess and hot glue the leds in place like he does in the video and now my gamecube looks very green and i love it.

now the xbox. and by the xbox i mean the xboxes. i bought three of them in various condition for not that much more than the price of one working one (around £70). so far i’ve removed the clock capacitors on each board and today i brought in the most fucked of the three (a what seems to be 1.0 that’s absolutely had someone in it and displays many a hard drive error on bootup) in hopes of installing a pi pico in there to use as a modxo chip. i took my time installing each wire to the points on the LPC and D0 and then didn’t take as much time installing the wires to the pico, something i regret but not necessarily because i think i’ve broken the xbox (since i right now don’t think that’s the case), more because i realise that if i want to keep doing this i really should learn how to manage time and stress better. anyway i put it back together and as stated in the first paragraph it’s now showing me that it can make christmas lights. from researching what that error is i believe what’s happening is that D0 is being sent to ground which is telling it to look for a bios off the LPC bus but it’s not able to get any bios image off the pico when searching for one there and so it gives that error. if that golden rule from installing the picoboot is just a general rule of thumb/it’s just a good idea to keep cables as short as possible then it may just be that we’re looking at another case of cable too long. i shall keep you updated.

merry late christmas to those who celebrate and happy new year :D

so i got paid a bit early may. after putting some of that money into savings i went onto ebay and had a look for ps3 systems as i had been wanting to buy one for months prior. after a while of searching, i started to realise that the exact model of ps3 slim i wanted to buy was kinda hard to find, at least on that day. because of that, i started thinking about other systems i had been wanting to put in my collection. soon after, the gamecube popped up in my mind and off i went looking for a DOL-001. not long after, i found a black one in fairly good condition with all the cables (the AV cable was fake but that wasn’t gonna matter cause GCVideo), one controller, one third-party memory card and a game for ~£60. i started thinking about whether or not i *really* wanted it, as i always do for some reason before buying something, and not long after i had a confirmation email from ebay for the purchase of a gamecube.

a couple days later, i had just finished one of my exams and i get my phone out of my bag and turn it back on. i look at the shipping status and see that it had arrived. the driver attached a proof of delivery image too. it was incredibly low-resolution and it seemed to be a random picture of the ground. thankfully when i got home, the parcel was actually there and when i opened it i did indeed see the gamecube i paid for. i powered it on and made sure that it worked. it worked fine, controller inputs are recognised, the memory card is too and the optical drive seems to be working fine (thank god). the video however, was really really bright. the black background of the gamecube startup screen was light grey haha. i obviously blamed that one on the AV cable they provided, which i ended up being correct about. i am absolutely keeping that cable though because paired with my cheap AV to HDMI adapter, the output i get from it looks like it was recorded in the early 2000s with the cheapest capture card anybody could get at the time. and i like that.

along with the gamecube, i bought an sd2sp2 and a 32GB SD card. upon loading a memory card with a save exploit and a copy of NiHuSu’s dolauncher, i tried using the sd2sp2 to boot Swiss. it failed. i tried everything i could and it still failed to load. so off i went looking for an sdgecko. one amazon search and around a day later, i now had an sdgecko. this time, booting Swiss actually worked and i could get to setting it up. after that, i beat Sonic Adventure 2 for what feels like the 30th time in my life, and completed a couple of the stories in SADX too. safe to say i’m happy with my purchase. soon i’ll probably have to open it up cause i see some rust on the shielding, but that’s no issue really.

so a few months ago i was wanting to set my Wii U up again. i put my SSD into my SATA to USB drive enclosure and plug it into the system. formatting goes well, and soon enough i’m installing some smaller games. then i decide to add Xenoblade X to the queue. it starts downloading really slowly, i think nothing of it cause in general the Wii U’s internet is pretty shit. a while later, i get a black screen with an error.

There is a problem with the USB storage device.

i reboot, the drive and the games on it no longer show up on my Wii U menu.
attempting to format from System Settings makes the system tell me it’s convinced there’s no drive connected.
i try putting the drive into my laptop, the laptop can no longer complete its POST.
as soon as i disconnect the drive and reboot, it POSTs normally and tries looking for a way to boot an OS.

oh well, the drive was only 128GB anyway. i should have listened to the people warning others not to use solid state media on a Wii U to store games.

so i leave the Wii U alone for a while cause i have no money and don’t want to install games onto the MLC (i have a 2012 system with a Hynix MLC). a while later, i get some money back that i let someone close to me borrow. i use it to (amongst other things) buy a 500GB WD Black mechanical laptop hard drive with a USB Y cable to properly power it from the system. said Y cable turns up really quickly, the hard drive however took a bit longer to arrive. when it did finally arrive though, i was impressed with the packaging. it was packed really well (which really it should have been because it was a mechanical drive but for the £8 i paid for it i honestly expected worse).

first things first, i put the drive into my laptop and boot from a USB that had on it a copy of ShredOS. that took about 6 hours but now i can rest easy knowing that whatever was previously on that thing was very likely gone now. next, it came out of my laptop and into the drive enclosure. that got connected to my Wii U and i started the format. i installed all my game backups on it, that went well. i go onto the eShop to try and redownload my copy of Xenoblade X. it’s not there. i suppose that’s what i get for buying a grey market key on eBay. time to buy a physical copy!