XBMC4Xbox

Is it possible to truly emulate the disc drive?

replacing the whole big drive with a small unit so we can build really small boxes, and have the safety for hexen or something?

If possible does anyone have a pinout of something?

Take the PCB out of a drive & connect it like you normally would the dvd drive, now you can make a slim.

Rocky5 wrote:Take the PCB out of a drive & connect it like you normally would the dvd drive, now you can make a slim.

Not sure what that means, but that's what Google is for. Thanks, I've been wondering how to do this. I bought an Xbox off ebay marked as not working, but I think it was b/c they hadn't tested it. I'm going to try to heavily mod that one.

no dvd bios mod ? you solder three wires together on the dvd conector and flash the bios and you never need a dvd again.

You all seem to have misunderstood, all I want is to run 1 iso with the click of a button for recovery but still removing the dvd drive.

You can also use a modded no DVD bios like this one.
This works fine providing the hard drive you are using is less than about 600Gb in size. It is a modded M8 bios I made some time ago for all my slims with no flubber and no DVD check however the DVD path is still intact meaning although you can simply unplug the DVDrive cables and remove the DVDrive itself and the machine will work perfectly, if you ever have a need to use an install disc like Slayers or HeXEn, you plug the DVDrive back in and it will read the disc as per a normal modded machine with a DVDrive. It only has the DVD check feature removed, not the DVD path. If you wish to use this bios, put it in EvoXDash utilities in with the other bioses it already has and select this bios from the list to flash your bios. You can use it direct from the EvoXDash app on your HDD or mod the EvoXDash app on your PC and FTP the whole EvoXDash app over to your Xbox. If you already have the EvoXDash (full) app on your machine, you can just FTP the unzipped bios direct to the EvoXDash app bios files. You need the "full" version of EvoXDash to have the utilities folder. It doesn't come on the Slayer's disc. Eurasia has the full version of the EvoXDash app. Just be very mindful this is a 256kb bios. EvoXDash will make it suitable for any sized bios for any machine that is why I suggest using EvoXDash to flash the bios. I take no responsibility if you use any other method for flashing the bios using any other bios flashing tool. This is the way I do it and I know it works fine. The bios will boot to the D/ drive, then F and C evoxdash .xbe and then C avadash. This means your shortcut to boot XBMC will need to from evoxdash c OR f to your folder XBMC is in and it's .xbe file. Slayer's provides all this so you don't need to do it manually. Just select "change startup dash board" to XBMC and the path will be done for you.
Just make the discussion.......
Install XBMC as primary dash- (retail HDD)
OR
Install XBMC as primary dash- (upgraded HDD)

Retail means the boot path will be E/Apps/XBMC.xbe
Upgraded means the boot path will be F/Apps/XBMC. xbe.


Make sure XBMC is in you E apps folder or your F apps folder and the machine will boot direct to XBMC with or without a DVDrive. If you can't follow what I have wrote here, please don't try till you fully understand what you are doing.

Henning_B wrote:You all seem to have misunderstood, all I want is to run 1 iso with the click of a button for recovery but still removing the dvd drive.

So a hardware DVD drive emulator?
They don't really seem to exist.

Henning_B wrote:You all seem to have misunderstood

More accurately, you didn't properly explain what you are trying to achieve...

If you want to remove your dvd drive, you need a custom bios flashed with 'no dvd check' option enabled.
If you want in addition to allow loading iso files (games) with one click I remember it is possible with a softmod and some extra software.

I think it would be a very nice feature to have this in xbmc4xbox (playing games directly from iso file and having this iso listed as a game if stored in the games folder).
Hopefully someone has more information about this and maybe algorithms or sourcecode to achieve this

You're never going to be able to boot a recovery environment with something that's emulated by xbmc etc, assuming I'm correct in thinking you want it to recover accidental deletion of xbmc's .xbe or softmod files etc.
The only way to do it would be with DVD drive emulation on separate hardware or perhaps a BIOS could do that?

You have two choices.

1) TSOP flashed with ind-bios or another bios that's supported by CDROM Modchip.
2) Softmod with virtual disc drive enabled & have a safety image load if all else doesn't.

Both can work & are simple to do.

You cannot have an image load if you wipe the HDD completely for example for both TSOP or softmod.
(Would require a real disc drive for that)

So boot process for TSOP is as follows.

Xbox turns on
Execute CD-ROM Modchip xbe (path defined in bios or config)
CD-ROM Modchip xbe loads dashloader.
Dashloader boots one of 10 paths.
Your dashboard now loads.
If no paths found boot the image (well the attach xbe that attaches the image to drive D)

Now the softmod.
Xbox turns on
Load dashloader (defined in NKPatcher)
Dashloader boots one of 10 paths.
Your dashboard now loads.
If no paths found boot the image (well the attach xbe that attaches the image to drive D)

The issues is, why & how big are you wanting this image to be?

As what you want can be done with a simple dashboard installed to a location not normally used by the system or users.


You could also have it dualboot the image file so boot with eject loads recovery image & powering on normal loads your dashboard.

TSOP requires a dualboot xbe
Softmod does it natively.

Henning_B wrote:You all seem to have misunderstood, all I want is to run 1 iso with the click of a button for recovery but still removing the dvd drive.

If you are thinking like an ODD emulator as found in Xbox360 hacking, it has crossed my mind.

This could be possible given engineering feats were achieved. I see it like this, completely different than you, that we can put a huge HDD, as usual. Then beef it up with a second HDD via a hardware device that translates the iso backups to appear loaded as normal DVDs .

I all i know whoever does it won't get rich