first off there is away to flash the TSOP on a v 1.6 just you can't do anything but i will tell u how any way (this is not for real do not try unless u are an idiot).

1. open ur box
2. find 3 places to soder bridge to gether
3. put ur box back together
4. turn it on
5. and now you will have a $150 christmas light

ok , just hear me out on this one.
i have not done this yet so it is purly speciation.

if u had a xbox 1.0 - 1.5 with all the tosp points together for flashing, couldnt u grab the eeprom chip from xbox v1.6 and solder it inplace from the older xbox and then flash it. or use a eeprom programer to write the data to the chip?

The eeprom is not the same chip as a tsop. 1.6 boxes have an eeprom chip, that is flashable, but they do not have a tsop (where the bios is stored). The eeprom just holds info such as region, serial number, video mode, parental settings....etc

im wondering. if theres no tsop, where is the bios loaded from?

Old thread but hey.

The BIOS is in the MCPX I believe. I'm not sure if its hard coded in or just you cant write enable it because there are no points to solder to enable this.

you can't flash it because it is not a flash, it is a rom chip

the bios is loaded from the xyclops chip, along with information from some other previously separate chips IIRC

you can see it to the right of the IDE cable in this picture http://pictures.xbox-scene.com/4/xboxv16/xcalibur_02xs.jpg


you cant flash it because unlike on previous its not an EEPROM (Electronically Erasable-Programmable Read Only Memory) so on an xbox the TSOP and the EEPROM are actually both EEPROMs, although the EEPROM is not a TSOP (confused yet? lol)

as for how it can boot without a TSOP, TSOP means Thin Small Outline Package, and refers to nothing more than the physical shape of the chip


well thats all the interesting but otherwise useless information for today

I'm totally new, please forgive my ignorance.

My question:
I opened my box; it appeared to be 1.6 or later. There is an small EEPROM (probably 256x8 (2Kbits))
next to the Jtag sockets. The chip labeld: 4M90W L02.
I searched and found that it is likely to be an EEPROM (I2C interface) chip but couldn't find
any spec on this chip.

1. Could anyone happen to know what chip it is and where to find the spec?

2. I'm hoping that the HD key is stored on this chip. If I can read it out and
find the HD lock key, I hope I can prepare another bigger HD with HDD builder package,
lock it with the same HD lock key, and plug it in. After the BIOS successfully unlock
the HD, I hope it just gonna boot the new OS on the drive without halting...
Is it something reasonable to persuit or it's just plainly stupid and I shouldn't
try it?

Thanks.