Technical insight greatly apreciated for Franken Alpha

There are alpha towers, there are beta units (DVT3), and then there are debug and development kits that run final code (DVT4), just debug patched. The DVT numbers don't matter a whole lot, since Microsoft has some convoluted system that we haven't figured out, but basically beta units are closer to retail hardware with some changes, while dev kits are all compatible with debug signed code for games that would come out on the system.

Final Debug and Development units can launch retail games with nearly perfect compatibility if using an app like Retail Game Loader or Phoenix Bios Loader. Beta hardware cannot, for the most part. And Alpha hardware cannot.

The Xbox is pretty highly customized with stuff that you can't get on a PC. Yes, it uses PC based parts, but things like the MCPX aren't replicated elsewhere.

The Alpha Kit is an entirely different beast than a retail based system.

 

some extra background info if wanted http://xboxdevwiki.net/Development_Kits
or the general wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_Development_Kit

EDIT: I was too slow, Borman was just faster

 

At last, I've got USB card and were able to complete installation (only original gamepad works, but keyboard or any other USB gamepads from Logitech or Defender - they didn't). Second good news is that I bought another Ti200 based GF3 card and it works too.
Three things left:
1. Wait a little for Audio card to come.
2. Build a case for it (doubt about it at least not in the near future)
3. Explore Franken tomorrow using FTP. Will try Chihiro games or Kameo. Maybe some emulators. Need to install PC side software.
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Don't have any problems with PCI slots. It doesn't matter there I put these cards (near AGP or far from it or install LAN card first or second).

 

Any retail based games arent going to work, nor emulators.

 

So, that means I have less things to do. It's sad.

 

Again people, the Xbox alpha is NOT an Xbox*, the executables are "diferent". Short story, it will only run Xbox Alpha compiled programs. if you are getting into programming and the SDK that came with one of the leaks, you "might" be able to compile some sourcecode to work on the alpha... but you need to understand "programming" and "compilers" a bit to understand that simply changing a header to become XE isstead XBE wont work, and probably homebrew relies on Libraries that might not work on a Alpha.

You basicly porting software to a new/old system. usefullness? very low. Fun? probably...

 

I do get it, just wanted to see what will happen.
Audio card came 4 days ago but tested only now. MS Dashboard or any demos don't have any sound at all, there are only 8 tracks at MS Dash available to play. It work. That means I finally made it in one piece.
I'm a bit confused about PC side SW, so, if I may I want to PM you about it.

 

Digging around in some old hard drives, I found the full bios source code leak that came out many moons ago. Can build dev and retail bioses, even found an old VM win2k image with all the whole environment setup to build it. I'm an embedded sw engineer by day and been debating whether this source might help us to build a firmware image that would work on a franken box? Anyone got any thoughts on this idea?

For me, the main show stopper would be the graphics card, I don't have enough experience with programming gpus. Assuming a suitable geforce card was found what do you guys think to the feasibility of building a bios image that supports the retail file format?

 

I kinda hope to know if you be able to share that with people? I think ive seen the source and vm image somewhere.

if its the same, its like after retail and im not sure if its posible to remove the hardware dependencies that are in the code. if its the same one as Barnabas (wich is Kernel 4400) it will be kinda hard my guess.

Main problem you have even if it compiles and sort of boots, games are compiled targeting the xbox specific hardware, you need to hack the games to support whatever compatible GPU you have, MCPX not being there so drivers cant find it. Xqemu or cxbx be easier. But what do I know, i havent looked at the code to see it run on alpha hardware. maybe reverseing the Alpha bios to add more hardware or somehow enable newer nvdia cards or remove chipset checks might help maybe downport sample programs? if your source is more complete, you might have nice programming samples aswell

 

The alpha bios didn't have any special bits in it to make it an 'xbox'-compatible device. It's a standard Intel bios image. The alpha kernel (on the filesystem) is where all the important bits are - it's keyed specifically for loading only an nvidia card, etc. I tried several years ago with minimal knowledge of reverse-engineering to alter the nvidia PCI ID it looked for, and ultimately got it past the initial kernel boot, but it crashed after the drivers loaded.

As for reverse-engineering the alpha kernel with the Barnabas sources, enough changed between the two where there's very little the same. They are essentially two different generations of code - very little in common with the other, at least from my own analysis over the years.

I haven't attempted anything more than changing the device id lookups in the alpha kernel to get it booting - windbg works via a virtual machine, if that's helpful at all to anyone. Only issue is, a lot of the standard debugging features are stripped from the build, as it is an extremely stripped down NT5-based kernel, with only the bits that would help debug a faulty Alpha kit included.

Edit: Looking in the alpha recovery leads me to two interesting bits -
The alpha kit uses DOS + XBBOXLDR.com & XBOXLDR.BIN, which appears to be like NTLDR on Windows. It searches for XBOXKRNL.BIN, which it chainloads like ntoskrnl.exe on Windows.
This is important, as the early version of the alpha does not have anything like the 2BL in the retail xbox, and instead executes the kernel directly. I would assume that we could utilize ntldr to chainload xboxkrnl.bin, but have not tried it (or at least don't recall doing so). Whether or not that helps anyone, I don't know.