I remember watching the XBOX talk. The one thing that really stood out was how the Flash ROM happened to contain a previous version of the hidden ROM sitting right there. While it didn't exactly match the release version, it still provided a whole lot of information on how the boot sequence worked.
> The most critical part of the install was nailing the alignment and reflow of not just one, but BOTH ball-grid-arrays for welding over a single rework profile.
Oof. For someone who describes themselves as a software engineer, this is an extremely nice piece of work.
Phenomenal piece of engineering, especially the soldering and figuring out why it wouldn't boot with the debugger attached.
Projects like this has always inspired me to learn new things that just so happen to help me grow professionally.
> Within three months of launch, this secret bootrom was infamously dumped by Andrew “bunnie” Huang blowing the console wide open to further research.
TIL. I never knew about that one - I always thought him being famous came of his various work surrounding the "gongkai" ecosystem.
He has a whole book on the subject! Great hardware hacker.
Designing a custom interposer is crazy
CPU interposers in the OG Xbox community isn't uncommon. You can drop in a retail PII with double the clock speed but it requires an interposer.