Rabbit Hole

A lot of people have been asking me how I got my XBOX 360 for so cheap. So I shall tell the tale of how I got lucky… I publish this so that you, the reader, may get lucky too!

This story begins with the infamous “Red Ring of Death” flaw associated with Microsoft’s XBOX 360. This was a big issue… if you happen to be living under a rock I’ll bring you up to speed.  The XBOX 360 has a major cooling issue; when the 360 overheats (and it often does) the “XCLAMPS” on the back of the motherboard, that hold the Processor heat sink and the graphics processor heat sink in place, force the motherboard to warp. When the motherboard warps the XBOX 360 detects a hardware flaw and displays 3 red lights around the on/off button. Now like I stated before this was and still is a big issue. So big in fact that Microsoft had to extend their warranty by another year. This is where my story begins. Since Microsoft extended their warranty by one year it meant ALL XBOX 360’s… no matter how old… were returnable for a new model (granted you didn’t void the warranty sticker).

After hearing the Windsor Gaming Centre quickly adventured to all the nearest pawn shops looking for “broken” XBOX 360’s. Most gamers don’t follow gaming news so when their 360 breaks and its beyond warranty they do the only thing they can, cash it in for parts. This is when we came along, buying ALL broken XBOX 360’s for 50 dollars a pop! Send them into Microsoft and 6 weeks later we get fresh new XBOX 360’s equip with BENQ drives!!!

Now at first this was a problem and there was much sadness. The BENQ’s were not moddable so these systems sat ignored like an unwanted orphan. Then god came alone (read C4EVA) and released the IXtreme for the BENQ drives and there was much rejoicing… somehow the ugly duckling syndrome was applied to these ignored systems and they became the talk of the town.  Zach and I modded our first one and I took it home with me along with a controller that Colin sold to me for 26 dollars.

This modded system and controller laid dormant in my basement since I had no AV Cables and No power supply. But still I had hope, I bought some knock off Component cables from a third party game store for 20 dollars and ordered DiviNeo’s 360 PSU solution.  So now I’m at a total of around 120 dollars Canadian… I then bit the bullet and bought a memory card from EB Games for more money than I would have paid anywhere else.

So that my friends is how I got an X360 system for under 150 dollars.

Last night Zach and I modded my new XBOX 360 equipped with a BENQ drive. This was actually easier than I thought it would be. For this tutorial you will need the new BenQ_iXtremev1.1 archive file (search google), the DosFlash_V1.3Beta archive (google again), a floppy disk, a Windows PC, a SATA VIA CHIPSET Sata controller, and obviously an XBOX 360 with a BENQ drive.

The first thing to do is boot up your Windows PC and throw in your floppy disk. Right click on the A: drive, go to format, and create a MS Boot Disk. Download the archives mentioned above and when the boot disk is done extract the DosFlash16 part of the DosFlash_V1.3Beta archive to your floppy disk. You should have a MS Boot disk floppy with the DosFlash16 folder in it. Now before we reboot the machine into DOS we need to grab the starting address of your SATA card. You can either get this from msinfo, or iprep… I used msinfo; by clicking Start -> Run -> msinfo32.exe. Go to components, Storage, SCSI. We need the starting address of your SATA card; mine was in the first range… you will see something like 0×0000B800……… write down the B800 part, this is the starting address. Different chipsets use different ranges so you will want to investigate that little part (thats the hardest part).

Alright so now that we got that little tidbit of information we can reboot the PC and boot into DOS using the floppy. This would be a good time to have your XBOX 360 disassembled, plugged in and the SATA going into the benq plugged out. Make sure the 360 is TURNED OFF and patch the BENQ drive to your PC’s satas card using a sata patch.

Type cd DosFlash16… or in my case cd DOSFLA~1 and type:
dosflash r <insert your starting address> 1 a0 1 4 a:\orig.bin 0

Now get ready and read ahead before hitting Yes. What you need to do is hit yes turn ON the 360, wait 2 seconds turn it off then wait 2 seconds again and turn it back on. If you did everything right it should start reading the banks and creating your orig.bin file. If everything went OK you should see the word “OK” from all the banks. After this is done we can shut down the 360 and reboot back into Windows.

We now need to make the new firmware from our old firmware. You have a decision to either mod your 360 with the “fast” firmware or the “quiet” firmware. I choose fast because my computer room is loud already. Which ever you choose you need to copy your orig.bin file to either the Fast or the Quiet directory then run FIRMTOOL.EXE. If everything went OK you should have a benq-ix.bin file in the same directory. Copy that binary file to your floppy disk and boot back into DOS.

Get back into the Dosflash directory and type:
DosFlash e <insert your starting address> 1 a0 1 4 D8 0

You may need to do the same procedure as the read, however after I hit yes it started to erase right away. You DO NOT need to erase, but its good to know how to do incase you mess up the next step. Make sure the 360 is powered off before you do the write procedure.
While you are still in the DosFlash directory type:
Dosflash w <insert your starting address> 1 a0 1 4 A:\benq-ix.bin 0
Once again you may need to do the same procedure, you may not… some people suggest restarting after each Dosflash command; I didn’t… and both the write and the erase happened instantly.

Thats is! I hope you got your BENQ flashed if there are any problems feel free to post in comments, I wrote this tutorial straight from memory.

Update: As of Nov 6/07 there has been a new version of BenQ_iXtremev1.1. It is called BenQ_iXtremev1.1 rev 2; it includes some protection so people don’t get banned from live and also has some more DVD features. I haven’t touched this new version, but I’m assuming it works the same way; I don’t go on live so I don’t care.

Update 2: As of Nov 8/07 C4Eva released a new version of the firware entitled C4EVA_XTREME-BenQ V1.1 Multispeed. It allows the user to select different speeds at which the drives run at and adds more DVD Movie support… another useless update for me, I’m assuming it works the same way.

Oh so busy where to start… might as well start with the small things. Just an update on Super Mario Galaxies for the Wii; I ended up getting a copy of this beast, but Nintendo decided they would be jerks and throw a new type of copy protection on this marvel of a game. The released version of Super Mario Galaxies works on the DCWii Keys, but not on the WiiKey’s or WiiKey Clones. WiiKey has announced that they have addressed an issue, but are working out a delivery system… whatever the hell that means; why can’t they just release an update CD or just give us the binaries… either way; thats at a standstill.

Last night Colin decided to praise me with an XBOX 360 with a BENQ drive in it. Which means Zach and I had a chance to finally take a stab at modding the BENQ’s. It’s surprisingly easy once you get over the millions of drive swaps during a read/erase and write. To make a long story short we finally got my BENQ modded and tested a backup of Halo 3 on it… worked perfectly! Yay!!!! We didn’t even boot it before modding it; that was kind of a mistake because we actually had to use a controller after modding it; yea… we are that lazy.

So all in all I have spent 130$ Canadian on a 360; not bad in my opinion. I bought a computer PSU with Xbox Connector off of DiviNeo today. Now all I need is to wait for the PSU, buy myself some high def cables and a memory card… then my friends… I am buisness.

I haven’t been able to play any new games recently. I found out an interesting tid-bit of news last night; it turns out the new Memorxes they sell in Windsor are not Wii compatable. I ran into yet ANOTHER batch of Memorxes that fail after burning Wii iso’s to them.. so if you are tempted to buy that 9.99$ 100 pack (like I was) … DONT! So now my Wii media of choice are Philips DVD-R’s… they seem to be working fine.

Things are slowing down in school which means I will have a lot more time for my girlfriend and video games, plus my parents leave next week so I will have some quiet time as well.

Just some Halloween news for all you guys! I went to Halloweekends over the weekend and I would have to say I was extremely impressed. Saturday night was VERY cold, but I got to share a coat with my girlfriend so that wasn’t so bad. The fright zones were the best… after 8PM they designate certain parts of the park as “fright zones”… essentially it involves actors running around scaring you, pretty cool stuff but it looses its effect after a couple of hours. There are also haunted houses sprawled across the park, sadly none of these were as good as the haunted house here in Windsor, but they were still really fun. To further my halloween adventures I went to a zombie walk with Tyler this past Sunday; it was AMAZING!!! If you are really interested in the walk there are tons of facebook groups under the Windsor network to check out. Just search Windsor Zombie… or look for the Windsor Zombie Horde. They are trying to plan another walk for december, but I will keep the blog posted.

Anyway tonight I will be heading out to see 30 days of night with my girlfriends brother…. I hope your halloween is spppooooookkkyyyyy!!!