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I finally got around to playing around with my old Xboxes again, and decided to try the mother of all hardware hacks possible:  Transplant 4 memory chips from a dead Xbox motherboard into a working motherboard.  I just gotta say:  it was as troublesome and painful an experience as everyone claims it to be.  :-(  Sure, removing the old chips was not a problem with my shiny new Infrared Soldering Station, but it's the soldering process that was troublesome for me -- resolving all the shorts between pins was definitely a drag.

I toiled under the magnifying glass for two long, tiresome nights -- rewetting all the memory chip pins with a fresh blob of solder, dragging the blob from the center of the chip, outward to the tips of the legs before picking it up and moving to the next area... and then cleaning up anything funky with solder-wick.

You wouldn't notice it from casual observation, but DAMN, solder can creep up from the UNDERSIDE of adjacent pins, causing a short right next to where the pins enter the chip body.  I was definitely surprised (especially since I can't see it even with the magnifying glass).  My trusty Fluke multimeter doesn't lie, though.  :-7

OK, so I didn't bother to check each and every pin (4 chips of a hundred-some-odd pins each?  Are you nuts?).  I just tested to make sure +5 wasn't shorted to GND through any of the chips, and then I reassembled the board, fired up the Xbox, and held my breath.  Green LED.. Awesome!  Then it shuts off 3 times, and flashes red/orange.  Aw, dammit!!

The final pass, I ended up running the soldering iron while observing the operation under a magnifying glass.  Doing so allowed me to observe the behavior of the molten solder a whole lot better - and I was able to catch "adjacent pin" shorts by watching the blob of melted solder for any "unusual shape behavior" -- redoing the area if it didn't go as smoothly as the other areas.  Tested +5/GND again, reassembled, and... SUCCESS!  Woo-Hoo!

Anyways.. since I finally got that working a couple of weeks ago, I've got a little momentum going with this little Xbox, and I might decide to make it more useful again.

My current work in progress is to recompile the 2.6.21 (or later) kernel, and then inject it into the Fedora 7 LiveCD in much the same way that I did for the Fedora Core 4 Installer CD.  I'm not promising anything, just saying what I've been working on.

If it works, cool... a documented Xbox-Hack for Fedora-based LiveCDs can open up new possibilities.

I'd love to have an Xbox-hacked MythDora LiveCD someday...  :-D