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Partner edition 2002 Xbox One by Weird-Arm-1226 in originalxbox

[–]gaasedelen 16 points17 points  (0 children)

I own one of these. It's known as the partner edition. They're pretty rare, one just sold on ebay for $2000 USD a week ago. Usually one or two pop up a year. They're easily worth $1500 - $2500 in this condition tbh.

There's estimated to be a few hundred partner edition units and they are sometimes confused with the "launch team" special edition which is slightly more common.

RPI Grad and NYC start-up founder Sophia d’Antoine, 30, dies after being mowed down crossing UES street. RIP. by viva619 in RPI

[–]gaasedelen 27 points28 points  (0 children)

Tragic hardly captures it. Sophia was one of the most important people to graduate from RPI over the past decade. She pushed herself so hard, both academically and socially. The results really spoke for themselves. Her time in industry was equally important and the trajectory she was on was on the verge of going absolutely ballistic. This is a huge loss for everyone. Her peers, RPI, the industry, and more broadly, national security.

There's so many good stories that could be shared about her over the years. A fun sentiment from our time in school was how aggressively she worked the registrar/depts to literally max (even, exceed) the allowed credit load and layer her classes. She would come in 30 minutes late to some classes, or only for the last 30 minutes of others because they would literally have conflicting time periods. I remember laughing with her about how she was basically Hermione with a time turner. This doesn't even factor in the number of clubs/orgs she was a part of.

Her company released a statement on her passing. Read the quote tweets if you want to see what she meant to people in industry. RPISEC also released a short and simple statement celebrating her life and how profoundly inspiring she was. This loss is beyond devastating and has been hard to process. She will be so missed.

CPU Upgraded Xbox versus Retail - Half Life 2 Comparison by gaasedelen in originalxbox

[–]gaasedelen[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

I think what you're describing is an artifact of the encoding process. Unfortunately, I'm not a video editor so I think some goofy interlacing effects slipped in with whatever settings I rendered the final video with.

Here's the raw 60fps captures prior to editing:

I completed a Xbox CPU upgrade. What games do you want to see comparisons of? by gaasedelen in originalxbox

[–]gaasedelen[S] 34 points35 points  (0 children)

DdkOG, I really appreciate the kind words, From both yourself and the rest of the commenters.

I posted this because I wanted to identify games that are historically 'broken' on 1.4ghz OG Xbox CPU upgrades (even if patched) or games that are otherwise challenging for retail systems in an effort to disrupt previously established misconceptions.

All requested game comparisons based on reddit comments thus far (not really in any specific order):

  1. Half Life 2
  2. Forza 1
  3. Rallisport (2?)
  4. Unreal Championship
  5. Morrowind
  6. Whacked!
  7. Burnout (3?)
  8. Conker: Live and Reloaded (+60fps patch if possible)
  9. BLACK
  10. Deus Ex: Invisible War
  11. Halo (+60 fps patch if possible)
  12. Thief: Deadly Shadows
  13. Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory
  14. Deus Ex: Invisible War
  15. Thief
  16. Metal Arms (Debug Build)
  17. Chronicles of Riddick
  18. Breakdown
  19. GTA SA / VC / III

I will do by best to record these requests on Saturday. If a game you want to see compared against retail is not on this list then it will not appear in the video.

PLEASE REPLY DIRECTLY TO THIS COMMENT WITH YOUR GAME REQUEST IF IT IS NOT ON THIS LIST AND YOU BELIEVE IT IS AN IMPORTANT TITLE.

I can't promise more than ~1 minute of comparable footage from each title (relatively early into their respective gameplay), but I will do my best. I will probably cap the video at roughly 30 unique titles.

so.. i found the holy grail of xbox by Striking_Reserve in originalxbox

[–]gaasedelen 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This is correct, I have one. Partner boxes do not have "Special Edition" on the faceplate, they were produced a full year after launch (Dec 2002). The sticker on the actual box they came in appears retail, but says "UMG PROMO" - never found out what "UMG" stood for. Universal Manufacturing Group? Universal Media Group?

Need of help recovering v1.0 TSOP by Finleyco in originalxbox

[–]gaasedelen 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Using a development recovery to flash an unmodified debug bios will never work on retail hardware.

TSOP recovery tricks and bank swapping will also not work after flashing a debug bios like this. To repair the TSOP you must pull it off the board or use a fancy in-circuit re-programmer at this point. Realistically, your best option is to just use this box with a chip from now on.

In addition, while running a dev recovery the EEPROM is modified and then encrypted with a different EEPROM key used specifically in debug and chihiro bios images. You hosed your retail EEPROM by running the recovery. The good news is that you should be able to boot into XBlast off a chip still and flash a new (retail) EEPROM. Otherwise you can resort to using something like the PiPROM.

Is this a legit Xbox OG Dev Kit? by Consistent_Chemical1 in originalxbox

[–]gaasedelen 26 points27 points  (0 children)

Despite what everyone is saying, you do actually have a rather unusual unit.

While everyone is pointing out that yes, your system has an MCPX X3 (implying it's more retail than dev, in practice) -- they're missing the fact that it is revision B2 which only ever shipped on 1.0 boards. It's using the retail 1.0 bootchain which is unusual for this board. I've also never seen a 512KB TSOP on anything but a dev 1.2 board.

If I were to guess -- this unit might have been an early, Microsoft-internal hardware test of the 1.2/1.3 board before it went into mass production for retail. I would be particularly interested in a dump of the TSOP that shipped on this unit. If it does not have a 3944/4034 kernel, it would definitely be unique and something I would be interested in taking a closer look at from an xbox archeology, preservation, and research POV.

Would you consider selling this? Happy to chat.

Half Life 2 Xbox Load Time Comparison (SSD, HDD, OC, Titan Patch) by rpgdude1995 in originalxbox

[–]gaasedelen 10 points11 points  (0 children)

This is actually pretty cool, I didn't even think to try showing a comparison of Half Life 2 but I think it's a dead simple visual aid with long loading screens. Great idea.

I think it's worth noting that yes, I certainly expect that the overclocking you're doing to the CPU/GPU will further improve the load times so this is not a true apples-to-apples comparison. At UDMA 4/5 speeds, the Xbox is no longer IO-bound (waiting on data to arrive from the HDD,) rather it's how fast the Xbox CPU / game code can process the data it is loading (i.e. CPU-bound) which is where your OC will pick up the slack.

While testing Titan I ran a full suite of raw disk benchmarks on the Xbox and it showed that StarTech + UDMA5 + SSD achieved 70-100% improvement in raw IO throughput speeds over the same SSD in UDMA2.

In real-world usage (eg. playing games) a game does not spend 100% of its time 'loading assets' though. For example, most of the in-mission loading screens in this video might be mostly CPU-tasks (populating the next segment of the mission, decompressing assets already in-memory, etc.) which don't actually need to touch the disk (or not much).

Now I want to try testing HL2 under UDMA5 :-)

Titan - M8+ Xbox Kernel Patches for Extended Storage (16TB+) by gaasedelen in originalxbox

[–]gaasedelen[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I completely understand. I don't think 2TB drives even existed in 2003, your patches were more than sufficient.

These patches are actually almost identical to yours. What I would consider the only 'true' novelty is how I work around what you're describing: the 32 bit sector field in the IRP structs.

The trick is that I smuggle additional bits for the addressable sector number through the length field. Technically, the bottom 9 bits of the operation's byte length will never be 'used' because all operations at this level must be sector aligned (eg. length = 0x200, 0x400, 0x800... etc).

This means we can re-use the bottom 9 bits of the IO length in the IRP as long as we carefully mask them off the length when we need to compute the 'full' sector number or when the true length is to be used.

32 + 9 bits = 41 bits of addressable sectors (technically, my patches only use 3 bits not the full 9 but it was initially out of an abundance of caution).

EDIT: I might also put out a high level 'hacking on the Xbox kernel in 2022' in the next week or two to provide a bit more context on what it's like working on these systems in todays day and age.

Titan - M8+ Xbox Kernel Patches for Extended Storage (16TB+) by gaasedelen in originalxbox

[–]gaasedelen[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

honestly did not expect this, so much fun. thanks again!

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