So my buddy Joe came over with his Xbox 360 Elite tonight, and before he could finish 3 games of Halo 3 on my 360, his system was finished. He had a BenQ VAD6038, the same that Dave had the day previous on his Xbox 360 Arcade. The process was exactly the same for his system as it was for Dave’s, which is why it took less than 15 minutes.

This was the first Elite 360 I’ve done, and the third BenQ drive. The 14th Xbox 360 drive overall.

Chad’s 2nd 360 might be coming soon, making it an even 15. After that, I better cool it off for awhile, flashing 360s has been dominating my time lately.

I’ve been a huge fan of the Tower Defense genre of games since they first came out as custom maps for Warcraft 3 in 2003.

Over the years, plenty of different ideas have been implemented with respect to this genre, that is building structures to defend against an onslaught of passing units. The goal (varies slightly, but mostly) is to not let any units pass. There is a lot of strategy involved, including placement, upgrade strategy, deciding when to spend money, quanity/quality, etc.

Some of my favorite tower defense maps are
Element TD
BK’s Gem TD

There are non Warcraft 3 variants these days, namely Flash Element TD, and Desktop Tower Defense. Recently I watched a review about PixelJunk Monsters on the 1up show, which I’m really excited about. Too bad it’s PS3 only (at least for now). It looks really cool, though.

Dave did a switcheroo, returned his 0079FL and picked up another Xbox 360 Arcade, which happened to have a BenQ drive. I’ve done a BenQ before, this was the “grand slam” we were looking for.

So I hopped on #fw on efnet irc, downloaded the latest tutorial, iXtreme firmware, and iPrep to make a bootable usb flash drive for flashing the 360’s BenQ drive. Similar to the last BenQ drive I did, I used Kessa’s computer with my VIA 6421 sata card.

This time it wouldn’t read. Upon following instructions, the drive status would start on 0×79, but it would not go to 0xD1 as it was supposed to. Instead of stuck at 0×80. Pressing any keys would lead to showing this message:

An internal stack overflow has caused this session to be halted. Change the stacks setting in your config.sys file, and then try again

I tried about 100 different combinations, of port used, PCI slot used, timing for turning on the system, and a few other variables. Eventually I found a 360mods.net forum thread that said this:

Power the 360 and PC at the same time, but leave the SATA cable disconnected. Connect SATA at DOS and try it that way.

And that worked first try. It still froze after reading, but at least it would consistently read the drive. I had to manually run firmtool and verify it actually inserted the key correctly. When it came to writing the hacked firmware back on the drive, I just followed the directions in the tutorial and it worked first try.

Overall, great success. It’s a bummer all of this was in vain though:

Swing #3 at [sad] Dave’s 0079FL Xbox 360 resulted in a miss, I think that means we struck out. That’s ok, the inning is not yet over.

We verified that the Xbox 360 still works, so worst case we’re out ~$30 for the Passkey. We might try for a grand slam and swap this system for a non Hitachi 0079FL Xbox 360. Time will tell.

Tonight we made attempt #2 at soldering the Maximus passkey onto Dave’s Hitachi 0079FL Xbox 360. The first time wasn’t really an attempt, we didn’t have a heat gun as the guide suggested for removing the epoxy, and our hottest blow driers just didn’t cut it.

I bought a $20 heat gun from Harbor Freight, and applied it to an aluminum-foil-isolated area while Pat chipped away the epoxy. That part went really well. We connected the cable to the fcc connector and did our best to solder it onto the dvd drive’s board, but no luck. Upon completion, we just couldn’t get the blue LED to come on. PHAIL! Here’s the steps we followed:

After 4 hours, we were using a multimeter to verify the connections were good when we had to give up. I’m not exactly sure how to troubleshoot this, I guess I’ll think of something when we resume on Thursday.

It seems like whenever I touch a soldering iron, badness results. Maybe one of these times I’ll actually try and learn the correct methodologies before attempting it.