First, I got my matrix in the mail and I tell you what, getting the battery in the programmer without feeling like you are going to break the thing is a challenge! I actually bent in the female contact on the battery. So what I did was take a screwdriver and bend apart the female contact on the battery a bit and applied a little pressure and it slid right in.
Ok, next problem... plugged the chip into the programmer and then into my laptop. Fired up WinLPC and it recognized it. So far so good, I then loaded up a bios (ybox colormod) that I shrunk to 256K using a hex editor. I tried to write that to the chip.... error writing to chip.
I then noticed that the side of the circuit board on the programmer was hitting up against the casing of my laptop... it won't go all the way in the LPT port. Ok, so I moved to my desktop and the chip programmed great. I even read the bios off and did a binary compare to make sure it was ok... all good.Next, take apart the XBOX... this was the easiest task yet and I did use a hairdryer to heat up the stickers and feet a bit so they would come off quite nicely.
Next step... take some tape and put the spacer on the motherboard. Piece of cake.
Now, align the matrix and screw it down. This part took me about 15 mins of trial and error until I got the chip on there and kept it flashing green. I stayed on the side of not tightening to much and this caused me to lose alignment when I switched the switch out of mode 1. So, each time, I just tightened a little more until I got it to stay. Now I can change the dip switches and get all the appropriate colors. Boot the XBOX and I get error 13.
What's wrong, why error 13. Hmmm, I think a bit and look through the forums and ahhh, yes.... I flashed with a ybox bios and sure enough, there is no yboxdash.xbe on my hard drive by default... duh.Ok.... now I took the EvolutionX stuff, made an xiso with xiso and burnt it to a fully erased TDK CD-RW. Popped it into the XBOX and viola... Evox Dashboard!
Success. I now FTPed to the XBOX, backed up all my files and copied in a yboxdash.xbe and evox.ini. Boot up the XBOX and viola, Evox dashboard again!Now, lets try a game.
Took a Verbatim CD-RW and fully erased it. Took Crazy Taxi 3 iso and burnt it to the CD-RW in Nero at 4x. Popped it into the XBOX and booted and 30 seconds later, I was playing Crazy Taxi 3! Success.Ok, now I noticed that I have a Samsung Drive in my XBox.... so lets take some cheap a** PNY CD-R media (not CD-RW but CD-R) and see what happens. Burn the CD-R the same as the CD-RW and pop it in the XBOX.... it works! No problems whatsoever!
I do have a Pioneer DVD-R drive but I didn't have time to erase the one DVD-RW that they gave with it and my DVD-R media won't be here tomorrow so I can't post those results but I am having a very good feeling about it.
I know this is long, but maybe it may help someone along the way. It took me a few hours to do all of this because I am super anal about doing things slow and precisely but I think it was well worth the effort.
Good luck everyone!
