Found one of these in a thrift store today and I can't seem to fund anything about them on the innertubes. All I can tell for now is that it appears to sport a 1.6 mobo, Phillips DVD-ROM, Western Digital HDD and standard case with a sucker on the front with specs and a big fat prototype sticker on the bottom. Manufactured in 2003. Whoever had it installed mini-Linux on it along with Evo-X. Retail dash is still accessible. Don't have access to a camera right now but I will in a few hours. Anyone know anything about this thing? EDIT: Err its a "Tuscany DVT1" with the top of the front label reading "TD1-6", whatever that means.
It was. There were already holes in both stickers and neither had any screws. The four pads were also moved adjacent to their appropriate positions and positioned near them. Pictures below: Bottom of the XBox unresized for a 3.35mb download: http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b373/APE992/IMG_0893.jpg What you see above is how I got it. Aside from one sticker internally it looks identical to retail 1.6 mobos but I can take a shot later, no signs that anything was ever attached to the LPC bus.
Shame it was opened, seems to be a fairly rare box. Sure, it's really just a sticker on probably a late test unit, but still
There was absolutely no need to either. It was softmodded using the font exploit featuring "Bert" and "Ernie". The sticker also tells you exactly what is inside: Western Digital HDD, Phillips DVD-ROM, MCPX3 and a Delta PSU. A bit unusual configuration for a v1.6 (most I've seen sport a Samsung DVD-ROM, Seagate HDD and more often than not something other than Delta for a PSU) but still interesting. Judging by the font exploit and the screen cap on E: it looks like this was all done back in 2008. Wonder if the source for this XBox was the same one as the Alamo controller I purchased from the same thrift store a while back.
Possible, but there is a small sticker on the left side of the mobo just below another I've seen on multiple XBoxes that has the same basic info as the sticker on the case does in a table with one row being the item in question and its status in the second row. All are listed as "NOM" which I assume means "nominal". Still no idea why anyone opened it up beyond curiosity. EDIT: ^Sticker in question.
Ever find out what these Prototypes in 2003 were even used/built for? I have a similar one that isn't opened and the label reads: TD1-15 Tuscany DVT1, Config 15, XM3, Fast Slow CS, Seagate C1R4, Philips J5 AP 1.5, Delta S6 2003-12-07 K 1.00.5838.01 D 1.00.5659.03 My only guess is perhaps test mules for the revision 1.6's before mass producing them?
Yeah, my best guess has always been that they were designed to test motherboard revisions. I have two proto consoles incoming. There are quite a few different tests that were being done throughout development. You had them testing both hardware revisions and software revisions, remember.
"AP 1.5" = Anti-Piracy 1.5, the second revision of the DVD-X2's copy protection system, released in later games. It basically just did more of the challenges - it didn't seem all that different from the previous type. This differs a lot from Xbox 360, where the second revision of the disk copy protection system was radically different and required Microsoft into hack their vendors' drives' firmware to accomplish the task. At least, that was the story I was told. (Supposedly, the reason they did that on 360 was not for piracy reasons, but because the anti-piracy system was eating 2 GB and they needed a different design.) "Nom" probably stands for "nominal" - that is, the nominal chip for the retail system. This was a prototype of a retail system. If anything, these tell us what the real names of the revisions were, rather than the hacker-named revisions. It's well known that v1.0 is DVT4. My educated guess is that v1.1-v1.4 and the possibly-nonexistent v1.5 are all what Microsoft calls DVT6. I had thought that Microsoft called v1.6 XBLADE, but maybe they called them XM3 (Xbox Mark III?) instead, or later. That, or maybe XBLADE is v1.4, and XM3 is v1.6.
EDIT: This post was in response to a picture of a "DVT2" console. Seems to be missing now. It would be nice to see that owner open a new thread for that console.
