trusty xbox pictures

[professor_jonny]

Here is some of my pictures of my trusty driven xbox for users that may be intrested in my thaughts and a few pics to look at when i get around to it:

[xman]

Never saw these before P.J.. Nice and clean considering the work involved. An X3 as well. LCD as well?.

[darknior]

Yes ... really impressive work !

[professor_jonny]

Cheers guys

I did say that when i got around to it i would do a writeup about my trusty xbox so here goes:

For people that may not know trusty is an xbox modder that has been supplying and selling some what supped up xbox consoles, he has done cpu and ram upgrades to the xbox simular to what was releaced by friendtech back in the hay day of the xbox and were a very sort after bit of kit.

Trusty has completed several different cpu upgrade paths over the years from 733 and 1 ghz celerons and pentium 3 procesors with bigger on die cpu cashe sizes to what i have being the fastest processor releaced in the pentium 3 range the last edition of the p3 line up of processors running in at 1.4 ghz over doubling the speed of the processor in the xbox.

The factory xbox has a fusion of a celeron and pentium 3 based BGA (ball grid aray) processor which is soldered directly to the main board and using some expencive computer controlled soldering equipment trusty has removed the older processor modified traces on the main board and soldered a mobile pentium processor socket to the xbox.

The fastest tuition processors in the p3 range only come in a p370 socket and not in a mobile format so he has made a custom adaptor to fit the processor in to the socket of the xbox much like the power leap processor upgrades back from the dx486 days.

This upgrade speeds up the xbox over doubling the speed of the xbox processor but this has caused some issuies with original games and software, as the xbox was a fixed bit of kit and was never designed to be expanded the coders of the xbox software did not take into account processor speed in the programs which ment that some games went too fast and binkx videos did not play smooth for some unknown reasons.

to combat this a few users made a pc appilication to patch games to run at the correct speedd by adding a sort of do while loop from what i have read adding in wait states in to the xbox executable fixing speed issuies. This fixed most of the games except for a few.

it has only been recently that a patch was added to fix these issuies with games unlocking the xbox to be used for all types of entertainment as before it was basically limited to a few power users running linux and emulators and for the general population it was no good as half the games did not work corectly.
It is a shame this patch was not releaced during the hay day of the xbox as it could of been patched into bios to do on the fly patching of games which would mean games could be run from dvd with out being required to be installed to hdd and having the xbe patched requiring a pc.

with the xbox being twice as fast it also has an upgrade with an extra 64mb of ram making it up to a total of 128mb of ram. these two upgrades have really come into play with linux and other homebrew emulators making more games playable that would other wise be unplayable or laggy and has made linux more pleasurable to use as the amount of ram is a great bottle neck and the added 64mb really helps expecially with the over heads of a loopback file system.

in some of the earlier mods trusty soldered the processor adaptor directly to the main board but this means that upgrade in processor means resoldering which cant be done at home and adds complications making the job harder to do.

one of the fallbacks of the xbox and xbmc4xbox is that the processor is not quick enough to play some hd content specifically 720p and above over 5000kbps (i think) this upgrade helps and makes the whole xbmc4xbox experienc better but sadly is still not enough to play 1080p content as the cpu is just not up to it.

the upgrade makes the interface seem a lot smoother when scrolling around the user interface and ftp transfers go a bit better during movie play.

Some say that the full potential of the processor is not utilised but this is not the case as i proformed some bench mark rendering tests with mplayer under xbmc4xbox and the results showed roughly twice the results so there is some merit to this as the processor is not just double the speed but also has double the processor cache and this may not fully be utilised.

From reading past heated conversations on the xbmc forums xbmc4xbox does not fully utilise the upper 64mb of ram in the xbox as it is said that the gpu is unable to address it but im not sold on this as the chip is 32 bit which shuld be able to address a max of 4gig of memory (in theory) but for sure the full 128mb of ram is not utilised currently from what the user interface says.

the upgrade if your after 1080p is a waste of your money at 220usd but for playing emulators such as coinops cps3 and nintendo 64 it makes a huge difference and would be a good upgrade to users wanting to have linux box or for bragging rights

I love my trusty xbox and would not part with it i use it almost every day even if it is for only playing a few songs from my pc when folding the washing or something but it does get a good hammering from the kids playing supermario 64 under the nintendo 64 emulator.

i thank trusty for the time skill and effort gone into doing this mod as it is really is a techinical job and his workman ship is briliant.

[AwesomeNurd]

That's really nice !!! Is he still making mobos like this??

[professor_jonny]

yip i have directed several people from here to trusty over at xbox scene.

220 usd for ram and processor upgraded mother board provided by trusty.

he also does just ram and just processor's

[Geeba]

Nice work!

Always been tempted by these.... just for the fact that I have to modify everything!

Plus my TV is only 720p/1080i so I always run progressive.... so the 1.4G would give slightly better 720p...

Hmmmm.... wonder if BuZz had any luck with that 128Mb board? apparently britneyspairs has full 128Mb support on his media software but wont release the code?

[blighty]

Well jel m8

[professor_jonny]

Hmmmm.... wonder if BuZz had any luck with that 128Mb board? apparently britneyspairs has full 128Mb support on his media software but wont release the code?

i believe some other teams that created the fba and mame emulators have the code for 128mb to be utilised by the cpu but not by the gpu so i have read it can be used for rom decription which is good for speed on emulation to prevent disk thrashing from virtual memory but in the xbmc scence we would like it for rendering frames and the gpu has to access it to draw it on the screen, (note That im just reading what I have found on the xbmc forums and may be a load of codswallop)

[SlowCatalyst]

What XBOX games in particular have trouble running even after being patched for the processor and ram upgrades? I am literally about to have this done as well.

[Nextelhalo]

I've never seen a solid list on what games have problems, if i remember right it was only 3 or 4 games. I've yet to run into a game that had an issue but that's on a 1.0GHZ Trusty Board although i doubt it makes a difference. Dont worry about it and pull the trigger, very cool mod to have.

[professor_jonny]

you just run the patcher program on the default.xbe from your pc and any other xbe's in the game directory and it will work at the correct speed and play in game movies properly.

I have not found a game yet that wont run at the correct speed after patching it it is said there is 1 or 2 but I dont know what they are.

i have found 5 or sogames out of my collection of 50 that run at the wrong speed but more have video issuies with in game movies.
lego star wars, nfl blitz, nba 2007, one of the colin macrae games and i think spy vrs spy run at warp speed.

it is very noticeable on a 1.4gig trusty mod the games that run real fast, it is fun to play leggo starwars at warp speed actually .

coinops has all sorts of problems if you dont patch all the files in the directory stuttering video problems and game slowdowns crashing....

[AwesomeNurd]

You still can put the HDD in place with the fan on top of the heatsink??

[professor_jonny]

You still can put the HDD in place with the fan on top of the heatsink??

yes but you have to cut away all of the plastic so only 2 runners on either side of the hdd are there.
it runs way cooler after doing that as if you did not do it the fan would be against the undercarrage of the hdd caddy and block the fan.

trusty's previous design was a thicker heatsink with no fan on top but it ran at a higher temp in the 70 deg mark

as it is it runs about 60-65 degrees with the fan on the top and cutting away the hdd caddy.

[AwesomeNurd]

I contacted Trusty and he told me he's busy at the moment, I'll probably ask for his services around the month of September, hope you can help me with this caddy modification as I don't really know how you did this, maybe if you have pictures of it...? Does he provide the fan or you add it yourself?

[r32crazy01]

I believe these are the pictures you want?

http://cid-ca9a446834e62bb3.photos.live ... %5e_o1.jpg

https://skydrive.live.com/?cid=ca9a4468 ... E62BB3!212

[AwesomeNurd]

Thank you for the pictures

[professor_jonny]

Does he provide the fan or you add it yourself?

it is all provideed just drop in and play as long as you have a suitable psu.

[GoTeamScotch]

I didn't know trusty was still doing these jobs. Is that still to this day? I'd love to get my hands on one. I mean, where else do you find these things?

Can the heatsinks be replaced?

[lowie]

i would like to buy a trusty any link direct to the person that does these many thanks