The Niveus Edge Resurrection: Hacking A Hacked Xbox 

Wow, had to check and yeah, this isn't even a joke.

I see that you found the same ebay offer I did.

@@xarin42 and it doesn't even have the heat pipes or the cover!

The Techmoan Effect

@@vcpradoThis happens a lot, not just when Techmoan covers something. Even the Sony FW900 monitor jumped in price after Linus Tech Tips covered it and it was already expensive.

as long as you don't dock with Edge so you're edging in the dock.

People will think you and your friends are more than friends.

I'd refrain or rethink after reading the Urban Dictionary definition of that word.

Can't edge without blades, this makes sense.

How about we don't do that.

You extend a good media.

"Seymour! The house is... not on fire, actually, thanks to this lovely cooling system."

"You know, these media extenders are quite similar to the ones they have at the local GameStop" "Hohoho, no! Patented Niveus Edges, old family recipe!" "For media extenders?" "Yes!" "Yes, and you call them cooled media extenders, despite the fact they are obviously Xbox 360s?"

The hams were steamed: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-bW2fCf7QZWo.html

I TRIED MY BEST

Nintendo Homebrew member spotted

@@Code7Unltd Thankfully I got out of that ordeal with my soul mostly intact, 80k worthless shares of Niveus stock and a job offer from DeviantArt which I happily accepted.

@@gnome6671 two nintendo homebrew members spotted

Three Nintendo homebrew members and one point of sale member spotted

Yeah, that suggested to me that the drive probably would’ve played regular DVDs; just had no authorisation for Xbox 360 games. (I have not looked into this keying mechanism.)

I was going to say that but you beat me to it

Also, Xbox 360 discs are dual layer DVD's, 7.5gb, and the DVD video is on the inner region of the first layer so that any/all DVD players will see the "this is Xbox 360" message. Original Xbox games are single layer DVD, 4.7gb, so it was likely done to make sure people know"Xbox at home is not Xbox 360"

@@imclearingit4149 very few xboxes could play dvd's as you needed to buy a special flash drive thing with a key in it

Same with many dreamcast and a lot of other gane systems. I remember a lot of Dreamcast games had track 1 as a redbook audio track that said something about it being for use only in the Dreamcast.

It might be hard to sell them for $1500 with no media drive bay though. It takes rich audiophile money (and lack of sense) to make that work as a business. And even then, as niveus proved, that still isn't even enough.

@@mukundamodell thats why you dont do exactly what niveous did, you do it better

Even just a CRD sticket would probably lead them in the right general direction, assuming RU-vid doesn't end up purged from the internet.

It's a recommended practice in automotive wire splicing, as soldering wires makes the connection brittle in vibration heavy environments, leading to higher resistances over time due to fatigue. Using a Western Union splice keeps the wires malleable enough to let them move under vibration load. So the best practice for wire splicing is to Western Union splice them and then cover the splice with heat shrink or fabric tape -- a lot of factory splices are done this way.

@@Stoney3K Thanks Stoney. I remember my teacher demonstrating that the splice got stronger under tension even without solder. Being the belt and suspenders type I've always soldered it anyways but may have been giving myself a metaphorical wedgie :P.

I wasn’t taught that name, but that was also how I was told to splice wires in electrical engineering/product design class!

@@bluephreakr ah yes, that was the name I was given! 😊

it's the recommended splice technique here in south America, where our power cables inside our homes have strands, and are not solid core. please use it!

Commenting to bump this up and to add there is a wicking thread retainer for use on already installed fasteners.

absilutely hated running into entire pcs red loctited every single nut and screw and the screw head... dabbed it then tightened it down. i bet some used every bit of that 80-100lb rating. and only lets go at nearly solder melting temps.

Yeah I'm realizing this now - it's really funny because it's, you know, _wrong_, right angle doesn't mean "it comes out the right side", but who can complain when it's a huge improvement? Once you know the terminology you can find whatever you need.

@@CathodeRayDude yeah, it seems to be pretty universal that "right angle" means whichever 90° connection is standard for that type of cable - for example a "right angle" sata cable goes down - and then "left angle" is used to refer to a cable that goes the opposite way (and i guess that by extension, up/down are used for the other two angles)

@@CathodeRayDude When in doubt, call StayOnline. They will make any oddball electrical cable you want.

GOD I HADN'T THOUGHT ABOUT THAT BUT YOU'RE RIGHT. of course that means they didn't think of it either hahaha

​@CathodeRayDude the original 360 disc drives was really loud. Weren't they trying to keep these silent?

That's pretty brilliant.

Maybe, but I think someone on the last video mentioned that you can't access DVDs from the Media Center menu, so they would have had to boot it into the main menu.

​@@hellogoodbye4906are they still loud on DVD video playback speeds?

Me here while my college is on strike, his vids are goated

If you want it to wick into the threads on something already fastened you need the green loctite

came by to say exactly this, thank you!

I'd like to do that, but the question is whether it runs off the right voltage. This might be why Niveus did it the way they did; for this era of LED, those are *probably* "normal" green diodes which run on less voltage/current, so the supply may not be enough to light up the blue one in the switch.

​@@CathodeRayDude For that to be a valid concern, it would mean they're overdriving the blue LED in the power switch directly from the 3.3V rail. Chances are the original power LED is driven from a 5V rail via a resistor, and a blue LED could be directly substituted for it with no ill effects. Heck, even if the original is driven from 3.3V via a resistor, blue LEDs are so insanely efficient that the half a milliamp or so it can get through the original resistor would still be plenty.

@@BrendonGreenNZL Fair enough, and it certainly wouldn't hurt anything to test it.

thank you so much! i was really happy with it!

Correct! IIRC the HD-DVD drive just needs 4532, while 4552 is the version that breaks the original exploit

It sounds like something a member of the British royal family would apologise for. "I would like to express my sincere regret for that particular... imprecision with a stripper."

@@liamr6088 ikr

They probably had caulking guns full of that white thermal grease

Throwing a bunch of metal at the problem is an effective way to achieve sufficient cooling It's a very heavy and expensive way to do it, but it does work

@@pocketpc_ true. And heat pipes are efficient enough to move it to the heatsinks even with all the less than optimal metal to metal interfaces in those stacks

Unlikely. According to Microsoft peak temperature has little todo with the RROD. The simple fact that the chip heats up the cools down constantly is enough to kill it. The actual temperature it reaches doesn't make much a difference.

Won't the 360 play DVDs on any regular DVD-ROM drive attached to it?

@@Stoney3K Exactly my point.

It's a solved problem -- at least the movie itself. AnyDVD HD. Although, what you might be asking, and I don't know the answer to this, is if software exists to play the disc complete with menus and whatnot. I have boxes of Blu-rays and UH box of HD-DVDs, but I've never once played any of them from disc, so it's never occurred to me to look.

My softmodded PS2slim still works perfectly fine and that's despite the broken laser. I believe that says enough about ease and reliability of mods

Yea very true, I spend 2 days on hacking my XBOX 360 and still failed, i need to give it to a guy that has the better flasher as the Pico one just fails for no reason. No problems with PS's at all, even when both of my USB ports are dead af on my fat PS3.

It's wild the disparity between Microsoft and Sony's security

Add a modbo to a ps2 and an Xbox 360 seems like a walk in the park😁

Microsoft makes operating systems that have to deal with all sorts of malware, so they already know how to lock shit down. Same thing for Apple. The only difference between a PC and an Xbox (or a Mac and an iPhone) is how much the user is considered to be part of the threat model. Sony on the other hand is a hardware vendor and a lifestyle brand. So they have no clue how to use cryptography effectively, how to write secure code, or even how to ensure upstream security fixes make their way into the downstream console's OS. Sony consoles will always be hackable. Nintendo is in a weird spot where they used to be as incompetent as Sony, but massively upped their game with the Switch. It's not quite as locked-down as the 360, thanks to Nvidia screwing the pooch, but the online services for the Switch are just as easy to get banned from for doing anything untoward them as Xbox Live is.

That was a good line.

or Arctic MX-6. Though the best would probably be liquid metal or a graphene pad, but those probablly cost more than an entire second hand 360.

​@@BrunodeSouzaLinoIronically, he has plenty of thermal pads left over from his previous Lil Guys video. If he rebuilds this to fix the crimes-against-heatsinks committed by Niveus (now that he's done this proof-of-concept); he could apply those at the same time he laps those hideous copper slugs.

@@BrendonGreenNZL The main issue would still be heat transfer. It's a bit strange that this much surface area dissipates so little heat. Those pipes and slugs should be either soldered or brazed instead of having several places with a thermal interface not designed for that.

@@BrunodeSouzaLino I understand the concern. However, the teardown video of the Denali proved that the cooling system is so overbuilt that this isn't a major concern. Yes, the thermal interface between the slugs sucks. However, there is so much thermal mass involved that it just doesn't seem to matter.

I have a single HD DVD video. I found it at the dollar store in like 2021. Why was it at the Dollar Store in 2021? I have no idea.

@@ReetinEntertainment My local CEX (think gamestopish, pay 50p for your stack of dvds and old compact camera) has several HD DVDs on display currently.

The VM situation on the Xbox makes me question how games even had good boot times back then considering every Xbox One shipped with a mechanical drive...

​@@TheRadmin1724I mean, have you played a game on an xbox one recently? I wouldn't describe the boot times as "good". I remember that dragon age inquisition loaded faster on the 360 than it did on the xbone.

@@maliciousintruder3010 360 games on the Xbox One are different. Obviously it's emulating the 360 so you also have to wait for the ENTIRE Xbox 360 boot process as well... I meant more of NATIVE games, not emulated.

@@TheRadmin1724 That's what I'm talking about. The xbox one version of dragon age inquisition loads slower than the xbox 360 version, it's not backwards compatible.

@@maliciousintruder3010 tfw i was sleep deprived while replying so my first thought wasn't to Google the game's platforms still, that doesn't feel right

DUMB GUY ENGINEERING IS SO FUNNY HELP

The company was renamed in 2010 to Bro Engineering.™®©

Dumb guy engineering is so fucking funny

Honestly, it just looks like a prototype to me. The kind of thing that exists in the world as proof of concept before the industrial design engineers get their turn to fight with accounting. I think the part where he talked about reaching a point where you just toss everything else in the box, sit on it, and tighten the screws because you are just _over it_ ... that's prescient here.

apple fans attempt not to go "ERM ACKSHUALLY" in literally any tech youtubers comments section challenge (legitimately impossible)

@@ProtoMan0451 What makes that different from any other fact correction? Is it just the sheer mention of Apple that makes it distasteful to you? I bought a Gen 1 Apple TV as an experiment for streaming my personal music/video library, and the OP here brought back a long lost memory of the one or two times I used it to rent a movie, before deciding I might want to try converting it to an XBMC box instead. So "ERM ACKSHUALLY" thanks for the well-detailed post.

It doesn't fit as well as it looks, trust me. I could use an extension but then I'd have a bunch of extra miserable cable mess torquing the drive connector, which *really* wants to pop out of the board as it is.

​@@CathodeRayDudeYou could perhaps swap it for mSATA?

Yeah, at least it seems that we're slowly growing out of calling it all "Digital" .... as opposed to DVD/BD/HD-DVD, which were... um... hm.

okay nylon I knew about but those are super special purpose so I don't really count them. what on _earth_ is an aluminum screw for???

@@CathodeRayDude Very lightweight, you can buy them for multi copters and other RC planes. But yeah need to be really careful with those. I tried those, but latter changed to titanium screws, less lightweight but not such a hassle to work with.

I've used some pretty vile screws in the past as well, and aluminum is definitely up there for being frustrating. My least favorite were some #8 hex bolts made from ceramic used to center a high voltage electrode in a tube. Bastards liked to shatter and send little razor sharp slivers everywhere. Now most of the exotics I worked with were for thermal reasons - working on scientific gear that was made out of who knows what and you needed a stack up of screws and washers that had a matched coefficient of expansion so you neither slacked off the tension or snapped a screw. Phosphor bronze and brass 2-56 x ¾" or God save you, 1½", were our bread and butter, all flathead:) I also had the pleasure of getting to know what it feels like to torque in a set of nearly pure Nickel screws, which is to say, notably unpleasant. I switched projects and now get to use 18-8. Life is good.

Blades is dumb and it sounds like you got more than $20 worth of fun from it. No big loss

Can't you mod or hack it so you can still run games?

I don't know why people get all masturbatory about the blades firmware, it's not like it looks super cool or works better in any way. It's like pining for Windows 7 instead of Windows 11. It's not better, just different. And old.

@@theParticleGod Gonna disagree with that. Windows 7 was the last version of Windows, IMO. Windows 8 is what sent me to the Mac world. Blades is cool because an Xbox running Blades firmware is a living museum piece. It's like having a pet dinosaur. ANY Xbox can play games, but if you spent some formative years in Blades, and now all you have is those stupid tiles, there will be a part of you that remembers that stuff with fondness, and might want to go back and visit for a while.

​@@nickwallette6201 I personally don't like the Zune vibes that the old firmware gives off, it's not that I wasn't exposed that firmware, I disliked the look of it from the beginning, with it's stupid background colors, illegible fonts and sideways labels. It's just meaningless to say that Windows 7 was the last version of Windows. It clearly wasn't, billions of other people have continued using it, sometimes with software that's decades old working flawlessly. You can say a lot of things about Windows, but it didn't magically transform into something else just because Microsoft scrambled the UI, much as Microsoft wished it would. The Windows 8 marketing fluff really seems to have worked on you.

A modded original Xbox is were i first seen blades dashboard (actually xbmc blades) and it also had emulators, used to play Destruction Derby 64 on it.