Not quite sure how I found the first one or even why, but there's all these websites out there about UK roads and all these people who seem to have catalogued, documented and photographed them. Somehow I've managed to waste an hour and a half looking at this stuff:

http://www.uk-roads.org.uk/
http://www.cbrd.co.uk/
http://www.pberry.plus.com/ukroads/index.html
http://pathetic.org.uk/
http://euclid.colorado.edu/%7Ermg/roads/

And it just goes on and on....

I was going to post some pics of the steps involved during the mod chip install. However I loaned my digital camera to a mate Andy to take to Chile on his company trip to Concha Y Toro's vineyards so I haven't got any pics of the XBox's insides and dodgy looking solder work and that's probably a good thing :).

There's quite a good guide to installing the mod chip here

Anyhoo if you're going to undertake a mod that requires soldering a few things spring to mind:

1. Get a decent soldering iron and decent solder. The temperature of the gas fired thing I bought was difficult to control and there was a severe risk of lifting the delicate tracks on the XBox PCB. I'd recommend investing in a good temperature controlled professional soldering iron such as a Weller.

2. Practice your solder work on a scrap PCB, especially one that is multilayered and has the same fine trackwork as the XBox.

3. It turns out there are 8 PCB revisions ranging from v1.0 -> 1.6b. Mine was a v1.0 PCB and unfortunately holes for the LPC bus were filled with solder and that had to come out before fitting the pin header assembly. The LPC bus holes newer revisions of the motherboard are fortunately solder free.

4. If you have a v1.6 or v1.6b motherboard be sure that your soldering skills are really good because MS made some slight but significant modifications to the outputs on the LPC bus which means you have to patch the underside of the PCB with jumper wires to get the correct outputs. Some of the newer kits such as the Xecuter 3 CE include a PCB rebuild assembly that reduces the some of the pain. There's still a high risk of accidentally creating a solder bridge between one of the solder points and an adjacent tiny (< 1mm x 1mm in dimension) surface mount resistor and from bitter past experience these little buggers are a bitch to put back on if dislodged by accident when trying to clear the solder bridge. I have a 1.6 XBox as well (that's another story) and didn't even consider trying to fit the rebuild PCB simply because the iron and solder I had weren't of sufficient quality to do the job. I'd get a pro to do it for you.

5. If you have a v1.1 - v1.5 board then the installation should be plain sailing and the only difficult soldering task is soldering the D0 wire in the D0/LAN LED/HDD LED harness to a tiny wee solder point on the underside of the mainboard (v1.0 requires this too). A magnifying glass would've been handy for this task.

More later and how I thought I'd fluffed the install.

I binned it early on and here's why you should too:

http://www.leastprivilege.com/CassiniConsideredHarmful.aspx

I decided it was time to do something interesting with my XBox (std). So begins the story of how I turn it into something more useful than the black brick that sits under the telly that gets used occassionally for that snowboarding game...erm..what's it called again..oh oh aye...SSX Tricky....

Anyway...here are the bits...(cheers Dave for the motivation)....

The XBox:

Ooops...no that's a train from New Zealand.

OK...These are the bits...(really)...

One XBox -

One Xecuter 3 CE Kit from XBox Mod Chips (apologies for the crap photo, not quite got the hang of my new Fuji FinePix camera for indoor work):

One butane soldering iron..some dodgy looking butane fueled thing from B&Q's plumbing dept. It's redeeming features were a small pointy solder bit, heat control and it's reasonably ok to handle for electronic work such as IDC headers, consumer PCB's and the like  (I lost my Weller Soldering Station in a house move...grrrr). Anyway...as I said the bit is reasonably fine and after some practice on an old PCB to get used to and control the bit temperature it should do the trick. I might need to order a desoldering tool (again another lost item) if the location where the IDC header goes is filled with solder on the XBox PCB.

Ok.....it's late, I've had some friends round with some decent chunky Chilean red wine (sadly no Wine Makers Lot) and a bit of pizza and it's time to hit the sack before getting drunk and disorderly on my XBox with firey hot tools and pliers...tune in for part two soon......

Kev

Been a while since I posted a playlist so here's the one from last week:

Hayseed Dixie - Whole Lotta Love
Led Zeppelin - When the Levee Breaks
The Fall - Pacifying Joint
Spizzenergi - Where's Captain Kirk
Per Ubu - Non Alignment Pact
The Damned - New Rose
X-Ray Spex - Oh Bondage, Up Yours
Dead Kennedys - A Growing Boy Needs His Lunch
Stereolab - Vonal Declosion
Manitoba - Crayon
Four Tet - Smile Around The Face
Beck - Girl
Dirty Beatnicks - Suicide Mission
Ladytron - Destroy Everything You Touch
Go! Team
The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy - Television the Drug of a Nation
Roots Manuva - Witness (1Hope)
Silo - Those Adopted By People
Mogwai - Sine Wave
Muse - New Born
Lush - Undertow
Doves - Firesuite
Amorphous Androgynous - The Galaxial Pharmaceutical
Boards of Canada - Into The Rainbow Vein + Chromakey Dreamcoat
FC Kahuna - Hayling
Engineers - New Horizons

Also ordered these CD's this week and hopefully they'll arrive on time for the show this Friday -

Thunder, Lightning, Strike - Go! Team
There Goes Concorde Again - Native Hipsters

And in my post christmas spree on Amazon I ordered myself a replacement copy of Tracy Kidder's Soul of a New Machine which I read 20 years ago. It's the story about the team who built Data General's first 32 bit minicomputer to hit the market (the Eclipse MV/8000) and as I remember it was a damn fine read. I used to have a DG CS-200 in my parents dining room when I was at college until they managed to persuade me to give it back to the DG shop I worked part time at. It consisted of 2 19" racks, one rack had an Eclipse S/130 (see pic below) and the other had 2 x 10MB+10MB Gemini disk drives and a 1600bpi reel to reel tape unit. This was back when real computers had switches, dials and keys on the front:

As I remember it was big noisy and sent my folks electricity bill through the roof. The one I had even had a user programmable microcode board so you could write your own custom machine code instructions. I wrote one to clear one of the accumulators but it took weeks to get it working. Hooray for .NET and C#.

Anyway here's another gratuitous shot of a DG box:

Geeky isn't it :)