I've seen people around here trying to rebuild the rare Alpha kits, which is an awesome endeavour and made me think if the same is possible for a post-release Xbox or XDK since these are more common and, I suppose, there should be more data available such as component versions and firmware images. Also, does anyone know if there are any Unreal Engine 2 devkits with Xbox deployment capability out there ? I know that UE2X was specifically made for the Xbox but I barely found anything out there.
My alpha project was started with the same thought in mind, building a "retail" xbox. I don't have much to add here, but I know people years ago were working on this and had issues with RAM. This is something that is def. on my list of things to attempt.
Is there a thread here on the forums that documented such attempts ? I've found some useful hardware data on xbox-scene.com but I wouldn't want to repeat the same mistakes / stumble upon the same issues as those before me.
No, it wasn't documented. I don't see this happening as easily as the alpha kit was built. And I wouldn't try without kernel debugging. Though I doubt the kernel debugger will ever even boot. I'm not even sure where I'd start that project, honestly.
Well, the first problem I've seen, just by looking at the reported specs is that the nforce 420-D was never featured on intel-compatible boards. Not sure how much the north bridge matters but the south bridge is probably a deal breaker since it handles sound and ethernet. Roughly speaking, it would seem that Microsoft took an AMD board and stuck a Pentium on it.
It's not possible. Don't even try it because a post-release (Retail and Debug) Xbox is VERY hardware specific and Xbox1 is not just a PC in a box! The Alpha kit is one thing, a retail Xbox is another. 1. The boot process is quite different from just a standard PC. Simply flashing your bios on a PC with very similar hardware just isn't going to work. 2. There is no PC equivalent to Xbox's MCPX and many components connected to it. Some have extra hardware registers, others have registers accessed to MMIO instead of PMIO. Sound hardware is a good example. It's not just an AC'97, there's a soundstorm APU in there too along with a handful of other DSPs and codecs. The AC'97 is also different than the PC standard (IIRC the PC is PMIO, and XBox is MMIO). 3. The PCI layout is VERY specific and the Xbox bios and OS expects the hardware mapping to be exact and other PCI addresses to be disabled. So just sticking a soundstorm audio card in a PCI slot and expecting the Xbox bios to just "figure out" where it's located is not a realistic view. It's not a realistic idea. If you want to try anyway, be my guest, but if I were you, I wouldn't waste my time on it.
