Xbox 360 News

There has been much hype surrounding a possible 360 chip that was allegedly tested by just one mod retailer (who has absolutley no real influence in the scene - so thats suspicious to start with). We've kinda kept quiet on this one due to the fact that at least one other mod chip maker had been trying to do "business" with them so we wanted to see how it played out.

There has been no picture or video evidence and no technical information - again very strange and suspicious. In the past all major mod teams including ourselves and Xenium and SmartXX always gave something real to chew on before a release.

First this site shows a picture of a mod - which is blatantly bullshit. Looked like some pic emulator board (later found to be true)

Then they say sorry as its a fake picture !?!

Then they post a picture of a bios config screen similar to what you'd see with X3 Config Live and others) but they say they arent doing any unsigned code hacking ?!?

Now we hear this from Divineo...

Quote:

"The 360 chip is 99% a scam, we had booked tickets to go meet them, we were ready to make huge prepayment and more after we meet the guys at their office and see the working X-Box 360 with back-ups they 100% confirmed they had and it was no problem to show etc. Now at last second they cancelled, with some lame reason, those guys are scammers I really believe. They did the same to Xenium, backed off and changed completely what they said."


Our point of view is that this is not real, or possibly they had some success but discovered some new security structure in the 360 and are scratching their heads but of course posted the news too quickly.

If this was ever real they would first go to someone like Xbox-Scene with a demo and then of course Divineo, not some website shop that no one has ever heard of -especially for something that would be such a huge breakthrough.

All we say to the scene is don't go putting too much credence (or funds for that matter) into anything that isn't proven as real. We can assure you there will be more than one type of mod available from different groups in the coming weeks/months - just be patient.

The guys over at gamersreports.com posted an article explaining how you can download marketplace content that is not available for your region. North-Americans users usually get all content, but other regions often get new demos or movie trailer later or in the worst case never.

The 'Fight Night Round 3' demo for example, released yesterday in N-America, is not available in all countries.

The idea is fairly simple. Make a new passport .NET account (and apply for a hotmail account) and put as country the country where the demo/trailer is available. Then create a new profile on your Xbox 360 and chose for a free Xbox LIVE Silver account and link it with your new hotmail account you made above.

So, just make 3 new Xbox LIVE Silver accounts linked with a passport/hotmail account with US, Japanese and European address and you'll get access to everything ;)

Thanks to ShortAcid for the headsup.. :)

The first thing to be aware of is that this isn't just a bolt-on-the-side extra for you Xbox 360, this is a serious case mod as all the Xbox 360 casing under that shiny blue CoolIt casing isn't there anymore... that's right kids, this thing is set into the Xbox 360 meaning that pretty much half the side case is now gone... a fair chunk from the underside is missing too to allow for the pipework.



Looking at these pics you'd be right in thinking that this is a pretty serious mod and hacking into your Xbox 360 with a Dremel to fit a cooler is something that you might think is best left to those that know what they're doing. That's what the CoolIt guys think too so you won't have to fit it yourself, CoolIt are working right now to train up a bunch of fitters which you'd send your Xbox 360 to for fitting. Of course, your warranty is still voided, regardless of who chops your Xbox 360 up, but at least this way you know it won't blow the thing up if a professional does the job.

There was some misinformation floating around last week that I wanted to clear up. Specifically, that folks are cheating at Hexic and earning achievements or getting high scores that they got by cheating. I got an email from the Xbox Live Arcade team where they told me:

We're seeing reports of people hacking Hexic HD using the European Kiosk disk hack. The truth of the matter is that we actually removed the code from the kiosk version of the game that awards achievements and Gamerscore and posts high scores so the reports are false. While Hackers can play the game and trigger the achievement awarded animation as if is still there but they don't actually earn anything since they can't connect to Xbox Live.

He created a gamesave in FIFA 2004 on his (modded) Xbox(1), ftp-ed it (UDATA4541003b and TDATA4541003b) to his PC. To get it on the Xbox 360 HD it's a bit more complicated of course ... he used the newly released big-endian FATX support in the Linux kernel to read the Xbox 360 FATX partitions via his PC.

Using the linux 'dd' command he made an image of the second FATX partition, mounted the image (that linux understands thanks to the new big-endian FATX support), copied the UDATA and TDATA dirs with the FIFA2004 gamesave to the mounted image, unmounted the image and 'dd'-ed it back to the Xbox 360 HD. More details about how he did it is available on xboxhacker.net or xboxhacker.net forums[Please remember if you choose to participate that this thread is for technical discussion only, thanks!]

Also of note is the delayed release of Dead or Alive 4 at number thirteen in the charts, with less than 61,000 units sold. A significant proportion of these sales went to existing Xbox 360 owners, with hardware sales only doubling to 12,300 units. This suggests the title may only appeal to a relative hardcore of users, with the various Mistwalker role-playing games now looking like the only obvious chance for Microsoft to gain real ground in Japan.