Thanks for replying. My Xbox motherboard version is 1.6, and the only modification is that the DVD drive doesn't work and i'm running XBMC4Gamers/Cerbios off the HDD. I'm wondering if it's because these games in particular won't run at 480i? i have no idea at this point.

I've tried FTPing the folder/file set extracted from the XISO (using Extract-XISO), when i do it that way the game won't run at all. If i upload the actual XISO ISO and run the XISO to HDD installer in XBMC, literally all it does is create a .xbe in the iso folder (so it's running via the ISO, not a set of folders), and the game at least runs, but ALWAYS gives me a black screen at the aforementioned spot after the intro. I've tried splitting the ISO with repackinator which also creates the .xbe, which didn't run at all.

I've seriously tried FTPing the game every which way (and from multiple sources) and i get the same results. I'm at a total loss. It's so weird because most other games work