I currently don't have a 1.6 board here to check (I have a boxed LE clear system I might open) but what is the reason for the 1.6 not being flashable? Is it: A: The chip is unknown (MS part number only) B: The chip is write once C: MS just didn't enable W/E (and whatever else) using jumpers on the pcb The bios has been dumped, meaning there is a way to read it at least.. Yeah I know cheap modchips exist but this is still an interesting topic (in my eyes)... Thoughts?
They have different chips altogether. Up to 1.5 it's a re-writable EEPROM, similar to what most PC motherboards have. 1.6 has a plain ROM chip. It might be a write-once EPROM with no window.
Xbox 1.6 has no TSOP flash, it loads the BIOS from a custom LPC chip labelled 'Xyclops' which is read only. Well, as far as I know it is "read only". Back in the day when 1.6 was released no one really tried to reverse the Xyclops chip because the involved teams were too busy selling LPC based modchips, it would have been counterproductive. For those who are interested I keep a log of the hacking related events when Xbox 1.6 was released: http://www.eurasia.nu/wiki/index.php/XboxXyclopsEventLog The Xbox EEPROM is not related to this, that's a different chip where hard drive key and some other info is stored.
Why not to use some eeprom programmer to write IND BIOS on 512KB flash? It's just a memory after all. Or we don't know the MS ROM chip pinout? P.S. Sorry, just saw your link.
