Hola friends, colleagues, and brethren. Over the past few weeks I've been boycotting XBL. A few of you have sent questions asking why. A few have told me I'm being a ****** (I am). I'm delivering the truth behind my departure from XBL. It's called a jTag. Those on the 360 mod scene will instantly recognize the term. a jTag is a relatively new type of 360 mod that allows the console to run unsigned code. In essence it will play anything you tell it to. This includes hombrew apps, media centers, custom dashboards, emulators, XBLA games, and full games. In short, with this mod the 360 has almost reached the level of modding that the original Xbox reached years ago. I started this project well over a month ago. The jTag mod requires an older 360. The 360 itself doesn't need to be old... But the version of software on it needs to be older. After finding the proper 360 (was tougher than I thought to get one un-updated that does have HDMI - I love my friends that never been online). The mod itself is a physical mod of certain parts of the board. It requires a dump of the board's NAND, a hack and a repush of the flash memory. It worked. My 360 runs anything now. I have custom dashboard. I have crazy media center programs. I put a 500GB laptop drive into my 360 HDD enclosure. I can install games to the HDD right from the Microsoft dashboard and play then without a disc in the drive. I am finally home. With that, I forfeit XBL. I've done so much questionable **** on my profile at this point.... I don't want to risk my saves again by having an "online" 360 and my uber hacked up one. So I've decided to let XBL go. If there's a game I REALLY want to play online, it'll be PSN for me. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
yeah sure thing. At work now. But when I get home i'll put up pics and vids if you guys wanna see it in action.
Damn, sounds good. I have an older one that may have been banned before MW2 (not sure if that is old enough), and an even older one (that may or may not be banned) which had the disc drive stop reading discs (doesn't have HDMI, though I don't mind much as my TVs accept VGA). If you can play stuff without the disc in the drive, my 360 with a messed up disc drive (or laser) would be a perfect candidate for this, no?
HOLY ****!! I have fallen behind as of late but this sounds awesome. I am ready to make this jump as well since my original modded Xbox finally stopped working. Thanks for the info Mor.
so you cant play online wiht it anymore once you do this? i dont even play single player games since i got my ps3.
Nope. Online dead. Here's a quick video... If there's anything else you guys wanna see, let me know [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-xUfsY_RvI"]YouTube- Xbox 360 hdd demo[/ame]
for the record, HDMI isnt required to do the mod. I just wanted HDMI for my beautiful TV. Finding an HDMI 360 with an old enough system update was tougher than I thought. That's the only reason I mentioned HDMI
For those of you looking into this, I want to note that while this thing is unlocked and there's stuff out there... The quality of the apps and stuff out there isn't quite where it is for the old Xbox. Obviously, these guys have had 10 years now to perfect the old Xbox's apps (which people still make stuff for btw). Example: I installed a Sega Genesis Emulator last night. It works. Looks good. Plays good. It just doesn't have all the bells and whistles of a full fledged emulator (with good reason, this stuff is all pretty new). That being said, I see a big beautiful future for all of those brave enough to attempt a jtag.
Is there no way to downgrade your system firmware to make it compatible with jtag? Do you think there will be hacks coming for the newer firmwares in the future?
At this point there's no workable downgrade method. There are downgraders, but none that can change the part that needs to be a certain age before doing the NAND dump. I'm certain that at the speed these guys are working now that they find exploits for current 360's very soon.
But when the apps do mature.........OMG!! Imagine XBMC for the 360. I think another thing that intrigues me is the possibility of a PS2 emulator. I just don't know if that's gonna be possible.
Awesome...glad the 360 scene has finally gotten things to this point. Now all we need is custom firmware for the PS3 and I'll be happy.
I picked up an old 360 from a buddy that has a problem with the graphics chip. He did a little resoldering and it's working. So I actually have 2 jTaged 360's atm. One has no case LOL
