It was a good Christmas.

Since I was having some problems with my modchip, it was recommended to me that I need to update the bios on my chip (as a last resort). I was told instructions to do it. I found the name of my chip, it’s an Executer X2.3b pro.

I downloaded Executer’s 5035 bios for the X2 pro line. The first set of instructions I received said to flash with Avalaunch’s utility. So I started a flash update with Avalaunch, during which it says DO NOT REBOOT DURING THIS PROCESS. Naturally, however, it freezes in the middle of the process. So I rebooted it, and sure enough it would not boot. When I turn it on, the light comes on for about 2 seconds, then it shuts off, comes on and shuts off over and over again. I figured out that I had currently 256k bios’s flashed on my 1MB chip, because only the single bank configurations worked for booting. So I switched it to another single bank configuration, since the current one was corrupted.

This time, I followed the second set of instructions I received. This one said to download FlashX (from xbins), then load the bios into one of the two-bank configurations as it requested (because it was a 512K bios). So this time I tried to do that, and it erased the bios fine, but when writing it got to about 50% then just stopped, it froze again. Somewhat annoyed, I tried it again after switching to another bank, this time using the other two banks as the destination for the flash, and of course, again it froze.

So I was a little frantic, I only had one more chance to flash this thing correctly. I looked up guides and walkthroughs and readmes, and I seemed to be following the directions in each of them. My Switch 4 was set to ON, meaning flash protect was OFF, meaning I was able to write to the bios. I tried one last thing, and this is what worked for flashing the bios.

1. Start the XBoX with a single bank confiration, as it was the only one available.
2. Load FlashX
3. Change the switch configuration to BE the resulting flash location. i.e. If I was going to flash banks 1/2, I would change the switches to represent that.
4. Start the flashing process. This time it didn’t get stuck at 50%, and the entire flash process took 10-15 seconds

Man was I relieved that this worked and I didn’t have to buy a piece of hardware to flash the bios on the chip.

And of course, after all of this, the new bios didn’t fix the original issue; many of the games didn’t work. At this point I don’t really care about those games, I’m more happy that the XBoX itself still worked.

So as far as I’m concerned, the problem is resolved. Next step: fix my broken ps2!

We just finished wiring the panel, and we mounted it on the cabinet. We inserted the computer and speakers and gave the machine a test run, a “proof of concept” if you will. It seems to work OK with a few exceptions.

Firstly, the encoder works fine, it responds to all of commands that we wired to it as set inputs. However, I can’t get the software to communicate with the encoder, meaning that I can’t reprogram the controls. This is a problem, considering one of the defaults is the ESC key, one is the P key, and one is TAB. Escape will exit the current MAME game (and is unchangable?), P by default pauses the game, and Tab by default brings up the in game menu. This is slightly annoying for current testing, because if you try to press a certain key on a certain player, it will do the unwanted command instead. So this is something for which I need to find a fix.

Secondly, there seems to be some issue with pressing certain directions on the joystick. For some reason it isn’t the most responsive to directions. For example, if you player is pressing “right” on the joystick then presses up, it doesn’t always go up; it might go left or keep going to the right. As far as I can tell this is a hardware problem, and I think it means that the joysticks that I ordered are not the greatest quality. I need to test this out a little more before I blame the joysticks, because it’s possible that the issue lies with the software, trying to turn an 8 direction joystick with 4 inputs into a software controlled 8 direction.

These are the main two issues I see with the setup I have. I wanted to finish the project by New Years, as I last predicted, and I would consider this finishing it, for now. After these two issues are fixed, I will move into looking at each of the following areas.

• Upgrading the computer system
• Coin mechs?
• Marquee’s for the top and sides
• Mounted speakers in strategic places
• Custom side, and panel art

But as far as a first pass goes, I think we did a great job, and I’m pretty proud of it.
Total resources spent thus far: $270.00, 28 hours

Over the past few days, we spent lots of time drilling holes and mounting the 4 joysticks, each with 4 buttons. Only a little extra equipment (~$12) was required to finish the wiring and mounting job. Pat and I spent a load of time doing this, and it looks to be pretty good quality.

We took pictures of the panel before anything was put on, as soon as the joysticks and buttons were mounted, many during the wiring process, and after the wiring was completed.

Total resources spent thus far: $270.00, 25 hours

The default bashrc for freebsd is bland, black and white, so I looked for something to spice it up.
First I added color as well as some custom-ities to my two line prompt:

export PS1="e[32;40mt e[33;40mue[34;40m@e[31;40mh e[36;40mwne[37;40m#$ e[0m"

Then I added color to my ls’s. Once you experience the default linux coloring, going back is pretty hard.

CLICOLOR="YES";    export CLICOLOR
LSCOLORS="ExGxFxdxCxDxDxhbadExEx";    export LSCOLORS

This gives
the 24 hour time in green, followed by user (orange)@(blue)host(red), followed by the current path (light blue), then new line
followed by the number of commands done on this term thus far, followed by the “$” symbol.

Works great for me.

Of course, don’t forget to source it in your .bash_profile
source ~/.bashrc