Hi guys.

I work for a small magazine and after relying on official screenshots and crappy capture cards we have finally realiced that we need a way to take decent captures from our press material, so, the plan is to buy a new Xbox unit, mod it with a X-B.I.T. since MS won't ship a debug unit for such a small publication (we get plenty of games, though)

The main problem is that, well, I am pretty clueless regarding the tech difficulties of the process, so I'll enumerate my questions and concerns.

-I have the 4627 debug BIOS. Will it work with any Xbox PAL version? I guess we'll be getting a 1.6 since those are the most recent.

-Do we have to patch our retail games and burn them on a DVD-R or will they work right on the "debug unit"?

-If games are required to be patched... can we run them from a computer using the network cable to save blanks?

-Is there any important things we should know before modding the console? After the operation it will be used for both retail games and taking screenshots from them.

I understand that these are some n00b questions, but since the XDK/debug units are advanced topics I thought this was better posted on the Development forum.

Thanks for your time

the only difference is the amount of ram between the debug kit and a reatail kit im running the xdk on my retail kit taking screenshots with no problem just follow the tutorials i need to go to work i'll explain better later

Any help?

I use the X3 bios which has debug features that can be turned on and off. No problems for NTSC or PAL. Dunno if 4627 will work.

For the rest of your questions, its not neccesary to patch or hack any of your games to work with the debug bios. (Almost-) all games might work with debug bios. The only thing that the debug bios do is to run a different thread that is dedicated to listening for debug requests from the outside. Furthermore, it will apply some "hooks" for the debugger to catch several API's.
So, the programs aren't patched, its the bios...

The only thing I noticed is that some memory exhaustive games, like HALO2, don't like a second thread occupying memory. So, in my collection of 200 games, this was one that didn't worked in a debug environment...

Final thing, you don't need to install M$ XDK & Visual .Net. if you only need screengrabs. There is a nice utility for it that isn't dependend on XDK&Visual .Net. Keep in mind that some tools you have to install on the xbox, however, are also in the XDK...

Thanks