I just found out they stopped making them, and they are unavailable. This is going to bad for people who have a lot of them around.
It's piss easy to softmod an Xbox anyway with nothing more then a PC with an IDE controller and a CD-R, so what benefit do the modchips offer over this?
I'm not sure, but when I first wanted to mod my Xbox, the softmods required action replay and a certain game like 007. I never got it working and ended up just getting a X-Chip modchip and never had any problems after that. Seems to me that a modchip can be very helpful. But I've heard softmodding improved after that so I don't know. I'd still prefer a modchip over a softmod.
I always used to reflash the TSOP using the Splinter Cell hack. No point spending money on mod chips when there's a perfectly useable chip already there.
Not unless you want to go on Live - then you need one. Well, that's no longer a reason now... If you can't get any professional chips, and absolutely want one, there's always the 1st gen chips, the homemade ones. Those 29 wires are a b*tch to install though. Still, if you got a 1.6 box, you're screwed - since neither gen1 chips nor reflashing work!
i'm pretty sure the games for softmodding are less than that now lol. I've never had problems using the softmod method, and RSO - dude, Xbox Live for Xbox 1 was taken off line permanently 2 weeks ago. There is no reason for a Xbox to be stock now.
Some softmods, depending on the software on your xbox, don't require any specific game at all as I recall.
Softmodding nowdays costs nothing at all, apart from the pennies a single CDR costs (and if you have a number of machines with the same kernal then you can reuse the disc...)... it seems to work on any Xbox I've thrown at it. It requires you to open the Xbox up but from start to finish it's a 20 minute job (another 20 if you want to whack in a bigger hard drive). I've done it on a number of machines as the drives are getting crap and it's easy to copy games to the hard drive and watch the massive increase in speed in loading games (No Action Replay or weird versions of Xbox games needed.) So again... what point are the modchips? Even with a softmodded machine it was possible to disable it so you could use Xbox Live (although this is dead so no point now...)
It's all down to what version of the EvoX or Xecuter BIOS you use. You use the same BIOS to flash the onboard TSOP that you would put on a modchip anyway. It just requires soldering a couple of points on the MoBo to write-enable the chip, a memory card with the Bert & Ernie hacked Splinter Cell save games on it and a computer to telnet into the Xbox once Linux is running. There were a couple of other games you could use (MechWarrior was one), but it just so happened I had SC anyway. I know that you could replace the DVD with a second HDD using Cromwell BIOS/Linux, but I can't remember if any of the hacked BIOS ever supported this. It seem so long ago now; I haven't done an Xbox for anyone in years.
You do have to get the lock code from the original drive and lock the new drive with it. It's a bit annoying but pretty straightforward.
