First post here so Forgive me if I am Ignorant. I have a dead Chihiro system. Looks like a 1.2 Xbox board. But with the X2 chipset. I have a question, Could I take a retail 1.2 Xbox Main board, and transfer the X2 chip, EEPROM, TSOP, and the 4 ram modules and use that as a replacement Chihiro board? Or buy a old dev kit and just replace the Eeprom and the tsop? I have read "hints" that this "May work" but I have not read anything for 100% sure it will. The reason I ask is I have not found a replacement Xbox Board for my game.
I believe that what you're suggesting would work - but like you said, nobody has tried it. I was going to try something similar but I only have one 128MB retail modded xbox board here and the TSOP pads on it are damaged beyond repair, so it boots permanently from a 256K cheapmod. The 256K is too small to fit a Chihiro BIOS. From what I've read you may not even need to change the MCPX chip on a retail modded board. Using a 128MB devkit motherboard should theoretically work with just a TSOP and EEPROM flash.
The retail Xbox would be the best way to go, for "purchase price" but I would need to buy a good SMD BGA rework Station, and this "one" project is not enough of a have to have to justify that purchase. I have not found any DEV / Debug boxes for sale, Anywhere near me, and the one I did find was stupid spendy. I could buy another working Chihiro System cheaper. So, anyone have a motherboard they want to sell off?
Again, take this with a grain of salt: X2 should be the same as X3 without the hidden boot rom (X2/X3 is probably *not* the version. There can be X2 which are newer than X3. Also X3 don't always have to be interchangable while X2 can probably be replaced by any other X2) As the bios probably still contains X-Codes which are normally interpreted by the bios it should be enough to convert them to X3 retail Xbox code (Which should be pretty easy). Your chihiro bios should then also work on a 128MB retail/X3 Xbox board. The bios and jamtable / X-Codes are part of the flash and the eeprom is also software writeable - this means the repair / conversion could be done mostly in software (once you made the flash writeable and moved the RAM) - without resoldering the MCPX. You can probably test your X2 => X3 conversion in MAME or XQEMU. TLDR: X2 = No bootrom = Bootrom from flash will be used = X-Code interpreter from flash = Convert X-Codes from X2 to X3 hw opcodes => X2 bios running on X3
You just have to ask the wright person! I did it the other way round as i had a chihiro board with a burned out MCPX-X2. I used a retail eeprom, Tsop, microcontroller and MCPX-X3 to tansform it into a 128mb Retail board. It works the other way round too! You only have to swap the TSOP, eeprom and MCPX-X2 to a retail board and add the additional 64mb of Ram and you have a chihiro board. But it's a lot easier to just take a debug kit motherboard and flash the eeprom and tsop with the contents of a chihiro! If you want to take a look at the pictures i took while repairing it here are the links:
N64. Nice work. Perfect Solder Job. Yup I need the Rework Station... So anyone have a Debug Board to get rid of?
I also says it, but you know you can load any bios with phoenix bios loader on debug kit, but freeze on black screen, missing card from chihiro certainly
Again, not the exact question you are asking, but one of my friends fixed an xbox devkit using a Chihiro board - just swapped over the flash and EEPROM. That worked with no problems at all.
