Xbox 360 Experiments: swap DVD/TSOP, 360 without EEPROM?, ...

' CrackerJack (cjack) of darkmoon.org bought a core and premium Xbox 360 system and has released info and screenshots of his progress.. '

He noticed that while his core system has the EEPROM chip near the CPU, his premium Xbox 360 does not have this chip. However it does not seem to be core/premium related as XanTium's (X-S) premium Xbox 360 has this eeprom chip. On the images below you can see cjack's premium 360 without eeprom on the left and XanTium's (X-S) with eeprom on the right.



Some other interesting stuff he tried:
* He desoldered the TSOP of his 2 consoles and inverted them. The TSOP of Premium soldered in the Core console did not work. The 'ring of light' blinked red ... black screen. He resoldered both TSOPs in correct consoles ... and everything worked fine again.



* He also desoldered the eeprom from his Core Xbox 360 and, a bit unexpectedly, the console worked fine without the eeprom chip! Dashboard version and Kernel versions (backup version too) were the same then when there was the eeprom. Everything worked fine, games boot without problems, Xbox LIVE worked too...

* He checked the DVD player labels: they are almost the same but 2 different ROM versions:
-Core: DVD PLAYER model: GDR3120L
(X800475-008), Rom version: 0046DH
-Premium: DVD PLAYER model: GDR3120L
(X800475-009), Rom version: 0047DJ
He tried to swap the DVD players too and ... the games wouldn't boot. The Xbox 360 gave the same error screen then when you put the DVD in a PC DVD-ROM: "To play this disc, put it in an xbox 360 console". CrackerJack thinks that the Xbox 360 might have some kind of signature of the DVD player or that the ROM versions are not compatible.