xbox hard drive

Post by **nocturnalnerd** » Wed Oct 03, 2007 10:54 pm

I am curious can one take out the original hard drive and put one in with more capacity(say 200 gigs). If so what would one do with it.

Post by **GSZX1337** » Wed Oct 03, 2007 10:59 pm

This is a very common modification to the Xbox. The larger HD is often used either to store videos/music and applications. Another use for this mod is to keep games on to access them without use of the DVD(s).

Post by **lordofduct** » Wed Oct 03, 2007 11:42 pm

you need to modify it though, also you need to copy the contents of the old HDD onto the new one and 'ata lock' it. There is software for the XBOX out there that does all this with a push of a button though.

you should really go look at www.xbox-scene.com

if you didn't know that you could swap the HDDs, you'll probably be amazed by all the other things you can do to it as well.

Post by **mason** » Thu Oct 04, 2007 1:04 am

i wonder if they'll make an xbox emulator for the ps3. and if it will turn into the type of mod device the orginal xbox was.

Post by **Droid party** » Thu Oct 04, 2007 1:21 am

mason wrote:i wonder if they'll make an xbox emulator for the ps3. and if it will turn into the type of mod device the orginal xbox was.

Lordofduct is probably a much better authority on this than me but I strongly doubt that the sort of thing we saw on the Xbox1 will be possible on any of the current machines bearing in mind that the Xbox1 was really more a pc than a console which allowed for the sort of modding that we saw.

Besides emulation is pretty intense stuff, I doubt that the ps3 even has the muscle to emulate the Xbox1 even if it was open to modding.

Post by **lordofduct** » Thu Oct 04, 2007 2:13 am

I could never guess really what will happen on the PS3, I'm not very well versed in its architecture. It could possibly become a nice homebrew set up, but the 360 might show to be that... it really depends on who develops the necessary exploits for it. What I can say about it though is that what made the XBOX so great was the ease of modding it, the existence of a hard drive stock, and the x86 processor in it (it was a damn PII clocked at 766mhz, we've all seen them before) made it a great place for homebrew. Any coder out there has played in that sandbox a million times before.

As for XBOX1 emulation on it... meh, that I'd guess to be a low chance. As for PC emulation of it, I could see that seeing as the architecture is very similar... as they both use the x86 architecture.

This is probably the same reason the 360 emulates the XBOX so easily... mainly because the PPC RISC processor (the Xenon) that the 360 uses can easily run x86 machine code. Where as the PS3 would have to convert all the same machine code to its own processor and GPU languages.

This PPC processor makes it a great place for homebrew as well, seeing as it too is a sandbox many have played in... difference here though is the structure of the 360 has been altered from the XBOX a lot. Especially that of the lack of a HDD (the add on HDD is NOT necessary... system files are stored else where. Where as the HDD was integral to running the XBOX1).

Post by **rattboi** » Thu Oct 04, 2007 4:42 am

lordofduct wrote:I could never guess really what will happen on the PS3, I'm not very well versed in its architecture. It could possibly become a nice homebrew set up, but the 360 might show to be that... it really depends on who develops the necessary exploits for it. What I can say about it though is that what made the XBOX so great was the ease of modding it, the existence of a hard drive stock, and the x86 processor in it (it was a damn PII clocked at 766mhz, we've all seen them before) made it a great place for homebrew. Any coder out there has played in that sandbox a million times before.

Actually, it's a PIII/Celeron, but yeah, same diff.

lordofduct wrote: As for XBOX1 emulation on it... meh, that I'd guess to be a low chance. As for PC emulation of it, I could see that seeing as the architecture is very similar... as they both use the x86 architecture.

This makes sense to me. There are 2 alpha/beta quality emulators for xbox on PC. One is called CXBX, and it's had recent progress but only emulates a few games. The other I believe is called Xenon and emulates Halo only.

lordofduct wrote: This is probably the same reason the 360 emulates the XBOX so easily... mainly because the PPC RISC processor (the Xenon) that the 360 uses can easily run x86 machine code. Where as the PS3 would have to convert all the same machine code to its own processor and GPU languages.

This PPC processor makes it a great place for homebrew as well, seeing as it too is a sandbox many have played in... difference here though is the structure of the 360 has been altered from the XBOX a lot. Especially that of the lack of a HDD (the add on HDD is NOT necessary... system files are stored else where. Where as the HDD was integral to running the XBOX1).

I don't understand this part at all. The 360 does have a PPC-based processor w/ the 3 cores or whatever. However, that doesn't mean anything about making it easy to run x86 code. In the same way my PPC Mac Mini has problems emulating PCs, so would the Xbox 360. Apparently the 3 cores and such make sure that the 360 can run Virtual PC (a MS product for PC virualization on Mac) or some fork of it's code. Also, the Xbox uses an Nvidia chipset, whereas the 360 uses ATI. So the 360 is also translating the GPU stuff. The part about PS3 does make sense though, as the Cell architecture is an extension of PPC as well.

Post by **lordofduct** » Thu Oct 04, 2007 5:30 am

sorry i left out the third I

and to be fully technical though, it isn't a PIII either... it is in actuality a celeron mobile coppermin-128... but that's just getting technical.

As for the third part of my statement... I should of indulged more info I guess... The Xenon it uses has 3 PPE cores that can quickily perform the math to pile the CISC commands of x86 down to RISC command that the Xenon supports. The PPC although having to emulate x86 can perform the jobs much better then other less used processors, the x86 emulation on PowerPC processors is something that has been worked on for years by several different companies.

I don't know what the PS3 uses (don't really care about that system at all), so I don't know what the hell it's instruction set is, but if it's some special processor that Sony made the instruction set is possibly much different from that of x86 or PPC, and a lot of development in that area probably isn't around very much accept for by Sony themselves.

but again I don't know what the hell the PS3 uses, for all I know it uses a God damn intel Core2Duo and can run windows out of the box.

Post by **Droid party** » Thu Oct 04, 2007 5:43 am

Um...ahhh...my head hurts.

Like I said lordofduct seems to know a little about this kinda shit. Rattboi it seems too.

Post by **rattboi** » Fri Oct 05, 2007 3:17 am

lordofduct wrote: but again I don't know what the hell the PS3 uses, for all I know it uses a God damn intel Core2Duo and can run windows out of the box.

It uses the Cell processor architecture that was created specifically for the PS3. The Cell processor was designed by Sony, Toshiba and IBM, and is based on the PPC architecture. So, it is likely that you could emulate the xbox on PS3, although I doubt it will ever happen. Also, it is quite clear that "old" PPC still works with Cell because of the fact that you can install un-patched Linux PPC distributions on the PS3. Yeah, so all that stuff about x86 emulation on PPC also applies to PS3.