Here's a curiosity of the day... :)
I knew my Xbox used an LPC Flash ROM for its modchip, and that it could flash its own ROMs once a chip is installed. And I had restored a bad BIOS onto a PC*. Lack of an LPC-compatible board, and failure in my serprog+Arduino endeavors, I was kinda looking for anything. So, putting these things together, I thought I'd try getting Flashrom working inside XDSL. Most of the work was done through VNC, as jerking around with an on-screen keyboard and the Xbox controller was hardly rewarding... * -Flashrom seems to have some "read" bugs - it's bricked 2 different PCs so far by restoring a backup it made - the file was mostly correct, but uniformly-but-lightly littered with "p____________" ("p" followed by about 24 0x00 bytes) garbage data - found out after-the-fact when looking back at the backup data!
As you can see in the photo (attached), it runs, but doesn't detect the chipset (though it somehow detects the flash - weird!). This is properly identified as well, and that's even going through an LPC adapter chip of some sort (Xilinx something-or-other on the modchip, a Duo X2). I hadn't tested read/write, since that wasn't the chip I needed to flash. Sadly, if I hot-swap the chip into the Xbox while it's booted, it craps out and freezes. I can only do it in a tiny 3-4 second window after powering it on, while the Xbox animation is playing (presumably it's already loaded the ROM into memory). That works, but I haven't been able to get it to detect the chip yet. I still get the same chipset error, but it doesn't detect the SST49LF020 chip I'm trying to test with (ultimately I have a SST49LF040B that I need to program).
But anywho, I figured this might be some useful, or at least entertaining, information. Yup, Flashrom runs on an Xbox. :)
- Matt
