Tried to post this in the "post everytime you buy"-thread in the user market place, but somehow the post won't show up :/ Got an Xbox Debug Kit in the mail today, it came with the regular black case: My first debug kit, yay! Sadly the previous owner swapped out the hdd and the case is in pretty rough shape =( So the question is: Mod it or restore it?
There are some debug kits in black cases, sometimes used for demonstrations of early builds in public view. So case hasn't been swapped. There's no way the stickers would be perfect like that.
Very nice. I would like to collect more of the older stuff since I have a metric ton of 360 XDK related stuff.
This one has the full 128 RAM installed. There is a small amount of these black debug kits the have only 64 RAM installed from microsoft. So that is a giant plus! What size hard drive did they install? It is super simple on a debug to install a new hard drive and you can just put a unlocked 8 gig or 10 gig drive back in it to get back to stock specs if you want to. If you need a stock drive let me know. I have about 20 plus of them in a stack here.
Send me a PM sometime Ape, I know Id like a 1.6 prototype. As Hex mentioned, there are some display Black debug kits out there, along with internal prototypes often seeming to use black cases.
The Previous owner put an 80 gig hdd in. I'm not sure if I want to fully get it back to stock or put in something like a 320 or 500 gig hdd. I already have enough stock drives, but thank you for the offer Another thing I've noticed is that the clock capacitor isn't leaking. Seems a little odd, considering that basically every Xbox I have has had a problem with that to some degree. Is this because it has the mcpx x2? I don't know if I remember this correctly but the mcpx-chip also played a part in storing the date, didn't it?
If that was the case, then the if the cap died or when the XBOX was not receiving power for a bit the date would've saved.
What I have noticed is that gold cap that they used in the 1.6"s never seems to leak at all! Is this everyone elses experience also? So what I do is use those 1.6 caps in debugs. You will get a clock error if you do not have a clock cap installed in a debug or dev kit. I have opened over 30 1.6's in the last few years and I have at least 10 of them here now with no issues at all. I cant think that is just my luck.
I have done that, too. But only a handful of times, since I only have a few 1.6's. The thing is: They may have put in a better (meaning higher production value) capacitor, but I don't know if and how long it's going to last in a 1.1-1.5 Xbox. Since most of the caps in the pre-1.6 versions have had a few years more to "rot", maybe it's the same issue with the 1.6's capacitors only delayed (since they were produced last). The clock cap is really my only gripe with the original xbox, since there doesn't really seem to be a permanent fix besides taking out the cap. Other than that I absolutely love the xbox in terms of things you can mod, change and tweak.
Well if you want to get rid of the supercap at all you could mod in a cr2032 battery and a bigger cap. This way the cap won't leak and the xbox won't loose the time at all. Well until the 3v lithium Battery is empty. Thats the best way i think! (Not my picture, just took it of the web!)
Heh, it's from circuit-board.de What always kept me from doing this was a post, originally on the xboxhacker forums and it goes as follows: [original posting on xboxhacker forum; this post was in response to the question, "any plans on swapping out the capacitor for a battery?".] Well, that's a good point. Inspection of the board reveals a 32.768 kHz crystal at location 6F. This is the crystal used to keep time in the system: 2^15 = 32768, which is a nice easy number to divide down to get a precisely 1 second pulse with a 15-bit counter. This crystal is hooked up to the MCPX. This, perhaps, answers one question: the backup voltage is 2.5V because the time keeper is in the MCPX, which is a 0.13u part and it is possible that its transistors can't deal with a 3V backup battery. Nonetheless, I disconnected the + terminal of the capacitor and measured the leakage current with the power off: this is 0.14mA. Note that if you totally disconnect the capacitor and the power, the current goes way down, but I presume that's because the clock shuts itself off. Q=CV, so the capacitor holds 2.5 couloumbs of charge when fully charged. At a discharge rate of 0.14 mC/s, the capacitor should last about 5 hours to zero, although the clock probably stops working around 1.3V, so this confirms xboxmagic's 2-3 hour number. I discovered that why my clock sometimes only stays on for about 5 minutes is that it takes a minute or two for the capacitor to fully charge. (There is some series resistor of low value that prevents a *huge* current spike from rushing in if it's discharged). Because I tend to errr...power on my box sporadically for short periods err...I have "odd" gaming habits... ...the capacitor never gets fully charged and thus it looks like it's not keeping time. A 0.14 mA draw is enormous for a battery-backed clock; I looked up the Ibatt for one RTC and it's like 300 nA...about a factor of 500 less. The MCPX probably draws so much current because it's done in a .13u process, and the leakage current at those gate sizes is horrible. So, battery backup? well, even if you used a CR2032 coin lithium battery (220 mAh capacity) with a diode in series to drop the voltage down to 2.5V, it would last probably less than 60 days :/ Plus, in order to drop a battery in, you'd have to disconnect the capacitor charging switch. So in the end, the answer is: MSFT cut cost by not putting a long-life real time clock part on the XBOX, and instead integrated it into the MCPX; because of this, the current draw was high and they were forced to use a supercap which charges while powered on, becuase if they didn't by the time the box was shipped to the customer, the battery would be mostly dead. Eh. back to thesis. That's why I've never bothered with doing the battery-and-bigger-cap-mod. Normally I wouldn't really care all that much about the date, but in games like Vice City where sometimes save files have the same name, this can become quite a headache. How are you going to tell the save files apart if they both have the same name and the factory-date of the xbox (most of the time only varying by a few hours or minutes)? Does connecting to a time-server with XBMC get around this problem?
