Bus error: Jake Billo’s weblog

This is something I’ve been wanting for a while now - the Xbox Live DRM utility now functions properly. As some background information, when you download video or games from Xbox Live Marketplace, the content is licensed to two places: your Gamertag online, and your console by its serial number. If you change consoles, you can only access content if you’re signed into Xbox Live under that original profile.

For me, this was a major problem because I’m now on my fourth Xbox 360 - two exchanged through EB’s warranty program for faulty disc drives, plus a functional unit that I sold so I could upgrade to an Elite with 120GB hard drive and HDMI. As a result, some of my Rock Band tracks were licensed to the previous console and some to the new one. Offline play at a friend’s place was severely hampered and the game always required my acount to be signed in to access the content. No longer, though!

Check out Major Nelson’s post on the process, or hit up the license migration page. All my content was relinked to my 360 Elite properly and there should be some good times with Rock Band in the near future.

From Xbox-Scene: Dean Takahashi interviewed Todd Holmdahl about alleged Xbox 360 failure rates. Holmdahl is the “corporate vice president of Gaming and Xbox Products Group”, and effectively has NOTHING meaningful to answer during the interview. He also fails to answer questions that have even already been answered in public. The issue at hand is the “three red lights of death”, in which the Xbox 360 console indicates a hardware failure with three red LED’s.

In my personal opinion, his answers constitute possibly the weakest excuse ever for a press interview. Larry Hryb (Major Nelson), Andre Vrignaud (Ozymandias) and Dave Weller (Let’s Kill Dave) far outdo this guy in being open with the public.

Let’s get this clear: I’ve personally gone through two Xbox 360 consoles and am on my third model. Both have experienced disk reading issues, owing to their substandard internal DVD drives. I have owned five original Xbox consoles in total, and of those, only one failed out of the box after a bad Xbox Live update. The only reason I’m calling Holmdahl out on this is because Microsoft has a great chance of winning the next-generation console wars, and to be hamstrung by quality control problems is something they can’t afford.

Here’s my interpretation of Todd’s answers to some of Dean’s questions; I’m skipping the ones that are just corporate rehashing of “customer happiness” crap.

Q: What is the post-mortem on Xbox 360 manufacturing? How has it turned out for you?

A: Like any other post mortem, there are some things you would have done differently that you learned and that you incorporate back into your processes. Overall, it was really smoothe compared to the complexity of the product we were building.

This is the standard excuse from a Microsoft PR standpoint with respect to the machine itself. You can’t find an interview online where the complexity of the machine isn’t mentioned. We have an appeal to novelty: because the Xbox 360 is a new console, it must be comparatively better, and comparatively more complex to manufacture.

Q: The ramp of the Xbox 360 compared to the original Xbox. Was it similar or different?

A: Having lived through both of those, I remember both very well. Both were very complex products. State of the art technology. They were relatively similar in the ramp complexity and ramp speed. Exciting stuff. You and I had a conversation about this around November, 2005.

The ramp of the original Xbox wasn’t plagued by memory shortages. It’s also not really appropriate to compare the two situations as the Xbox 360 effectively had a world launch, whereas the original Xbox started out production in North America based from a single Flextronics factory in Mexico. The Xbox 360 used Wistron (who now no longer have the contract, even at a 10% revenue loss), Flextronics and Celestica.

Q: I’m sure you’ve seen some of these complaints that we’ve written about from the guy who went through seven machines. There are a lot of people posting on the blog saying they still have problems. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence that the quality of the Xbox 360 isn’t there. How can you paint the bigger picture for me there?

A: We’re very proud of the box. We think the vast majority of people are having just a great experience. You look at the number of games they are buying, the number of accessories they are buying, the Live attach. They love the box. They continue to buy the box. That said, we take any customer issue very seriously. We continue to look into these things very deeply. You have seen we have made some changes to our customer service policy.

Initially at the console launch, I’d heard rumors that Sony was flooding the Internet with fakeposts and trolls about Xbox 360 failure rates. I’d believe this, and it wouldn’t necessarily have to be company-sanctioned; after all, the fanboy wars between the PlayStation and Xbox camps have made utter drivel out of either company’s official forums.

There’s no excuse for people on, say, Something Awful, to risk a ban and $10 by fakeposting about console failures at this point in 2007. The official Xbox 360 thread in the Games forum has a running commentary of people going “well, mine died today.” I think the real bigger picture stems from a lack of time-sensitive stress testing, and there are already enough consoles out in the market that a motherboard revision at this time wouldn’t make sense.

(As an aside: The Xbox 360 is well overdue for a new motherboard anyway, but it likely won’t become public knowledge until the rumored 65nm chips begin shipping. It’s likely part of Microsoft’s profitability plan that yearly motherboard revisions wouldn’t make sense for this generation of consoles. Xblade, Tuscany and Barcelona are all codenames for various editions of the Xbox’s original board; in the Xbox modification scene, the boards are known by revision numbers such as 1.0 through 1.6b.)

Q: I’ve heard varying accounts of what is considered a normal return rate. Some people say that 2 percent is normal. Sometimes 3 percent to 5 percent is considered normal. Back to that question, can you address whether you are within those rates or within a normal rate.

A: We don’t disclose the actual number.

Q: Normal compared to the Xbox?

A: We don’t comment on that.

We know the alleged percentage is at least 3% and possibly as high as 5%:

“Microsoft has said that Xbox 360 return rates are within the normal 3 percent to 5 percent average for consumer electronics products. With 1.75 million consoles sold as of March 31, that means at least 50,000 consumers have had problems.”

Q: You guys did get rid of Wistron. Was that related to product quality?

A: We didn’t get rid of Wistron. It was a voluntary decision between the two of us. We try to run as efficient as possible. With our supply base the way it is now, two high quality contract manufacturers satisfy our needs.

Guys, it was a mutual breakup that was totally mutual, nobody dumped anyone. We both decided we’d start seeing other people mutually and it was so mutual that we’re still good friends. Really.

Q: If you take the main chips from 90nm to 65nm, do you get accompanying benefits in the rest of the system? Does the board itself get smaller?

A: That’s a really good point, Dean. When you do these designs, you’re looking at the CPU or the GPU, or just one specific internal component, as we continue to look through it, we look at it as a complete system. We make sure the components work with the system, delivers the right levels of performance, and operates at the right voltage to perform at the levels we want it to perform at.

Any CS or engineering student knows the potential heat reduction and decrease in power consumption that’s achieved from going from 90nm to 65nm. There are easy, non-confidential benefits that could have been discussed. Todd is walking a fine line and essentially saying “Buy an Xbox 360 now, it’ll be JUST AS GOOD as when we eventually cost reduce our components and make it run cooler.” That’s a HUGE decision for some customers.

Q: There was a surge of supplies in the spring of 2006. Did that mark any particular advance in manufacturing? Was that Celestica coming online?

A: We hold as confidential our production ramp. It’s not something we talk about.

It wasn’t so confidential when you announced it in March 2006.

Of all the comments this guy’s made, this one irks me to an incredible degree. Microsoft trumpeted around Celestica coming online to every major Xbox fansite out there, since people were screaming for the Xbox 360 to show up in the retail channel. This isn’t so much a corporate weasel as a flat out lie; Todd’s trying not to get tripped up so much that he’s not even releasing information that’s already commonly public knowledge.

I know this post seems somewhat irrational, but I’m a big fan of Dean Takahashi’s work, and to see him completely denied by a VP is a bit ludicrous. He’ll get the information anyways.

With school, exams and other random nonsense popping up fairly frequently, I haven’t done much in the way updating here. I’ve tweaked and updated a few minor pages this morning, and some of my programming adventures in Visual Basic 2005 are approaching a point where I can make them public.

Lately I’ve been spending more time with my Xbox console than the 360, specifically due to my purchase of a KF42E200A LCD projection HDTV. I’ve wanted one of these for about six months now, or at least something comparable to it. One thing I can say for Sony is that despite their media division’s monkeying with DRM, and SCEA’s FIVE HUNDRED AND NINETY NINE US DOLLAR PlayStation 3, they still make beautiful displays and televisions. You know exactly what you’re getting when you buy a Sony TV.

In any event, while the Xbox 360 has some nice downloadable 720p content and plays games in HD natively, the Xbox still has XBMC to take names and basically be a slimmed-down Kaleidescape unit for the basement. It upscales DVD’s, reads XviD and DivX files in packed RAR format over the network, and there’s a new upgrade pretty much every two weeks. For the non tech-nerds out there, just trust me that it’s really decent.

Unfortunately to run this sort of setup, you need an Xbox capable of booting unsigned code. I ended up buying a used unit off eBay and using the XboxHDM tutorial on Xbox-Scene to complete the process. At the time, EB wasn’t carrying any used systems; I’m debating going there and picking up another console since I saw about three on the shelf last week.

There are a few things you have to do if you want the console to run properly once it’s been modded, or set it up as an entertainment center. I’ll follow up sometime this week on the “post-installation” tasks that new users might want to consider, such as setting the system up for HD and installing Xbox Media Center as the default startup dashboard.

Along with the TV, a new Yamaha amp (RXV559) has graced the basement’s presence with a reasonably-decent sounding 3.1 surround setup (for now, at least.) Center channel and woofer are Paradigms, and the stereo L&R channels are Advent-branded speakers rescued from upstairs. I’ve ordered a set of cabling from Monoprice for the various components here, and it’ll be interesting to see how soon it arrives in the mailbox.

Apart from media entertainment: last month, I broke down and started playing World of Warcraft to see what the game was like. After being roundly harassed by several good friends for partaking in such a travesty, I’m still undecided as to whether I’m going to pony up for another month of playtime - perhaps during the workterm. Maybe I should get a real hobby?

There have been a plethora of hard drive problems I’ve had to deal with this year. In the past two days, I’ve had to repeat the wonderful Windows XP installation/update process three times - once for one of my servers (Windows XP/Apache2.2/PHP/MySQL stack) and twice for client systems whose hard drives just up and quit.

In January, my cousin’s P3/733 gave up the ghost in the same way - rather than buying a new hard drive and installing Windows again, he opted to go out and get a MacBook. It ended up costing him a bit more than he wanted to spend, but the system works for him now instead of Media Player giving a “Windows Genuine Advantage” failure every time he tried to play a video file. (Admittedly, I’m unsure exactly where this XP copy came from, but it shouldn’t prevent him from launching a previous version, like v10, of Media Player.) In the meantime, he ended up using VLC to play all video files. After attempting to reset the product key to a known, valid one, both using Microsoft’s official key change application and a widely-known registry patch:

Continue reading ‘Two dead hard drives, two days’ »

Some recent news over at Xbox-Scene has made it clear that Microsoft fully intends to exploit the enhanced security features of the IBM PowerPC-based CPU. Effectively, once you’ve installed the January 2007 update for the console (kernel version 4552), you’ve tripped an “efuse” that refuses to boot prior kernel versions. There may be up to 32 of these software-programmable switches, and once the efuse has been set it cannot be reversed.

This situation is similar to the electronic countermeasures employed by DirecTV in attempting to disable satellite decryption cards. On Black Sunday, writing invalid data to a PROM caused pirate smart cards to refuse to bootstrap the satellite receiver. In this case, tripping the efuse in the CPU prevents the Xbox 360 from booting previous kernel versions.

It might now be possible to sympathize with people who claim that “the latest dashboard update bricked my console”, considering that there are two ways for the update to cause the condition:

from x-s forums:

Looks like what is happening is either:

A) During the update the EFuse doesn’t blow and the dash updates fine which when checked by Hypervisor returns a no boot condition

B) During the update the EFuse blows correctly and the update DOES NOT flash correctly which when checked by the Hypervisor returns a no boot condition.

For more information on the update package itself, including a string extraction, hit the jump.

Continue reading ‘Xbox 360 dashboard update and efuses’ »

I’ve finally gotten the chance to deploy the new security-related fixes for WordPress. I’m not a huge fan of any mass-market weblog packages, or for that matter any heavily popularized software for managing a website. In fact, I plan to use a stable version of Ethanol or Aerosol to maintain this site once I get some time to hammer out some of the installation bugs that have crept in since its first release. It’s difficult enough maintaining “stable” and “development” branches as an sole, independent developer, let alone backporting usability and security fixes.

One of the reasons I feel so strongly about managing my own content is due to some of the security problems that have plagued phpBB; the popular bulletin board system had attracted a significant number of exploits and remote abuse abilities. The exploits were to such an extent that the developers removed the version number of the software from the default footer, since many scripts keyed on this version number in order to facilitate the crack.

I’m not sure of the current state of security for the phpBB project, but frankly I wouldn’t trust it running on a server without mod_security and Hardened PHP. Ideally, you’d run the package in a BSD jail, but that’s not an option for many low-cost web hosts.

While I was in the upgrading mood, I also managed to download the latest Subversion build of Xbox Media Center. For those of you who might not know, XBMC is an open-source application that runs on modified Xbox consoles, allowing it to effectively act as a media library for your TV. The best part about XBMC is its native networking support, so you can stream music and video files from your home network and play them on your TV. It also offers native archive support, so you can view the contents of RAR and ZIP files and play media stored within them.

Unfortunately, the incredible features and functionality of this software (I’ve personally not seen an open-source project as useful as XBMC since Firefox) are all muddled up in the great debate about console modification. Ozymandias (Andre Vrignaud) of the Xbox team goes over the three main reasons to modifying a console in his post, and attempts to debunk them:

• To play pirated games (Andre’s reasoning: “[A]t the end of the day every game not legally purchased is simply stealing money from the creators.”)
• To play imported/region-locked games (Andre says: “[S]ometimes companies have good reasons to either not release a title into a region or release it at different dates. It may be because of the time and cost of localization, marketing plans, ad buys, cultural considerations, or perhaps even because of the impact of piracy in the region. Whatever the case, it’s safe to assume the publisher has thought about it.”
• The desire to run “homebrew”, or non-licensed applications on the console. Effectively, console manufacturers like Microsoft and Sony sell their boxes at a loss, hoping that (over time) their attach rate, or number of games sold per console, will be high enough that they can recoup profit from the games. Andre indicates that he can’t condone running homebrew applications on consoles, because “[a]t the end of the day, the cost difference needs to be made up somewhere, and that’s why we need to you buy those razor blades.”

I personally can’t agree with Andre’s third argument against homebrew modifications. In my experience with marketing, I fit into one of the key demographics for being an early adopter of game consoles and peripherals. I have a significant amount of disposable income (well, as much as a student can have - but I’m not supporting anybody other than myself); I’m interested in the latest games, peripherals and systems that come out; and I understand the business model.
For the original Xbox, which was effectively a set of commodity PC parts in a black box, some attach rates for 2003 were quoted at 5.3 and 5.8 games sold per console. Dean Takahashi mentioned in his book Opening the Xbox that the expected attach rate for profitability on Xbox would have been 9.0 games sold per console, with at least three of those games as first-party, Microsoft-produced titles.

Personally, I can’t feel guilty about running a software modification on my system, because I’m well over the attach rate myself. I have purchased over twelve Xbox titles at full retail value, as well as several controllers, an Xbox Live subscription ($80/year) with headset, and some Halo 2-branded merchandise. I no longer even use my original Xbox to play games or sign on to Xbox Live; that’s reserved for my Xbox 360, which has fairly compelling media features of its own.

I understand Andre’s perspective - that console manufacturers are out to make a profit, and modifying systems cuts into their bottom line - but looking at the required attach rate, you can calculate this out: assuming a break even point on the system and software:

Xbox Console: Assume $299 (first price drop, Canadian funds)
First-Party Games: Assuming three required for break even point at $60 apiece: $180
Third-Party Games: Assuming six required for break even point at $7-$9 licensing fee: $42 - $54
Total Cost: $299 + $180 + $54 = $533

I would gladly pay $600 for a completely “unlocked” system, which allowed me to play games as well as run homebrew software. However, this idea doesn’t hold water, as it has no mass-market appeal. What’s more, the unlocked system would effectively be a development kit - which sells to developers for about a $10,000 US licensing fee. No thanks.
I think what Microsoft is doing with the XNA Game Studio and Creator’s Club on the Xbox 360 is interesting, but it doesn’t offer anything close to what the XBMC team is capable of.