Opened A Xbox To Find A Hitachi-lg Dvdrom, **MERGED TOPICS** Options

[valius]

Just grabbed the firmware flashed the drive & it's working a treat, maybe a little louder than a standard drive but good.

nice job on the firmware.

got mine wired into my xbox & playing H2 right now.

[valius]

So did you wire up the LDin & LDout points too?
I've been working on it for the last week or so.. seems to me that you got it working super quick.  If possible could you tell me where you got the firmware? #xbins?

Hi truBB

If you check some of the earlier posts you will see that all I have been waiting for is the firmware for some time.

I used a nand gate & a tut put together ages ago by superfro to work it out.

Xbins is the place it is in the firmware flashing tools folder, you don't need the firmware bin file the flashing tool does it all for you.

I'll see if I can put a little diagram together for you, but not just now it's sleep time here in Scotland.

[Maverick-DBZ-]

That's great news valius. Your using the GDR-8163b drive right? Does it read CD-R?


Hopefully I will have the same suggess once I get my drive.

[valius]

Couple of pics of the drive before I go to bed!!!





The only wire not hooked up here is the Eject signal.

I just took the drive out of my box, Its going into a friends box because his drive packed in, not tried cd-r's in it the firmware chaps say the firmware isn't set up to read cd-r's though.

Only tried a couple of games in it H2 & Unreal Championship both worked a treak.

YES it is a GDR-8163b

[Maverick-DBZ-]

Looks great thanks for the pictures!

[taximan89]

So this firmware is to flash the xbox lg drive right with a PC drive firmware right? And there is no soldering involved?

[twistedsymphony]

cheers to those who worked long and hard on finding a matching drive and getting the firmware.

I just ordered one of these from new egg (they must be back in stock because it shipped already). also it would seem that mwave has them for about he same price (assuming the BK is the same as the http://www.mwave.com/mwave/viewspec.hmx?scriteria=AA32910

as far as all these problems with the ready signal I think Tiros has the right idea for finding the best location.

as for using an op-amp or NAND gate I'd have to side wit neither. While I can appreciate both methods an op-amp has no place in digital only circuitry and a NAND gate requires more wiring than needed. The same effect could be accomplished with an inverting buffer.

I'll be exploring this drive a lot more once I get it and hopefully then I can be of more use, until then...

keep up the good work

[Maverick-DBZ-]

So this firmware is to flash the xbox lg drive right with a PC drive firmware right? And there is no soldering involved?

No taximan89, you have it backwards. lol.


The firmware were talking about is to flash the LG PC drive with the LG Xbox firmware. You will still need to solder once the drive is flashed.


edit: newegg has the drives in stock again. I ordered two just in case.

http://www.newegg.com/app/viewproductdesc....-136-050&DEPA=0


edit2: I don't think is the same drive at mwave twistedsymphony. The CD-Rom speed is 52x while the one on newegg is 48x. So far everyone has the 48x drive and that seems to be the only one working. I don't know if the BK one would work or not...

This post has been edited by Maverick-DBZ-: Mar 18 2005, 04:14 AM

[twistedsymphony]

... I don't think is the same drive at mwave twistedsymphony. The CD-Rom speed is 52x while the one on newegg is 48x. So far everyone has the 48x drive and that seems to be the only one working. I don't know if the BK one would work or not...

It might be beneficial to create a list of all the different possible versions of the LG drive, which ones work and which ones don't. Those into the 616 modding know that both the 616t and 616f drives work but the 616q doesn't.

I'm interested to know if the GDR-8163BII with the larger cache works as that could be an even more powerful drive.

[wenid]

If you want this to work right you will need to find the "ready" signal.

That depends what you mean by "work right". According to truBB, the point I'm using for ready is no good, and yet this drive is working fine. It may not be perfect, but in practice who really cares?

You should trace the connection directly from the yellow wire for "ready" to the microprocessor I/O pin that performs this function in a STOCK xbox drive first, Then find the equiv. connection point on your replacement drive. AFTER you flash the xbox FW, that point will become the "ready" signal.

We are well aware of this approach. It has been mentioned before and this is, in fact, how I arrived at the ready point I am now using. The problem is that the circuitry in the 8163B is not absolutely identical to that in the 8050L, and some of the differences appear to affect these signals.

BTW I would use a 74HC14 for the level shifting and inversion. You can run through 2 gates for the signal that doesn't need inversion. No resistors or other BS.

This device has already been considered and rejected. It's minimum high level input voltage is too high.

But it seems this unit doesn't read CDR after the mod....so what good is it?

The same good as any other Xbox DVD drive that won't read CDRs, ie. still very useful, especially considering how cheap DVD burners and media are these days. Who needs CDRs anyway?

[ChInEsE ChIcKeN]

does it read ALL DVD+R and DVD-R or only the good ones?????

[wenid]

Next thing I was thinking about was the differences between the 2 drives.
Xbox LG has different circuitry, but same chipset as PC drive?

There are only a few minor differences in the circuitry. Some are related to the different layout caused by the "yellow wires" connector vs. the standard PC power connection, and some appear to be related to the other yellow wires signals.

PC LG Better Lazer?

Nope. Same laser.

[wenid]

According to what you wrote before, TP126 is on the board of the other dvdrom (8050L) you have?

No, TP126 is only marked on the 8163B. Sorry for any confusion there.

If you also look closely at my pic above you can see that there is "TP126" on the left side, directly in-line with the blue point.

I couldn't make out what it says. On my drive's board the writing is at right angles to how it appears on your board. Maybe we just have different revisions of the board.

That blue point measured 5VDC for me, both with dvd-in and out.

OK. I'll check mine at some point.

It definitely says 'checking' in eVox with the GDR-8162b. But, thats with my incorrect ready point.  I forget if it says 'init' with the thompson, or 'checking'.

A couple of things. Firstly I hadn't picked up on the fact that you're using a 8162B not an 8163B. That probably explains the difference between the boards.
As to this "Checking" and "Init" business: they are not mutally exclusive. You shouldn't just get one or the other, but FIRST one (Init) and THEN the other (Checking). If any of this relates to the ready point (and I'm not at all convinced that it does), I would have to guess that "Checking" appears when it has detected the presence of a disc.

  Currently as I have it hooked up, if I float pin 10, (hold it in my hand for a sec) then ground it, it [eVox] detects the dvd correctly as 'evox-cd' or something similar. 

And what happens if you don't do this? Sorry, but I'm not sure how this information is supposed to help. Either my ready point is correct after all, or the ready point is not required for any of this stuff to work properly.

The timing is different than what I expected, when using the Thompson. For instance, measuring the GDR-8162b, I get what you'd expect from the points:
GDR-8162b
_______closed__opening__open
LDin  =___0_____3.6_____3.6
LDout =__0______0______3.6

I'll have to check it later, but I'm pretty sure that you've got LDIN and LDOUT the wrong way around here (unless the 62 and 63 are different in this area).

Thompson
_______closed  opening  open
pin3 = _3.4______0_____0
pin4 = __0______0_____3.4

I'm quoting those #s from memory. I have 'em written down at home, I hope I got 'em right.

So pin 3 is the same as your LDIN (which I think is actually LDOUT) inverted and pin4 is the same as your LDOUT. Are the Xbox signals active high or active low? I thought they were active low, but if that's true these signals seem a bit screwy to me.

I did attempt to get this working using an inverter, and only using LDin for both trayin & trayout without sucess. I went back to your orig config as it gives me the best results. Now that I look back, I think it wasn't working using the inverter only because I don't have the correct ready signal.

What do you mean by "working"? What tests are you doing?

To clarify with the thomson,
When the dvd is actually ready, I measured 3.2vdc. I forget if its says 'checking or init'. Zero volts otherwise.

OK. So this signal at least seems to be active high.

[wenid]

The drive that truBB is working with. I'm wondering if it's the same as this one?
http://www.lge.com/catalog/prodmodeldetail...alSuffix=000000

according to his last post before this one of yours, he's using an 8162B, not the 8163B (which is what I am using).

[wenid]

I also understand that if after making the wiring modifications to an 8163 drive but not replacing its firmware that it will work in an Xbox, but it just won't read original Xbox discs?  Is this correct?

Yes, that's right. You can probably even use it without the wiring modifications, but you'd need to use the drive's built-in eject button instead of the Xbox's eject button.