Anyone able to shed some light on whats going on here? I will take picture of the board on the Debug unit also.
I am open to pure speculation feel free to add to the conversation. My guess is this has something to do with either some form of emulation or is for flashing the firmware on the drive. The odd thing to me is the addition of the molex connection which seems to show that it was swapped out of the kit and hooked to a PC or a Alpha to be used since no second molex power connector was in the unit.
Looks to be some kind flashing test, so you might be in the right direction for that. Not sure if Borman has seen anything like this before. He'd know more than I do with development stuff.
Confusing to me, wouldn't the firmware update pass through the IDE connector just like if you updated a drive's firmware from a PC, it would communicate via IDE. I'd like to see a picture of the back of the drive and the top cover. Oh wait a sec, maybe its not for flashing the DVD drive itself but booting from the drive and flashing the motherboard?
Is it a normal size 40 wire connector? To me it looks a little bit smaller in the picture. But I think you might be right about it being for the updating the motherboard. To bad they used a thompson. I am assuming that the debug was not sealed? It just does not look something that microsoft did. It just looks really homemade to me. I hope that you guys get to the bottom of this! I would really like to see if this is something that we all can learn from and make for ourselves if it does update the motherboard. This would be a great tool to have! Did you boot the DVD drive to see what firmware it says it has on it?
That soldering looks like crap. And it's a 20 pin connector. Without better pictures of where everything is connected on the DVD-ROM as well as the guts of the debug kit (assuming there is a 20 pin connector in there somewhere) the assumption it was used to update the mobo doesn't make any sense. You'd need a connector in there. The idea that it was used outside of the XBox holds validity given the molex connector is obviously wired up to power points and ground.
The top cover of the drive is just a standard thomson cover. The soldering on the molex connector is a bit sloppy but the wire gauge is pretty hefty compared with the solder point so I can understand the difficulty of not burning up the board while soldering it the 20 pin cable wires are pretty clean. The cable would have connected externally. no 20 pin connection in the kit. I am not terribly familiar with how firmware on dvd drives is updated so I cannot comment to that much but my guess is even to do it via a cable soldered on the board it wouldn't take 20 solder points.
Too many wires for JTAG or serial alone and too few for IDE. Suppose it could be a wiring harness for testing purposes.
:concern: i could be wrong, but that drive looks configured to plug into an ide compatible computer and dump retail disks in true 1/1 style (6.5g xiso) could well be wrong? (if that's what it takes to image an xgd3/xiso besides a kreyon computer drive or flashed/TRASHED 360 optical drive, PASS! i give up, not worth the stress.) please others chip-in on what crap i said, and correct me. if this item is what i think it is, i'm asking a friend to do something incredibly stupid. :witless:
^^ WTF?! i'm serious! care to elaborate? talk to me as if i'm backward, shouldn't be too hard. :wink-new:
Could it be possible that someone at some point was hooking it up to a pc to try to dump the drives firmware? It's possible someone was working on turning a standard pc DVD drive into a box drive. Just a complete guess though, I have no idea what that connector would hook into since it's not a standard IDE size.
The connector soldered in isnt IDE. The reason he didnt go into more details is because its already been said in the thread.
^^ it all seemed like speculation, shots in the dark. above is good enough, avoiding like a disease, not my area! (thanks) :witless:
Thanks for all the good responses! I just got home and to a look side by side with another thomson board and the two are almost identical the only difference I noticed is this board besides the obvious soldered on parts was a 4 unoccupied jumper posts on toward the inside edge and the black number stamp on this board is prefixed by PB which likely is prototype board. Yes it is a 20 pin connector but only 8 total solder points and 6 wires tied together going to one point with the yellow wire. I doubt anyone is going to know for certain what this is or what that connected to but I like to hear the speculation since thats part of the fun about collecting this obscure stuff anyway.
