Did I kill my Xbox?

So I was messing with my 1.6 Xbox for the first time in months and I may have killed it. I've softmodded it with UnleashX dashboard. I have a game ripped to the HDD and was playing it last night to test the system out. I returned to the dashboard just in time to see the CPU temperature at 71 degrees Celsius and turn to 72 right away. Then the system froze up with crackling sounds and garbled screen. I turned it off right away since it overheated. I tried it again this morning only for it to fail again. It had all of last night to cool down for a short test before I try replacing the thermal material on it. When I turned it on the console would power up for half a second then shut off for 2. The light is green during the 2 times it does this. Then it powers up and flashes red and orange on the 3rd try. I have the AV cable plugged into it and my TV. I get no video at all. Not even the boot animation. Did I fry the CPU? If so it's no loss since this is a crappy 1.6 board. At least I'll have a nice case for something like say a PC project.

 

I do not think It is fried. It takes more than 72 Celcius to fry a CPU I think.
Although that is definitely weird.

This symptom is called "Christmas light" on the Llama's Xbox repair page.
http://www.llamma.com/xbox/Repairs/xbox_motherboard.htm
I think I have seen it once... I do not remember how I got it fixed though...

 

It's not quite the christmas lights thing spoken of there. Mine does the 3 boot attempts then flashes ORANGE and red, not green and red. I know it isn't video related because it booted fine with the same cable before the overheating. If it helps any I pulled the heatsink from the CPU and found it to be a nice cobalt blue. Don't think it's supposed to be like that...

Doesn't matter now. I have a good 128MB 1.4 board with a 1.1 console on the way. Think I'll just sell or give it away as junk along with my failed 128MB 1.2 board.

 

Oh, yeah I missed that nuance.
Considering how worthless ( in term of money ) Original Xboxes are I can understand why you would not want to mess with it.
I still like to fix them up if I can. Because fixing stuff is fun

 

You can have it then. I'll even send the HDD that is with it and the PSU if you want. Just no case, DVD drive, IDE cable, or stuff like that.

 

Well, thanks for the offer. I would take it if you were my neighbor. Or maybe even If I was USA resident.
But I do not want to pay even only shipping to Canada for it.
I have about 10 spare Xboxes already and do not know what to do with them. Ive sold everyone I know who was interested a Softmodded Xbox already.

 

Orange=AV cable not plugged in. Since the cable is plugged in we can deduce that the XBox can no longer detect the cable being plugged in.

Thus it is bloody obvious this is a FRAG where the XBox cannot detect the AV cable.

 

Might be something silly like cold solder on the AV port. Llama said that he had some xbox give this error with some kind of AV leads and not others.

 

Then why did the Xbox work fine before the overheat then do this right after it did? I didn't touch anything. I just turned it off, waited about an hour for it to cool down, turned it back on, and this. I didn't touch the video cable or anything. Something strange is going on then if it can't detect the video cable now from being overheated even though I never touched it...

 

Dunno mate, just saying. Sometimes some random shits happen together.

 

Meh. As I already said, it doesn't matter. I have my 128MB Xbox running playing some Chihiro Virtua Cop 3 so I'm set.

 

Is there an advantage to 128 mb in performance for Arcade games that run choppily on standard 64mb or is the upgrade only useful for the roms that will otherwise give you a ( out of memory ) error?

 

Think it will help improve all games that run crappily on MAMEoX. To use the 128MB RAM for the classic MAME arcade games you need MAMEoX128 Plus. It's a modified version of MAMEoX for 128MB consoles. Some games will use it for smoother play. I know there is a video on YouTube showing that in action but I don't remember where it is.

I just use it to initialize all 128MB for VC3.

 

I almost exclusively use CoinOps and FinalBurn Legends. My versions are probably 1 year old at this point though. Might be an idea to check for updates.

A game I remember ran poorly is Dragon Blaze arcade. That kinda pissed me off because I wanted to play it. Was wondering if 128mb would help there.

 

I'll test it on my setup and report back with my findings. Should run on MAMEoX.

 

Thanks, that would be nice to check.
I think It might also work on Final burn.

BTW, Final burn seem to work better than MAME 100% of the time. It is much faster and accurate, it just runs less games. So I typically check if a game runs on Final burn before bothering to try Mame.
I think CoinOp for Xbox is also preferable to vanilla Mame versions, because better updated. The exception would be light gun games. Those were glitched in Coinops ( last I checked ) .

 

So even with the 128MB upgrade it still runs like crap. I think it's CPU at this point. This is emulation we are talking about after all. The game is from 200 and the Xbox design comes from 2001. A 733Mhz single core CPU just doesn't seem to cut it. Maybe a Trusty 1.4Ghz 128MB one will do better. The game only seems to run like crap when the screen is loaded down with enemies galore. Otherwise it seems to run fine. the periods of slowdown only last half a second or so.

That's my findings after fidling with the memory settings. Maybe I can mess with them more to smooth things out. But not tonight. MORE VC3 NOW!!!