XBOX 360 4GB Corona

    I know, yet another 360, sorry but its what I have at the moment to mess and learn about.
This model is a slim but has a different approach than the Trinity I did. The NAND cannot be
downloaded using a NAND-X programmer. Some people make their own SD Card reader using a split open usb stick or butchered SD Card, apparently the standalone SD Card readers widely available are less than reliable in this process.
           
Motherboard: Corona 4GB

Here is a look at the Pinheader the SD Card wiring needs soldered to, Its really small.
Well the connections are strip like so close together its hard not to join two close points.

I took the easy way out and instead of going full on McGyver and making one I ordered a tool from Weekend Modder.com. He has decent tutorials on Youtube too so why make it any harder. Ive uploaded Team Xecuter`s pic of a fashioned SD card reader and a picture of my SD Card after i installed the wires.

I really didnt like the look of the above, Weekend Modder is in USA but I got the SD Tool just over 7 days.

    This card comes with resistors already built onto it . The grey wire Ive used goes to a Crystal on the mobo, it allows for READ/WRITE function but needs to be disabled during the install at different times. I fitted a quick release connector for this. The install was tricky as I said before its easy to bridge short connections.

   Not much room on the pads once installed. Time to fire up JRunner and try reading the NAND. The quick connector must be attached to the crystal and power cable plugged in but console OFF..

I got a flashing blue light on the SD Tool and nothing on my USB adaptor. Some advise to have a few variations of USB Card reader as not only poor connection to the SD Tool can be a problem but USB 3.0 vs 2.0 etc. After re-soldering to the points for a third time, yes if anything I`m persistent, I got a solid blue light on both SD Tool and USB adaptor, windows also bing bonged asking to format my new found device.

JRunner read the NAND perfectly so I backed it up incase I had any problems later.
I now installed the ACE V3 Glitch Chip. A few different points than the Trinity including two underneath.

   As usual I replaced the thermal paste on the heat -sink and combined CPU/GPU.
Fortunately I didn`t need to fit a PostFix adaptor which is another headache with many tutorials and micro soldering.

I recovered the Network IP address using the Xell ECC i loaded to the NAND. I don`t know why but I had to de-install the SD Tool in order for the machine to boot, usually just breaking the crystal quick connection allows for a boot, no such luck. I did get a panic on as I needed Xell to boot to give me that CPU key so was relieved it did. 

I now reinstalled the SD-Tool, lots of flux and my head mounted magnifying tool gave me a better job of it. I created an new Build on JRunner with the CPU key and wrote the new Nand, all seemed well!

The Ace Glitch chip worked flawless, machine booted into the Microsoft Dash, jobs a GOOD`N as they say here. Not too bad an install but with a few small headaches, i`m sure i`ll get quicker and more reliable with practice.

I had to utilize the kitchen workbench during install, just some advice to anyone else,
Its not worth the aggro, the bollocking so near to meal times and you have soiled the place with your JUNK!

I did a more professional job on my SD Tool as the wiring did give me issues, not only on the board but on the cards solder points. I had some Dupont cable so made something that will hopefully be better for future use.

I don`t have a spare decent size hard drive to put in this at the moment but I managed to install Aurora dashboard ready and adjusted the fan speed to combat any overheating in the future. 
                                                          MERRY XMAS.....

XBOX360 Falcon E-76

 I need to give some background on this 360. I bought it for £10 on Gumtree in the summer. It was sold as seen, no other peripherals, just the box. I wanted a black case as
I had a damaged case from previous disassembly, bit heavy handed but I`m not perfect.
I got it home and plugged it in to be be greeted with this.

  One RED light to the bottom right and E-76 on the screen. Quick google and this points to
a bad ethernet IC, possibly blown by a surge of power (lightning?) up the ethernet cable to
the IC. I left it at that till now as I had plenty of other things to break in the mean time. I did order some replacement IC`s from Aliexpress and put them away for another day.

Lets get it open and see whats going on, get a look at the IC in question and see whats what!

Not too dirty, but some damage visible to the  Ethernet IC 1893BF top left above.

Heres a closer pic, look at pins 3 & 4, pin 1 being the one closest to the INDENT DOT on the IC. A bit of leg damage, possibly from an impact, badly fitting the DVD drive more than likely as nothing else would warrant messing around up here.
          With nothing to lose and a chance to practice with my heat station, I`d give it a go, worst case I have a practice mobo full of parts and a black case which i wanted anyway.
I used Kapton heat resistant tape to protect areas I didn`t want to cook.

     Ive seen people remove IC`s with a heatgun and some loaded the IC legs with low melting point solder to help the process. I do not have any so I`m going for the mega flux option. Lots of it and high heat. Hopefully IN and OUT fairly quickly. I turned on my heat station and patiently waited till it was hotter than hell.

      Well if hell was 338 degrees C. The unit goes to 500 I think but I saw sense.
concentrating on the IC and moving all around it, lots of smoke as the flux burnt away, it slid away from its pads. Unfortunately minus two pads, pins 3 & 4 that looked to have been crushed in the pic earlier.. So I`m in balls deep now, so lets look and see what can be done.

    
As seen above pads 3 & 4 are missing, I need to check the schematic and see where they
connect to and see if i can solder jumper wires in. Google again and I found a Falcon mobo schematic.

         Here is IC 1893BF and on the right side Pin leg 3 joins to Resistor R1N7 which is underneath the motherboard. Pin leg 4 has a few options, all close to the leg, no worries with that. So new solder to the remaining pads and on with the replacement IC.

       Flux everywhere but looks ok, not great, but give me break, first replacement IC with my heat station, every days a school day! Now to run Pin leg 3 to the rear on the board.

    
Red arrow marks the point. The top point was so small as it was around 5mm of wire straight to a solder point. Im not great at stopping and taking photos, I get carried away which aint good on a blog. Both legs now had connections so it was time to move forward.
            I fancied fitting some blue Leds to the Ring Of Light switch on the front panel, on a black box i think it looks better. This was fiddly alright, I got rolls of 0603 SMD LED`s in different colours for around £10, theres thousands of them!

The 4 corner LED`s were easy enough with the heat station, new blue replacements I had to resolder a few times testing with a small wired battery to make sure I had the correct orientation, clockwise fed if i remember. With that little mod done I fitted a Coolrunner modchip, maybe another blog for another day doing that. All went well and so far so good, time to reassemble.

   New thermal paste on heat sinks of course!

      I`m going to have to play on this one for a while to make sure its fault free, get it
working and even leave it on overnight. In time I can mod a controller to matching blue and find its PSU and cables cheap online. So I`m not over confident but fingers crossed this will be fine down the road, enjoyed the IC removal experience and saved another box from the tip hopefully!

XBOX 360 Modding Trinity 16GB

       The XBOX360 is a console I like, which has attracted a lot of bad press since launch for good reason. Microsoft dropped the ball on cooling this thing which resulted in a lot of overheating and melting of low temperature solder that connects the Graphics Processor to the motherboard. The Red Ring Of Death as it was known did more for sales of PS3 than any amount of advertising. Not every model motherboard suffered this, I myself own a white (Phat) Falcon unit that`s never missed a beat. Older units however did, mainly Zenon, Zephyr, Opus and as mentioned Falcon. I got hold of a later version Slim model from CEX
for roughly £40, reliable, has built in wifi and small form factor, whats not to like.
         Exploitation of the XBOX360 is the reason I love this unit, custom dashboard with an ability to launch games from a hard drive up to 2TB. Obviously backups of games which I own the originals! A modchip is required and some pretty nifty hardware which is getting harder to come by these days, luckily I found a NAND-X unit on ebay. We need to pull the thing apart down to motherboard and using the Nand-X hardware, extract the NAND info,
alter it with a more friendly version to allow exploits and re-inject the new info to the NAND chip. I wont bore you with all the details but this method is known as RGH meaning Reset Glitch Hack, a way to run unsigned code.

MOTHERBOARD: Trinity 16GB

        Inside I found I had a Trinity 16GB, fortunately one of the easier models to work on. This ones got 4GB internal memory fitted (small daughter board on left side). I removed the heat sink and fan to clean them as it did have its share of dust, nothing gross, normal expected amount. I replaced the thermal compound and gave the fan a clean.

HEATSINK and FAN fitted

 Nand-X Wiring

       The Nand-X reader must be connected to some test points on the motherboard, nice header points giving solid connections. I used a fibre glass brush to remove any lacquer protecting them and roughed up the connections for easier soldering. The picture looks wet but its isopropyl alcohol which is evaporating after i cleaned the pads.

      I used some Amtech flux and tinned each pad, the Nand-X has a cable for push fit connection, this is what I soldered to the board.

  Now to use some software called JRunner to read the NAND and capture it onto the PC.

 Modchip

  I decided to use an ACE v3.0  modchip for this install. I`ve used Coolrunner chips in the past but found a few of these at a reasonable price, £4 each or so.

 I tinned all the points and using its sticky pad provided mounted it in a suitable location for soldering.

 I followed the wiring diagram supplied in the JRunner package for my Trinity motherboard.

Most connections were on the surface of the motherboard apart from the connection shown.The X-Clamp is the mechanical sprung bracket holding the heat sink close to the motherboard. Unfortunately my photo was blurred of the top connections so I googled a donor pic below.

 Once installed I used the Nand-X to connect to the Ace chip and program its Glitch timings.Although this photo shows the Nand-X wiring removed mine was attached as I created my new Nand kernel on JRunner  to inject back onto the board. All motherboards have keys, a CPU Key, DVD drive key, which must match those listed in the Nand to work.
JRunner makes all this simple as it injects a custom firmware called XELL which is open source to allow a network connection to retrieve all keys and setup the new Nand kernel .

Loading new Nand

With the Nand-X attached via usb I reprogrammed the Nand and started rebuilding the box
to at least have the motherboard in its chasis . A quick test though before anything else.

I took the liberty of fitting a spare 500GB Seagate Firecuda I had in the wings. The rebuild was definitely more fiddly than the disassembly, lots of plastic clips and annoying misalignments. But finally I got there, back to its normal sleek self and booting to the microsoft dashboard, looking stock but now exploitable!

I like Aurora dashboard which was easy to install. Now I can transfer via USB or FTP and load this thing up with Games and any other content I feel fitting. Plan is to install a 2TB drive soon and make this my XBOX360 keeper to join the collection. My little Youtube channel has a video of an RGH console in action!



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCZllnqgLb8

June Bug - A600

 " Absolute shambles and waste of time"   "Complete & Utter screw-up"

     Not my words, the words of Commodore UK MD David Pleasance

    My true Amiga machine was an Amiga 500. Probably cost upwards of £400 in the late 80`s or early 90`s. This little fella was released as an improvement to the A500 Plus and cost even more. To make things worse it had a lifespan of 6 months as the A1200 with advanced Graphic Architecture (AGA) was ready for release. Codenamed June Bug after yet another B52`s tune, why the hell would anyone want it?

     Lets take a look at it first before joining millions of Amiga fans in slating it. It had a Hard drive,
a massive 20MB or 40MB if you were feeling flush. Hard drives at this time cost almost the same as an Amiga computer, the A500 expansion drive was a wallet destroyer so a solution built in was forward thinking I suppose. Everyone with an A500 had to buy a 512k expansion to take their Amiga to the dizzy heights of 1MB of Ram, not so here, supplied with 1MB and expandable to 2MB, an improvement. A PCMCIA slot on the left side for fast transfer between pc via CF card adaptor or further Fast Memory expansion by a RAM card, maybe a bit before its time but again forward thinking.
           

EPIC Bundle with built in hard drive- £399-£499

    A500 fans were quick to point out this machine was flawed. No numeric keypad rendering most Flight Sims or any game really that used the keypad, UNPLAYABLE. The Hard Drive itself on boot used resources so a Boot Options menu had to be implemented to allow for selections to deselect it.
Obviously the price was similar to that of the A500 Plus at a time when Nintendo and Sega were flooding the market with games on their consoles, marketing suicide surely. The Kickstart 2.0 wasn`t happy running some older games that ran flawlessly on kickstart 1.3. There wasn`t enough here for me to want one, I`d say I liked the small form factor but never felt I needed to upgrade my trusted 500. Commodore really had dropped a bollock so swiftly removed the Hard drives to try and tempt us with a sweeter deal.

  THE WILD, THE WEIRD & THE WICKED Bundle - £199 - £299

        With the release of the A1200 a mere 6 months away from launch of the A600 it was the tail end of the Amiga gang who bought this pup. I`d say people who looked on at friends owning 500`s but never had the cash, maybe owned consoles or dare I say an Atari ST, latecomers to the party for sure!

        I myself am around 18 years late in owning the Black sheep that is June Bug. As an Amiga fan it was probably going to be on my shopping list at some point. I was hooked by what I thought I could do with this desk friendly little urchin, time has treated it well, options are plentiful and the community vibrant. English Amiga Board, Lemon Amiga, forums full of suggestions. Sellers like Individual Computing, Amiga Kit UK, Vesalia, the time was right!

UPGRADES:

A604N - 1MB trapdoor expansion to take Chip Ram to 2MB

AMIGA KICKSTART 3.1 - Greater support for newer Operating Systems and larger HD`s

GOTEK FLOPPY DRIVE EMULATOR - At last a USB device to remove the need for Double Density Floppy Disks, the spawn of satan media. No more disk swapping with a stack of floppies, anyone remember Indiana Jones and The Fate of Atlantis ( 11 bastards). 

IDE ADAPTOR WITH CF CARD - I installed an angled IDE adaptor to avoid conflict with my Memory upgrade, 4GB is plenty for my games collection. Sandisk and Transcend seemed to work for me.

A6095 MEMORY UPGRADE - This card presses on the top of the MC68000 CPU and gives 8MB fastram and 1.5MB slow ram. This enhancement meant WHD Load (Hard Drive) games could run without slowdown or load stuttering. this upgrade is a low cost solution for gamers like me who dont really need a processor boost.

      I fitted the above slow time as funds became available. I wanted at least one of my Amiga computers to be a quick gaming solution, all games running from the CF card, no memory issues that WHD LOAD likes to throw up and an option to load ADF games which still have Cracktros and trainers incorporated. For now this is my best Amiga gaming solution. A Recap is required down the road and maybe a retrobrite. Here`s a pic of the inside with all installed and shielding removed. The Gotek is mounted on a 3D printed bracket so its sits flush with casing.

       I now feel proud of the June Bug, upgrades have enhanced it beyond my A500 or A1200, the ugly ducklings a swan now in my book. Here`s a few games I`ve been enjoying again

SuperFrog - Best Arcade Platform in my book

Silent Service 2 - Still satisfying

Flashback - Character animation still impressive

PP-Hammer - classic platform puzzle

Walker

With the added RAM upgrade Walker has full speech throughout.

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=65574

Here is an older video of my 600 prior to the A6095 Memory upgrade. These games are running from the CF Card with a custom Start Sequence that loads the WHDLOAD version of the game via its numerical number. I don`t  like Workbench with its cluttered Icons so a fast menu prompt was favoured. In time I will install Tiny Launcher by Michael Gibbs, a great fast loader that also looks neat and professional. 

                                    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OX-zSYc1j8M

                                                             Old video of Gotek Drive 

                             https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcGYxnzikGU&t=433s