Hacking [Q]Which version of hack do I have?

[Xbox360Noob]

Hello guys.

I bought xbox360 like in 2007 already hacked. It is supposed to have new dvd inside to read DVD+R Dl. Now I don't know how can I check version of this drive/hack. Also if someone could tell me what are differances between hacks?

Thanks

 

[DinohScene]

Seems like you got a flashed DVD drive.

If you want to play on XBLive, then you'll have to upgrade your existing DVD firmware.
Or you could opt for a Xkey which allows you to play backups from an external drive.

Upgrading the DVD drive is cheaper then an Xkey (~20 ish quid vs 80 quid for the Xkey)

Other hacks are the JTAG and RGH/R-JTAG.
Both of these don't allow XBLive access.

 

[Xbox360Noob]

So I have to upgrade whole dvd? Or just update firmware? Also how do I find out firmware of my dvd drive?

 

[DinohScene]

Just the firmware, you can't find out the hacked version you have unfortunately.
If I may ask, what dashboard version are you on?
Go to system settings - console settings to see it.

 

[Xbox360Noob]

Dashboard is 6717. So which is the best hack for any xbox360 there is? That you can play xbox live + have games on external hdd? Plus what would be best for my xbox?

 

[FAST6191]

Wow, not heard of one on that old a dash for some time.

Please do not update it until you figure out what you want to do -- that machine is capable of being JTAG hacked and that is quite a rare thing these days.

JTAG will cost you xbox live but is probably the best hack otherwise. You can do it very cheaply with a parallel port on a computer and a trip to your local electronics shop. The later hack in RGH may cause issues with certain hardware revisions made around that time.

The only option for USB and xbox live is the ODDE stuff (if you are familiar with the Wii then think WODE). They are quite costly things that sit on your DVD drive and replicate it for the machine and farm things out to to USB. It will not allow for region free, hacked games, homebrew, DLC or XBLA content to be played though. JTAG/RGH allow for USB but live is impossible with JTAG and terribly annoying with RGH, not to mention you can not use the hacks when on live when on RGH so you will need a hacked DVD or something.

For a DVD hack that old you can probably still dump the keys from the drive in a fairly simple manner, some of the later DVD hacks made this harder to get your keys again.

2007 then. Depending upon the age of the system it still means you are likely on one of the older hardware revisions. These are the ones most prone to the red ring of death failure method unfortunately. It is not an easy repair either. If it was a newer hardware revision I would have said even if you want live then JTAG hack it and sell it on, use the money to buy a new 360 and possibly hack that. Being an older version though it will not command the highest price.

What manufacture date is on the back of the system? Alternatively the image on http://team-xecuter.com/forums/showthread.php?t=76989 should help you identify it.

 

[DinohScene]

I'd personally JTAG it.
Like FAST said, it's a really cheap hack.

If you really do want to play on XBLive then I'd suggest getting an Xkey.
It's ~80 quid and you'll be able to play games off off an external drive.

 

[Xbox360Noob]

Wow, not heard of one on that old a dash for some time.

Please do not update it until you figure out what you want to do -- that machine is capable of being JTAG hacked and that is quite a rare thing these days.

JTAG will cost you xbox live but is probably the best hack otherwise. You can do it very cheaply with a parallel port on a computer and a trip to your local electronics shop. The later hack in RGH may cause issues with certain hardware revisions made around that time.

The only option for USB and xbox live is the ODDE stuff (if you are familiar with the Wii then think WODE). They are quite costly things that sit on your DVD drive and replicate it for the machine and farm things out to to USB. It will not allow for region free, hacked games, homebrew, DLC or XBLA content to be played though. JTAG/RGH allow for USB but live is impossible with JTAG and terribly annoying with RGH, not to mention you can not use the hacks when on live when on RGH so you will need a hacked DVD or something.

For a DVD hack that old you can probably still dump the keys from the drive in a fairly simple manner, some of the later DVD hacks made this harder to get your keys again.

2007 then. Depending upon the age of the system it still means you are likely on one of the older hardware revisions. These are the ones most prone to the red ring of death failure method unfortunately. It is not an easy repair either. If it was a newer hardware revision I would have said even if you want live then JTAG hack it and sell it on, use the money to buy a new 360 and possibly hack that. Being an older version though it will not command the highest price.

What manufacture date is on the back of the system? Alternatively the image on http://team-xecuter.com/forums/showthread.php?t=76989 should help you identify it.

It is Zephyr I already looked at that. But with JTAG I can play games from external hdd? And since it is an old xbox is that bad? I don't get it what any of these hacks mean since there is so many.

 

[FAST6191]

There are three classes of hack for the 360, they each break down a few more times but we can cover that as and when.

Internal hacks.
This would be the JTAG and RGH family (there is also King Kong but that is not something you can pull off here).
These do it all really -- you can load games from the internal hard drive, use games that are locked out for your region (there are many region free games but not all of them), use hacked games (not many but there are some), have XBLA titles on there, DLC on there, use any size internal hard drive. run things from USB and so on.
Using the hacks comes at the cost of live, there is a way you can run dual NAND with RGH hacks and have live on one of the NAND images but it is really annoying to do and I do not suggest it.

JTAG quite literally requires a few diodes and some soldering. RGH will require a chip and some fairly complex soldering compared to JTAG, expense wise for parts along you are looking at about the price of a couple of charting games or just under that..

However they do not do DVD hacks, most would find it pretty pointless when you have JTAG/RGH abilities but hey.

DVD hacks.
Two classes of DVD hack. You can take these on live, at one point in time there were bans from live at various point but we have not seen on in years and with the Xbone existing many doubt we ever will see another. Every DVD drive is tied to the console it comes from but if you have the keys you can reprogram them.

Optical drive emulation.
These fake the presence of an optical drive which in turn speaks to a USB drive you have hooked up to it.

Traditional DVD modding.
MS fluffed the security of the 360 very badly and it is the DVD drive which provides checks for games and is what checks itself. To this end you can mod the DVD firmware and play copied games in the drive. This was probably the most common mod (JTAG did not come back until 2009 and was gone just as quickly, RGH was more recent still and slightly more annoying). I could do a history of DVD modding but it is not worth it, the only thing of real note was a couple of years back MS released a new firmware of their own for all the various models of DVD drive to support a new disc format (called XGD3), this meant the would be DVD modder had to flash their firmware with a new hacked one where before they could have probably still used the first hacks on a then current console (maybe with a few new games not working). XGD3 discs also require a special DVD drive to burn and they are getting a bit harder to find (the original one is rare as anything, the new methods are still doable but you will have to look a bit).
DVD modding itself is reasonably easy, you may have to try to find a SATA card with a given chipset (VIA 6421) if your motherboard does not have that or another compatible one (some slightly older Nvidia stuff). There are some DVD modding machines but unless you are planning to do lots of them then I would not suggest it.

Other hacks.
At various points there have been other hacks like Modern Warfare 2 glitch that allowed some XBLA to work, profile sharing and the like. None of these are active right now. There is PIRS DLC though which anybody can do (even on a stock machine), here if you can access the hard drive (quite easy) or some things with USB then you can copy so called PIRS dlc to your console and play it. There is not much PIRS DLC but it does include a few things like Borderlands DLC, Fallout DLC and some other big games. Note that you do have to find the actual PIRS DLC as the normal stuff (be it scene or profile sharing) will not work.


Back onto your questions then.

Old is not ideal -- said old consoles have a habit of failing and the means to fix it properly usually involves a machine that costs about 1400 Euros and requires some fair skill to use (see "IR BGA reworking" if you are curious), there is a fix that sometimes works but rarely lasts very long that any half competent electrical repair person can do (hot air reflow). There may be someone around you that can fix it; a lot of electronics companies I see send a lot of stuff to your part of the world and it needs proper tools to do it.
Zephyrs are not that bad compared to the likes of Falcons and Opuses but equally I would not be surprised to see them drop like flies over the next couple of years.

 

[DinohScene]

Hmm, JTAG was a bit troublesome on the Zephyrs.

You can JTAG it (and I advice you to then forget about the idea of using externals to play games as you can upgrade the internal HDD to a max of 2 TB) but you'll lose the Live connection forever.
You can still play multiplayer games via LiNK but this is only for systemlink games and the only games being played is COD.

If you want to play on Live then I'd suggest getting an ODDE.
That will allow you to use external drives to load ISO's (fair bit easier then ripping the ISO's and copying them to your JTAG machine)

Otherwise, if you want to be cheap, let someone flash the drive for you.
That way you'll have to burn DVD's in order to play backups.

 

[Xbox360Noob]

FAST6191 That is so much information I can even get in to my head xD. You seem to know everything about consoles. Is there possibility to know if I have optical drive simulator or traditional DVD modding? Also can this type of modding read from external HDD? Because back then I burned games to DVD+R Dl 8.5GB. And I also don't remember what kind of file it was. Since there are hacked games and not hacked games if I have this correct there is different file of games that I can download or it doesn't matter which hack I use the games are the same?

DinohScene Would it be wiser to not do anything to this xbox and sell it then buy new one?

EDIT: Sorry for so much questions but I am so confused about all this because I thought this is like ps2 you only put some chip inside and you played burned games.

 

[DinohScene]

You've got a flashed DVD drive.
Back in '07/'08, there wasn't a ODDE as you only had hacked DVD drives and the Kingkong exploit (homebrew hack)
Nope, only JTAG and Xkey support external drives.
(like I said, it'd be unwise to use USB if you got a JTAG when SATA is considerably faster + more efficient as well as simpler)

Personally, I'd let it get JTAGged by someone and keep it (or sell it once it's JTAGged) and buying a new secondhand Slim (a shiny one) or a late Phatty (made in 2010) and put an Xkey in that.
JTAG's aren't worth much these days but you have the added benefit of being able to execute DLC, Arcade games, Indie games as well as Xbox 1 and 360 games.
Plus homebrew (limited to some emulators)
If you're not interested in it then you can sell it off as a JTAGable 360 (if it never received an RRoD then you could ask more)

 

[FAST6191]

Sorry, in the absence of a highly specific question, doubly so when you have the options you do, I tend to elaborate upon related things. Too often in places like this I see people railroaded into getting things that do things they might not want or realise they have alternatives to.

As DinohScene said the simulator/emulator stuff did not exist in a commercial form back in 2007 (I think the early work on replacement drives had happened by this point but that is an entirely different discussion), not to mention you would have extra wires or devices hanging off it should you have had one done (or no DVD drive option if they were a really flash modder and sacrificed the DVD drive to house it internally).

The only things it can read from external USB happens on later firmwares where you can use so many gigs for a memory card (which can a do a light line in DLC and XBLA if you got the official route), certainly not full games or full game installs.

Also yeah up until XGD3 got released it was often just a matter of getting the iso and .dvd file and feeding the .dvd file to a suitable program (probably imgburn), you may have also had an extra step with ABGX360 to check the iso was good. If you have the drive then it is more or less that once more, if you have the newer model it is still more or less that but you activate the mode to burn XGD3 with a program first.

I rarely ever see hacked games up for download -- it is easier to apply hacks and hacked games can not be used on DVD modded consoles nobody really does it. I do occasionally see install rips/GOD rips but that is not very common either, said releases will usually have JTAG or something in the name to signify this too.

DVD modded consoles can only run stock games that are compatible with their region settings (what game works with what region varies by game, http://www.abgx.net/filename/?ch=6 and http://abgx360.net/verified.php will hopefully be able to tell you what goes, as should the NFO but not all groups include it).

 

[Xbox360Noob]

So for SATA you only JTAG and then put bigger HDD inside? And then how do you put games on it? I don't want to mess with it since it was used only a couple of times and for like 6 years it only sat in the corner.

So I think I will sell it or JTAG it if this is the best thing to do to play new releases and I rly don't need live.

 

[DinohScene]

Games can be extracted via Xbox image browser, then you just copy the folder to a USB drive and then copy it from the USB drive to the 360.
Once you done it, it's incredibly simple.

Hmm if you don't need Live then I'd suggest JTAGging it.
You'll get more out of the console that way.

 

[FAST6191]

The hard drive that sits on the side is SATA but with a custom connector. Open the hard drive case and it is actually just SATA inside. From there you can stick in a laptop drive (better if it is a smaller one and not bit 11mm or something so you do not have to make room). If you are really bored you can also add a 12V supply to it and power a desktop style hard drive rather than use laptop style but that is a lot of effort.

You can access the drive in a variety of methods, most people though will just FTP (an old but still very popular means of transferring files around -- FTP = file transfer protocol) as most homebrew launching programs come with FTP servers and there are even hacks to add (a tiny bit slower) ones to the hacked dash people tend to run with JTAG. Edit. Again also what DinohScene said.