Comment by wildzzz

3 days ago

I did this with some proprietary hardware. It's an HDMI encoder lor the original Xbox. I designed a PCB to be electrically compatible along with being compatible with running a binary provided by the original maker. I used the same microcontroller so it could be flashed using his binaries that I was able to extract from an app he distributes. Normally, you'd run the updater app on the Xbox which sends a firmware update over the SMBus to the microcontroller but it's easy to slice up the updater app to extract the firmware image. Then you can use an ST programmer to flash the image to my clone. Despite what it says on my GitHub, I did actually get it working but there's some irregularities between original Xbox revisions that make my design not universal. Oh well, at least it works for me and I didn't have to give this guy any of my money.

The whole project started because this guy changed the design of his HDMI encoder to move the microcontroller off the board and into another board he sells that provides an alternative BIOS for the Xbox. Meaning instead of paying $60 for one board, you now pay $50 for the neutered board plus $100 for his other board. Someone released a barebones board that had the same microcontroller (running his firmware) on it that could be connected to this neutered board and this guy sent a DMCA takedown notice to a site hosting the instructions on how to build it. A lot of people in the original Xbox modding community got upset so some people were looking for ways to build open source HDMI encoders as a means to kick the proprietary junk from the community. I took it a step further and just built a clone.