So after acquiring a copy of the XDK 5849 with the 5849_Recovery.iso from the usual places. Back in the day, I thought I had to use XboxHDM to copy everything. Unlike Retail consoles where the hard drive is BIOS locked using a code which exists on the EEPROM of the Xbox main-board to handshake and unlock your hard drive for you. What eventually happens is there would be arcing inside of the Xbox to the point where traces can get blown completely off of the board! With a quick fire upon our soldering Iron and pour some new Solder in it’s back looking nice and shiny again! The Xbox Debug Hard drive Where the solder joints were either cold or from all of the stress of gamer shoving the cable in it begins to crack and break apart. Because that’s exactly why the debug main board was purchased! The first thing that was noticed is a common issue with v1.0 power supplies for Xbox. The motherboard in it didn’t power at all which is great. Which is more than worth the $18 on its own. But that’s okay Got a case for Xbox Debug board but issues with the PSU inside:Īfter spending about $18 on eBay to get a broken Xbox unit that had a Samsung DVD drive. The downside of course is we didn’t get the cool green case that is identical to the Halo edition case but instead of saying halo in the right hand side it says “DEBUG KIT”. Back then I didn’t know how to really manipulate this board to my liking so it stayed in the closet until now. But back then they wanted almost four times as much as straight-up getting a debug board. I liked the fact that you can take something that emulated old arcades and put it back onto a box that is literally designed for games made sense! However, MAME on Xbox crashed a lot because a lot of the MAME titles that we liked simply took too much ram! No problem if we bought a board that already had 128mb of ram on it! There were guys that were soldering the ram onto Retail Xbox’s and adding mod-chips to it. And no! Not for playing commercial Xbox Games.I liked the MAME emulator. The the reason, why we picked up one of these, was for the pure pirate in us. The Xbox Debug Board is very similar to a Xbox V1.0 Retail Except all RAM slots are populated. Debug kits also sent feedback showing how much ram is being taken during a game, CPU power, etc. But allowing devs to transfer their game onto the hard-drive and show others or beta-test on a pseudo-Xbox before finally publishing on legitimate Xbox’s. Microsoft gave development companies debug units that had the same amount of ram as the Xbox development PC.

For those who don’t know what these things are. The Xbox Debug Main-board.ĭusting off some of the old hardware that was in my closet we had a motherboard for an old Xbox Debug unit.

I can’t make it too technical because I don’t want to deal with lawsuits from Microsoft. This Xbox Debug post is going to be more of a blog than an actual technical guide as I go down nostalgia lane here.

Box eeprom bin xbox