As a former member of KAL, ECH, M7 and ProjectX I just want to say "thx" for that trip down the memory lane.. ;) BTW: The 1st releases weren't uploaded to our sites, in fact we sent harddisks around the world due to the HUGE amount of data.. :D
read about demos and demoscenes. you have to cram all the music, animation, graphics, etc into a tiny amount of space. it's a combination of technical skills and art.
@@huleyn135 I remember the ANSI Wars... The height of the Artpack and Demo era. ACiD, TRiBE, iCE... Razor 1911 was king and HPAVC still stood for Hacking\Phreaking\Anarchy\Virus\Cracking (Later Hacking borged cracking and the VC became Virus Creation). During the ANSI Wars the warez groups were raging along with the Artpack scene. Wardialing rival BBS system, narc'ing on the major PBX systems people were using to dial long distance BBS systems.... CreditMaster.... god it was a bloody war fought in the shadows.
Interesting that "scene" is used in the Xbox land also. I guess a couple of the same groups were involved but generally it should refer to the original demo/art/cracking scene on C64 and more to the point mostly Amiga. This has me wondering if vintage gamer was ever involved in the Amiga scene? was he one of the members of Mystix.. who knows but could be old enough and living in the right area.
He skipped over tha fact that a big reason for the race was that the scene had rules. There was rarely multiple releases of the same game. That was against the rules
Back in the day there were disk limits too. So if your release was too big, it could get nuked and replaced by another groups. I miss having to uharc with the cool animated group logo and bitchin 8 bit music
the speed match is propably the reason due to the fact that the grabber grabbed every line of the disk not just certain parts and a difference of speed could corrupt that alignment for the later recreationprocess
@@Deadpool-ODST just tried looking on ebay for this drive and no results were found. Probably gotta buy the whole computer to get the right drive at this point.
Music, animated background, keygen and patcher, 20kb file. I always was amazed by the coders doing that. I always assumed they had some hardcore dudes flat out writing that in assembly.
@@foxxy46213 eh. not really. I fucking love the demoscene and everything it's connected with. but a lot of the time when a game is utterly massive in size its for performance reasons. look at stuff like the 98kb game and compare it to games that look similar to it from around the time. you'll see a huge increase in resource usage due to just having to undo all of the delicate compression techniques. tldr: it's pretty cool but if you want your games to perform well its probably gonna stay like this.
@@TexasHollowEarth Well this is pirating so he's just stating facts, but who tf cares. consoles are a rip off full stop, may as well make the most of whats available.
@@mikotomisaka-kbhd-3975 - The guy only commented on the video.... how does that make him a pirate? I thought it wasn't 'pc' to use labels on people. 'Jailbreaking or hacking a device doesn't make a person a pirate. It's shitty fail-logic like that that's led to people calling anyone who mods a device, a hacker. Horrible misuse of terminology these days.
@@TexasHollowEarth Lets face it, 90% of people pirate movies, music and games. Also it's freedom of speech and the internet, u'd have to be living under a rock to not see that EVERYONE on the internet is labeled.
Seriously, he convinced me to pick up a Wii U after I found out there's GameCube support! Playing Eternal Darkness on the gamepad while lying in bed is some next level shit.
Though I think he should make a big disclaimer considering how these methods may be seen as facilitating piracy. The fiasco with Nintendo's already troublesome enough as it is.
@@anniewarbucks1794 They have a point but they abuse it. Control is their real agenda. When a game and the hardware to run it is no longer available outside of an overpriced ebay listing that argument carries less weight. This is part of a campaign. First the ROM sites and now homebrew videos. As we are seeing with Apple when a company wants control of everything free speech consistently get screwed.
I love these series. I always wanted to know the process behind these. I still prefer to buy games but I have a healthy respect towards cracking, the ingenuity behind it is inspiring.
A long, long time ago i knew a couple scene groups from Scandinavia. and i remember this they brute forced through custom firmware to let the laser start a different location. Oh irc what fun times we had.
@@toone1562 Honestly I do not remember it entirely but something about how cool it is to rip of CDS and at the end of the video it was semi not cool or some shit. The video was to persuade others to make videos about themselves.
You should do a video on Dark Alex (PSP) and the history of his CFW inc enabling the PSX emulator. I remember when he released this on Christmas Day it was incredible
The best form of protection before the internet became a thing was in my opinion the "insert manual page number/letter" method, everything got cracked but getting hold of the manual was a different thing. I actually had a bunch of games I couldn´t access because I didn´t have access to the manuals, these games didn´t require a crack, so release groups didn´t bother with them.
You’ve just made me remember when I had a french pirate copy of halo 2 a week before the uk launch version. If I’d of known about that dvd drive back in the day 🤦♂️
@@Flankerr To flash my drive, I had to use a tool that probed the memory first, to extract some key. That key was then used in the custom firmware to bypass a DRM step. That may have been made obsolete later. After doing this, it could play games burnt with my (also firmware modded) iHas 124 drive on my PC :) None of this had to do with actually ripping the titles though. I think that required a different modded drive, but I never actually tried.
@@Flankerr Seems like I remember the model of the xbox being important regarding that extra step, but it's been so long I can hardly remember. I am a software nerd, so I remember struggling a bit with the hardware stuff, but got it done.
From what I remember hearing (this may not be 100% correct) its very similar in that its a modified firmware [burner max] for the burner. The standard PC dvd drive firmware will NOT write out to the very edge of the disk, (overburning) which needed to be used to be able to burn the full XGD3 disk as the capacity for XGD3 was higher than a standard DVD or XGD2 disk. This drive in particular was used as not only was the firmware of it easily able to be easily overwritten, but it had decent firmware storage capacity for sizeable modifications. This drive was also initially very easy to find and cheap. When microsft probably asked LiteOn to address this easy burning drive, they came out with the new revision that had less space to store firmware and caused issues with overwriting it. Thus Burner Max Payload tool came out. Instead of patching the firmware flash, it patched the firmware RAM, which is why you had to run it every time, much like this tool for ripping.
team-xecuter.com/community/threads/crossflash-rebadged-drives-to-ihas-x24-b.67444/ forgot the exact detail: Rev B had the 2MB flash that revA and revC dont
Dude, mad respect ^__^/ . Iv been looking for new ways to dump and preserve xbox games as I found that DVD2XBOX just makes a hot mess out of the game dump so i'm totally building one of these if I can find all the things. Thanks for putting the FW and utility up for all to download as well
Do not use these ancient tools to make your rips - they do not contain all of the game data and create bad dumps. Read the redump guides to always know about the latest and most accurate backup method: wiki.redump.org/index.php?title=Microsoft_Xbox_Dumping_Guide I don't think these firmwares dump SS/DMI/PFI which are used for copy protection. They also extract the FATX partition, rather than doing a full ISO dump (which means a loss of layout information, which reduces performance and possibly breaks copy protection).
Two groups that stand out for me from my childhood memory: Eagle Soft from the C64 days and FBI (Future Brain Interactive) from early pc gaming. Always wondered what people are behind it.
Hitachi gd -8000 it is on eBay for $19 American dollars I need your help how can add the firmware any link help my primary language it is Spanish thanks
@@JorgeVictoria Unfortunately you'll have to look up online guides or try to find older forums. I was able to do it once many years back but I do not remember how today ):
@@TheWlr9 it's going to take me some time so please bear with me. Back then when I was involved I wasn't the most organized guy so I have a mess of media to search through that's all packed away in boxes. I'll open them up and start looking. I have a treasure trove of old school stuff dating back all the way to the BBS days.... But like I said, bear with me I'll put the time in to finding it all and getting it too you. If there is anything else you want let me know so I can keep my eyes open while digging. I'm a big fan of this channel. You all have given paper weights new life for me. This is the least I could do
Hey! IM STILL LOOKING!!! If I could post the pictures of the boxes of various discs I have you would cringe... Ive been working on them every evening looking through each disc. IF ANYONE HAS A SMARTER WAY TO DO THIS PLEASE PLEASE RESPOND!
@@sonichuizcool7445 oh boy yeah that sucks!! I wish I knew a better way... Perhaps there is some keywords or naming convention you could search for in a program or something...?
@@TheWlr9 I've actually wore my disc drive out. It's fun going back through memory lane and all. Tomorrow my replacement drive should be here. I need to catalog all this stuff and throw it on the internet so others can sift through maybe finding useful stuff.
While my pirate ship sails solely on the PC Ocean, it's always just cool to listen to how similar stuff is done on consoles. Though now I rarely pirate as I only did before because I had no money and a really crappy laptop so any game I did have, I'd only play for a short period before the lag and shitty graphics drove me back to my Xbox so that I both have money to buy games and a decent PC, I don't really do it since I usually really like the devs I get games from.
I was never part of any Warez group, but I remember using a pain in the ass way of ripping Xbox 360 discs using any standard unmodified DVD Rom Drive. I can't remember the specific ripping software but it involved "tricking" the DVD Drive into ripping the full Xbox 360 disc. The user had to find a dual layer DVD Movie disc that was really long (full of data). The movie disc was inserted into the DVD Drive, which would automatically read the TOC. After reading the TOC, the DVD Drive would continue spinning the disc while it "waits" for further commands... But after a certain time period with no activity, the DVD Drive will eventually stop spinning the disc. After the DVD Drive stopped spinning, I could safely "eject" the movie disc using the emergency hole and a paperclip. This would allow me to swap the movie disc with the Xbox 360 disc without the DVD Drive "knowing" I did it 🤫 And because the DVD Drive doesn't "know" the Disc has been swapped, it doesn't attempt to read the TOC from the Xbox 360 Disc. I'm not sure how the ripping software dealt with the layer breaks or anything else. But this method DID work... As long as the movie Disc TOC was "long" enough to cover all the data contained on the 360 Disc 🙏 (Ripping would automatically end where the movie Disc TOC ended) There was another program I used for patching / verifying the Xbox 360 Disc images... But these backups would boot on an Xbox 360 with modded DVD Rom firmware.
Ah memories! I was in cracking and courier groups, probably over 15 or 20 (plus a scene reporting group 'RCN'). I used to be hugely into this during the late 80s, 90s and some 00s, but a fairly big motorcycle crash in 2006 that I'm still recovering from severe chronic pain and loss of arm function unfortunately had me stop "caring" about warez etc. Funny that, caring about one's own health instead of cracking and releasing, how selfish of me! heh I used to have some of those Hitachi drives, this video brought back heaps of fun memories from those days, big thank you!!!! I made some awesome online friendships from back then, kept in contact with a few for over a decade after, say leaving grouo(s) we were in, but due to the aforementioned injury plus some other health issues, I've lost contact details with everyone I used to talk to online post leaving the warez scene. Mostly because a lot of the ways we used to chat online have either gone down/finished or lost login details. Apologies if I'm hard to read, pain, chemotherapy treatment today has left me a bit "brain fuzzy" compared to usual. Anyway, shout out to anyone and everyone I had positive interactions with, and there were many, many, many. - undinism
*I tried this and it didn't work* I have a dell computer put the xobx game in typed That 0xA1 or what ever that code was into the computer and the disk didn't copy. Nothing happened. How do I copy my game? Also how do you do this for xbox one and psp4 games? Do I need to click on the blue "e" on the desk top? Maybe my dvd drive is broken does it need to be a burner drive or can I just use my regular drive? Don't you just love those questions where someone asks a ridiculously stupid question with no back information and even if you did know they would never even understand how DVD drives work let alone change the firmware? It's like they need you to hold their hand to get them to ask the right questions.
I wonder if this hack could be implemented in conjunction with an Xbox emulator to play games on PC directly from the disc just like with PS2 games in PCSX2?
Great video! I was more in to making trainers (Evox-T, X0RED). So much fun back then. I ended up giving XBMC my kernel hack and src so they could add support in their awesome program. Debug kits all the way!
is xbins still up and working? I had a modded xbox with a smartxx chip, but the hDD is broken. THankfully, I had a backup of the drive, but I think I need to download an app that setups the HDD for use in the xbox.
Gotta love these release groups, years back my wife and I had all our friends baffled when wee had super Mario Bros wii 5 weeks before official released
Long time lurker, but you most definitely have some high quality videos. I love modding consoles and your channel really is just perfect. Earned that sub
Generally speaking, most of the time the "choice" of tools (the drive in this instance) just comes down to what the "staff" have on hand. Usually, the coders weren't swimming in money, so just cracking their cheap assed DVD drive made sense.
@@CoreBlaze oh.. I never uploaded them online. I just wanted it for personal use, due to not enough space on my hdd, later I upgraded the hdd, so then copied it directly to my xbox. I found out about that DVD drive later but didn't care lol. It was all for personal use only I was only like 10 at the time.
This brings back nostalgia... I remember hardmodding my controller cord to add in a USB connector to be able to link it to my computer and put the 007 Linux install on the mem pack and was able to load it up with Agent under fire I believe it was? At that point you could FTP into you XBOX from you PC and see/RIP any data from it. This was also a time when blockbuster still rented Xbox games for $5/week. New games(Project 8) when it came out :p
Another excellent video, MVG! It's always interesting to see this kind of stuff. Most of the people who use emulators on home consokes (myself included) don't know what goes on behind the scenes, how console security gets bypassed, how consoles are modded, how emulators are made to run, and all that good stuff. These videos are meant to be informative and entertaining, and they do a hell of a job! Sorry to hear about Nintendo busting your chops because they can't stand to realize their precious Switch can be tampered with, but don't give up, you do you; your efforts are greatly appreciated. Greets from México.
does anyone else remember that first video showing a burnt xbox dvd being booted? my memory is white painted cinderblock walls (lol college kids), gold masks and a photoshop of a shocked Bill Gates.
I am slowly collecting original Xbox games. Its Just Nice to have An case and manual with discs. I also have some gems for it hehe. Like my XCM case ruby red
Not without a modchip, but with a chip you could unlock your HDD and/or replace it with a much larger drive, and just put the games on HDD for easy access and fast loading times.
I love your videos about scene and its history. I always wondered why topic is rarely covered. There are many books on history of video games, but no so much on history of piracy.
hey mvg, the xbdvdread.exe is a c++ program. i tried using a c++ decompiler on it which did work but i am very sure it is nothing like the actual source. the decompiler i found reads the assembly code and attempts to translate it back to c++, so it could in theory work but i highly doubt it. i think the source code could be lost, but at least i had a go. if you still want the result it gave im happy to supply it though. great video also :)
I'm a simple man, if i saw MVG uploaded a video i like it before watching it. Also for a small message for you MVG. If you are reading you are awesome. I started to watch you last year and i'm in love with the things you do. When you talk about things like this i can see you love doing these kind of videos. And for us fans you give a lot of knowledge who are familiar with homebrew and hacks but know little about how they do them or how they hacked consoles. I love what you are doing and i can see your videos are very well detailed and putted together. Thanks for being so awesome and for doing these videos. And also thank you for making my childhood awesome with the Doom psp port.
7:22 "... it performs sector-based ripping of the disc, and after a while the entire contents is dripped onto your hard disk, ready to package up and upload for those mad internet-reputation points." haha!
It honestly sounds similar to translation groups (extremely) common in China, for shows, movies and games, that more often than not would also act as a release group (to those who can't read English and/or Japanese at least) except requires more works than popping a DVD into a drive and run a command. It used to be that people have no idea how to get the legit copy would want the pirated version which is "better because it's in Chinese", but nowadays it's actually less of getting first to brag because "it'll usually be one of the major player right", and more of, because people feel like doing it, due to the official translation (quite common already) isn't good enough, at least except those that put tons of ads into their shitty translations and never bother fixing again. Same thing goes for video rippers that use tons of computing power for compressing and fixing videos, sometimes even go far enough to use leaked master tape, because the official release doesn't have the best quality for the bitrate (or even quality, sometimes even blu-ray can suffer from badly HD-ified video). Well, it is kinda funny that when people thought these guys are breaking the market, they are really just breaking the boredom, and could contribute more sold copies for the legit version than those that criticized such scene.
Benq drives are my favorite to flash , i used to get upset when i wanted to flash an xbox and the drive was liteon , i didnt have the requirement tools for that lol
Gotta be careful man, you might get content ID'd by Nintendo for showing images of their competitor's games
Nintendo < sony
Fallen Ghost Yasha No, Sony > Microsoft
Nintendo is a different kind of product altogether
@@askhowiknow5527
Pc > all consoles in the world ever made even android 😝
Did they actually do that?
Sega does what Nintendon't.
Thoes crack screens really brought me back! RAZOR!!!
Meh. FAIRLIGHT!
@@peterobinson2546 Pizza!
ua-cam.com/video/5aXsrYI3S6g/v-deo.html
Cracked by Randal flag
SKIDROW
As a former member of KAL, ECH, M7 and ProjectX I just want to say "thx" for that trip down the memory lane.. ;)
BTW: The 1st releases weren't uploaded to our sites, in fact we sent harddisks around the world due to the HUGE amount of data.. :D
thank you for making my teenage years awesome-er
How long did it take to learn all you needed to start making exploits?
So cool!
Thanks for half the Dreamcast library!
no ur not. stop lying loser
holy shit those crack teams really loved rgb moving text
A lot of them are from the old bbs boards.
That goes back to the ZX Spectrum,Commodre 64,Amiga and Atari ST days.scrolly text everywhere
They even had contests of which group had the best intro music and video.
read about demos and demoscenes. you have to cram all the music, animation, graphics, etc into a tiny amount of space. it's a combination of technical skills and art.
@@huleyn135 I remember the ANSI Wars... The height of the Artpack and Demo era. ACiD, TRiBE, iCE... Razor 1911 was king and HPAVC still stood for Hacking\Phreaking\Anarchy\Virus\Cracking (Later Hacking borged cracking and the VC became Virus Creation). During the ANSI Wars the warez groups were raging along with the Artpack scene. Wardialing rival BBS system, narc'ing on the major PBX systems people were using to dial long distance BBS systems.... CreditMaster.... god it was a bloody war fought in the shadows.
Man that Fairlight hum brings back some memories
Almost every game on the Amiga what I played started that way! geat times :)
You started your video with excellence........ quality makes itself known ;)
Fairlight were incredibly active, even on PC.
Interesting that "scene" is used in the Xbox land also. I guess a couple of the same groups were involved but generally it should refer to the original demo/art/cracking scene on C64 and more to the point mostly Amiga. This has me wondering if vintage gamer was ever involved in the Amiga scene? was he one of the members of Mystix.. who knows but could be old enough and living in the right area.
He skipped over tha fact that a big reason for the race was that the scene had rules. There was rarely multiple releases of the same game. That was against the rules
Unless it was a bad crack then you would get a scrolly saying this is to fix the blah blah release from blah blah!!
@Yorkshire Pud Yeah that's why we still see "proper" releases today.
Back in the day there were disk limits too. So if your release was too big, it could get nuked and replaced by another groups.
I miss having to uharc with the cool animated group logo and bitchin 8 bit music
Sitania The music was often the best part of most cracking scene releases for me.
@@Sitania Good times Beta 1.00 Beta 2.00 Beta 3.00 Sale release, Final Final Sales Release lol
I believe the GD-5000 was chosen due to being extremely cheap & available, also it matches the DVD read speed of the xbox IIRC.
the speed match is propably the reason due to the fact that the grabber grabbed every line of the disk not just certain parts and a difference of speed could corrupt that alignment for the later recreationprocess
I thought it was because the Xbox itself also used hitachi drives
@@rowjelio No not really microsoft changed out the dvd drives frequently on newer xbox versions
Those drives are crazy high priced now. Just looked up and the only ones I found are over 100€ $120
@@Deadpool-ODST just tried looking on ebay for this drive and no results were found. Probably gotta buy the whole computer to get the right drive at this point.
Music, animated background, keygen and patcher, 20kb file. I always was amazed by the coders doing that. I always assumed they had some hardcore dudes flat out writing that in assembly.
Yep, and they hold competitions to make the nicest ones, look into the demo scene.
yeah it's a real pisstake that some dudes in bedrooms can put such stuff in such small files. if developers took such efforts in optimization of code
@@foxxy46213 eh. not really. I fucking love the demoscene and everything it's connected with. but a lot of the time when a game is utterly massive in size its for performance reasons. look at stuff like the 98kb game and compare it to games that look similar to it from around the time. you'll see a huge increase in resource usage due to just having to undo all of the delicate compression techniques. tldr: it's pretty cool but if you want your games to perform well its probably gonna stay like this.
They probably also used executable packing
Man this was great. learned a lot. Thanks!
it would be cool to see another more extensive video on scene groups, their secret rules and nukings and what not, atleast to me
YES PLEASE
I could write a book on it. Good times
@@dunkydog1676 maybe you should instead of being cryptic about it ;)
More of this and more ps3 jailbreaking etc! Good job
@Manek Iridius - Who da fuk r u supposed to be? Why you gotta poetically label the guy?
YAR HAR FIDDLE DEE DEE
BEING A PIRATE IS ALRIGHT WITH ME
DO WHAT YOU WANT IT IS ALRIGHT WITH ME
BECAUSE BEING A PIRATE IS FREE
R YOU’RE A PIRATE
@@TexasHollowEarth Well this is pirating so he's just stating facts, but who tf cares. consoles are a rip off full stop, may as well make the most of whats available.
@@mikotomisaka-kbhd-3975 - The guy only commented on the video.... how does that make him a pirate? I thought it wasn't 'pc' to use labels on people. 'Jailbreaking or hacking a device doesn't make a person a pirate. It's shitty fail-logic like that that's led to people calling anyone who mods a device, a hacker. Horrible misuse of terminology these days.
@@TexasHollowEarth Lets face it, 90% of people pirate movies, music and games. Also it's freedom of speech and the internet, u'd have to be living under a rock to not see that EVERYONE on the internet is labeled.
One of my favorite channels on UA-cam right now. You convinced me to pick up an original Xbox again!
Seriously, he convinced me to pick up a Wii U after I found out there's GameCube support! Playing Eternal Darkness on the gamepad while lying in bed is some next level shit.
@@killer1one1 The wii u is a wicked console. Very underutilized, like the wii awesome when modded. USB helper is awesome. There is aworkaround btw.
I just got a hard modded one today with a new 2TB hardrive
@@PremierLeagueProductions Never seen A Hard Modded Xbox I have 3 Soft Modded Xboxs and 1 went out
i own 8 original xboxes
Nintendo really sucks because of their attacks on emu videos.
the original XBOX was my first ever modded system.
Good stuff, as always.
Just commenting to spread the video. Keep up the good work & I hope you get those Nintendo videos back.
Though I think he should make a big disclaimer considering how these methods may be seen as facilitating piracy. The fiasco with Nintendo's already troublesome enough as it is.
@@anniewarbucks1794 They have a point but they abuse it. Control is their real agenda. When a game and the hardware to run it is no longer available outside of an overpriced ebay listing that argument carries less weight. This is part of a campaign. First the ROM sites and now homebrew videos. As we are seeing with Apple when a company wants control of everything free speech consistently get screwed.
me too.
I love these series. I always wanted to know the process behind these.
I still prefer to buy games but I have a healthy respect towards cracking, the ingenuity behind it is inspiring.
A long, long time ago i knew a couple scene groups from Scandinavia. and i remember this they brute forced through custom firmware to let the laser start a different location.
Oh irc what fun times we had.
;]
FairLight, Razor1911, Deviance
ahh the good old days
The piracy scene is literally the result of capitalism gone right. The groups all make each other better
I used to be in ""the scene" some crazy shit used to happen like that time Sony tried to infiltrate the scene with a shitty video.
Yes a lot of shit happened, also quite a few raids by the police.
I remember when nobody wanted to share a nuke or even a dupe.
What do you mean by that video?
@@toone1562 Honestly I do not remember it entirely but something about how cool it is to rip of CDS and at the end of the video it was semi not cool or some shit. The video was to persuade others to make videos about themselves.
>Xbox 360
>Xbox circle
We ain't doin' geometry.
Sony always wins, baby, Sony ALWAYS wins. BALLIN!
Playstation fans play games naked with one another
You should do a video on Dark Alex (PSP) and the history of his CFW inc enabling the PSX emulator. I remember when he released this on Christmas Day it was incredible
Yes definitely. I remember in highschool everybody had a PSP running dark Alex's firmware.
My psp still had dark Alex's firmware when it stopped working
Second that, Dark Alex was the king of the psp hacking. He got around firmware releases in no time. He was from Spain if I remember correctly.
ua-cam.com/video/qIxKPu20R58/v-deo.html
The best form of protection before the internet became a thing was in my opinion the "insert manual page number/letter" method, everything got cracked but getting hold of the manual was a different thing. I actually had a bunch of games I couldn´t access because I didn´t have access to the manuals, these games didn´t require a crack, so release groups didn´t bother with them.
Thumbnail: Rip XBOX discs.
My last brain cell: Rest in peace XBOX discs 🥀
Don't feel bad I thought the same
Paradox. That's a name I haven't heard in years.
(Also what is that keyboard used with the Dell Dimension?)
6:17 - I hear that Spyro 3 Paradox version theme in the background!
that would be Trainer2 by Estrayk : ua-cam.com/video/B1ofhNfdN4g/v-deo.html
The title made it look like “R.I.P Xbox discs”
I saw that.
Dude I have watching you for some time. The quality of your vids are top notch bro. Keep it up
You’ve just made me remember when I had a french pirate copy of halo 2 a week before the uk launch version.
If I’d of known about that dvd drive back in the day 🤦♂️
I miss XBC360 software
....wow those crack demos brought me back.... razor 1911 :D
keygenmusic.net
Enjoy these tunes
what about famous x360 rip/burner drive: LiteOn iHAS 124 rev.B ?
Yep, I had one. You also had to mod the 360 too, crack the serial, which was a manual process you had to do with a probe :)
@@Flankerr To flash my drive, I had to use a tool that probed the memory first, to extract some key. That key was then used in the custom firmware to bypass a DRM step. That may have been made obsolete later. After doing this, it could play games burnt with my (also firmware modded) iHas 124 drive on my PC :)
None of this had to do with actually ripping the titles though. I think that required a different modded drive, but I never actually tried.
@@Flankerr Seems like I remember the model of the xbox being important regarding that extra step, but it's been so long I can hardly remember. I am a software nerd, so I remember struggling a bit with the hardware stuff, but got it done.
From what I remember hearing (this may not be 100% correct) its very similar in that its a modified firmware [burner max] for the burner. The standard PC dvd drive firmware will NOT write out to the very edge of the disk, (overburning) which needed to be used to be able to burn the full XGD3 disk as the capacity for XGD3 was higher than a standard DVD or XGD2 disk. This drive in particular was used as not only was the firmware of it easily able to be easily overwritten, but it had decent firmware storage capacity for sizeable modifications. This drive was also initially very easy to find and cheap. When microsft probably asked LiteOn to address this easy burning drive, they came out with the new revision that had less space to store firmware and caused issues with overwriting it. Thus Burner Max Payload tool came out. Instead of patching the firmware flash, it patched the firmware RAM, which is why you had to run it every time, much like this tool for ripping.
team-xecuter.com/community/threads/crossflash-rebadged-drives-to-ihas-x24-b.67444/
forgot the exact detail: Rev B had the 2MB flash that revA and revC dont
Dude, mad respect ^__^/ . Iv been looking for new ways to dump and preserve xbox games as I found that DVD2XBOX just makes a hot mess out of the game dump so i'm totally building one of these if I can find all the things. Thanks for putting the FW and utility up for all to download as well
Do not use these ancient tools to make your rips - they do not contain
all of the game data and create bad dumps.
Read the redump guides to
always know about the latest and most accurate backup method:
wiki.redump.org/index.php?title=Microsoft_Xbox_Dumping_Guide
I don't think these firmwares dump SS/DMI/PFI which are used for copy protection. They also extract the FATX partition, rather than doing a full ISO dump (which means a loss of layout information, which reduces performance and possibly breaks copy protection).
Piracy is one of those "laws" like jaywalking, when was the last time you heard of someone prosecuted for it?
love your videos. You share a lot of your knowledge with us, with style
Goddamn, those cracktros and release group names bring me alllllllllllllllll the way back!!
Two groups that stand out for me from my childhood memory: Eagle Soft from the C64 days and FBI (Future Brain Interactive) from early pc gaming. Always wondered what people are behind it.
Sometime I would love to see a video from you about how the scene groups worked in more detail. Keep up the great work!
good call
Another amazing MVG video about XBOX!!
OG XBOX has to be my all time favorite console, what a beast it was.
I opened a non functioning X box and found a 10GB HD. 10 GB!!!
@@mikestanley9176 Damn. Did you ever get around to seeing what all it had stored on the HD?
@@rintinfin4440 I installed a 320GB into mine at the time I still have that xbox some where and the drive is about 3/4 full if memory serves right.
Could you make video about the ESR Disc Patcher for the PS2?
What is that
@@chocobillysranch9205 Its a program to read burnt dvd discs2 on the ps2. You need freemcboot (memory card hack)
@@aussieguy1012 aaah I remember that softmod thanks for the reply was wondering what it was.
The esr disc patcher program is really easy to get, I have it and also have my ps2 with freemcboot.
I wrote a program that allowed me to dump Wii/GC and RVT-R discs via a GD-2500.
can you link it?
Can you make a video about the mod chip xkey for the 360?
Xkey is useless best for you to get an RGH or a jtag
Ryan Mackie I don’t want to RGH I want him to make a video about the Xkey
What's the music at 0:46 ? I'd really like to hear the full version! EDIT: Found it, it's from the Razor: Birds of Prey Cracktro.
Also on Razor1911 Kick Reset
*I miss the days of burning my own games....PS1 - Modded - Xbox - Modded - 360- Modded...ahhh the good old days*
*why bold*
CDRWIN for the win.
Mvg forever live the scene 👀👍
The GD-5000 is no longer "cheap" it is $77 for a refurbished one on eBay.
The Retro Collector There are many variations of the drive.
For ex. Many GDR 8000 series can be flashed to work as a GDR-5000
Hitachi gd -8000 it is on eBay for $19 American dollars I need your help how can add the firmware any link help my primary language it is Spanish thanks
@@JorgeVictoria Unfortunately you'll have to look up online guides or try to find older forums.
I was able to do it once many years back but I do not remember how today ):
I have some source code. It will take me some time to unpack and find it though. But I definitely have it.
^^^ Please get back to me/us on this!
@@TheWlr9 it's going to take me some time so please bear with me. Back then when I was involved I wasn't the most organized guy so I have a mess of media to search through that's all packed away in boxes. I'll open them up and start looking.
I have a treasure trove of old school stuff dating back all the way to the BBS days....
But like I said, bear with me I'll put the time in to finding it all and getting it too you. If there is anything else you want let me know so I can keep my eyes open while digging. I'm a big fan of this channel. You all have given paper weights new life for me. This is the least I could do
Hey! IM STILL LOOKING!!! If I could post the pictures of the boxes of various discs I have you would cringe... Ive been working on them every evening looking through each disc.
IF ANYONE HAS A SMARTER WAY TO DO THIS PLEASE PLEASE RESPOND!
@@sonichuizcool7445 oh boy yeah that sucks!! I wish I knew a better way... Perhaps there is some keywords or naming convention you could search for in a program or something...?
@@TheWlr9 I've actually wore my disc drive out. It's fun going back through memory lane and all. Tomorrow my replacement drive should be here. I need to catalog all this stuff and throw it on the internet so others can sift through maybe finding useful stuff.
0:40 ".. to understand this better, we need to discuss release groups and how they operate."
*BUT FIRST, GAME-THEMED DANCE MUSIC*
I had projectX on a physically modified Xbox. I swapped out the OG matte black for a clear green case too. :)
While my pirate ship sails solely on the PC Ocean, it's always just cool to listen to how similar stuff is done on consoles. Though now I rarely pirate as I only did before because I had no money and a really crappy laptop so any game I did have, I'd only play for a short period before the lag and shitty graphics drove me back to my Xbox so that I both have money to buy games and a decent PC, I don't really do it since I usually really like the devs I get games from.
I wish a had a father like you, seriously. Love you
Pretty Nice Video , you are Awesome. Greetings from Germany !
Auch ein Deutscher, der MVG schaut :-)
Roses are red, Violets are blue.
We watch MVG, You should too.
bite me
jerkwad
I was never part of any Warez group, but I remember using a pain in the ass way of ripping Xbox 360 discs using any standard unmodified DVD Rom Drive. I can't remember the specific ripping software but it involved "tricking" the DVD Drive into ripping the full Xbox 360 disc.
The user had to find a dual layer DVD Movie disc that was really long (full of data). The movie disc was inserted into the DVD Drive, which would automatically read the TOC. After reading the TOC, the DVD Drive would continue spinning the disc while it "waits" for further commands... But after a certain time period with no activity, the DVD Drive will eventually stop spinning the disc. After the DVD Drive stopped spinning, I could safely "eject" the movie disc using the emergency hole and a paperclip. This would allow me to swap the movie disc with the Xbox 360 disc without the DVD Drive "knowing" I did it 🤫 And because the DVD Drive doesn't "know" the Disc has been swapped, it doesn't attempt to read the TOC from the Xbox 360 Disc.
I'm not sure how the ripping software dealt with the layer breaks or anything else. But this method DID work... As long as the movie Disc TOC was "long" enough to cover all the data contained on the 360 Disc 🙏 (Ripping would automatically end where the movie Disc TOC ended) There was another program I used for patching / verifying the Xbox 360 Disc images... But these backups would boot on an Xbox 360 with modded DVD Rom firmware.
Ah memories! I was in cracking and courier groups, probably over 15 or 20 (plus a scene reporting group 'RCN'). I used to be hugely into this during the late 80s, 90s and some 00s, but a fairly big motorcycle crash in 2006 that I'm still recovering from severe chronic pain and loss of arm function unfortunately had me stop "caring" about warez etc. Funny that, caring about one's own health instead of cracking and releasing, how selfish of me! heh
I used to have some of those Hitachi drives, this video brought back heaps of fun memories from those days, big thank you!!!! I made some awesome online friendships from back then, kept in contact with a few for over a decade after, say leaving grouo(s) we were in, but due to the aforementioned injury plus some other health issues, I've lost contact details with everyone I used to talk to online post leaving the warez scene. Mostly because a lot of the ways we used to chat online have either gone down/finished or lost login details.
Apologies if I'm hard to read, pain, chemotherapy treatment today has left me a bit "brain fuzzy" compared to usual. Anyway, shout out to anyone and everyone I had positive interactions with, and there were many, many, many. - undinism
Sorry about the accident :(
Hope you get back to💯% homie!!
*I tried this and it didn't work* I have a dell computer put the xobx game in typed That 0xA1 or what ever that code was into the computer and the disk didn't copy. Nothing happened. How do I copy my game? Also how do you do this for xbox one and psp4 games? Do I need to click on the blue "e" on the desk top? Maybe my dvd drive is broken does it need to be a burner drive or can I just use my regular drive?
Don't you just love those questions where someone asks a ridiculously stupid question with no back information and even if you did know they would never even understand how DVD drives work let alone change the firmware? It's like they need you to hold their hand to get them to ask the right questions.
Literally just found my old Drive and wondered if it was worth anything nowadays :P but I guess not aha
I wonder if this hack could be implemented in conjunction with an Xbox emulator to play games on PC directly from the disc just like with PS2 games in PCSX2?
I love all of your videos. They are very informative and well made. You deserve way more subscribers
growin up in straya warez puppyin' on a 56k... HAHAHA many sleepless nites & thousands of 1.44mb files offa irc...
Great video! I was more in to making trainers (Evox-T, X0RED). So much fun back then. I ended up giving XBMC my kernel hack and src so they could add support in their awesome program. Debug kits all the way!
is xbins still up and working? I had a modded xbox with a smartxx chip, but the hDD is broken. THankfully, I had a backup of the drive, but I think I need to download an app that setups the HDD for use in the xbox.
*Microsoft sending in their ninjas in 3 2 1...*
Nah they're not Nintendo. They just shrug this off and realize that their current gen is racking in enough cash... unlike Nintendo. XD
I love your videos. Its fascinating to learn about the science and methods of how people hack software and hardware.
Gotta love these release groups, years back my wife and I had all our friends baffled when wee had super Mario Bros wii 5 weeks before official released
The workable sauce pharmacologically trouble because kayak psychophysically decorate amongst a imperfect pisces. like, delicate egg
I always love watching your videos, it's super informative and entertaining.
Edutainment! Learning is fun 🤓
Love those old game crack .exe programs. Had the coolest music and gnarly graphics. Sounds like most of the music in this episode was taken from them.
The dell you got there was one of our first computers my family ever had with Windows 98 that we got '98, good times!
I swear one of the songs in this video is from ParaDox's Spyro 3 PSX demo screen ;)
i was scared of that song as a kid and i still dont know why
Long time lurker, but you most definitely have some high quality videos. I love modding consoles and your channel really is just perfect. Earned that sub
Generally speaking, most of the time the "choice" of tools (the drive in this instance) just comes down to what the "staff" have on hand. Usually, the coders weren't swimming in money, so just cracking their cheap assed DVD drive made sense.
I learnt another way as a kid, connected my Xbox to pc thru Ethernet, run a program put in a few commands and Bang!!
Got a perfect copy! 😎😀
He also mentioned your way in the video. He said it wasn't very efficient for those who were releasing them online because it was slower.
@@CoreBlaze oh.. I never uploaded them online.
I just wanted it for personal use, due to not enough space on my hdd, later I upgraded the hdd, so then copied it directly to my xbox.
I found out about that DVD drive later but didn't care lol.
It was all for personal use only I was only like 10 at the time.
This brings back nostalgia... I remember hardmodding my controller cord to add in a USB connector to be able to link it to my computer and put the 007 Linux install on the mem pack and was able to load it up with Agent under fire I believe it was? At that point you could FTP into you XBOX from you PC and see/RIP any data from it. This was also a time when blockbuster still rented Xbox games for $5/week. New games(Project 8) when it came out :p
Another excellent video, MVG!
It's always interesting to see this kind of stuff. Most of the people who use emulators on home consokes (myself included) don't know what goes on behind the scenes, how console security gets bypassed, how consoles are modded, how emulators are made to run, and all that good stuff.
These videos are meant to be informative and entertaining, and they do a hell of a job!
Sorry to hear about Nintendo busting your chops because they can't stand to realize their precious Switch can be tampered with, but don't give up, you do you; your efforts are greatly appreciated.
Greets from México.
does anyone else remember that first video showing a burnt xbox dvd being booted? my memory is white painted cinderblock walls (lol college kids), gold masks and a photoshop of a shocked Bill Gates.
No idea why I wasn't subscribed, but I am now.
Luigi Master me too 👍🏼
Same.
Can I stick a flashed GD-5000 in my modded Xbox?
Waking up to a Hot Cup of Coffee and a New MVG Video todays gonna Rock...
I am slowly collecting original Xbox games. Its Just Nice to have An case and manual with discs. I also have some gems for it hehe. Like my XCM case ruby red
can you burn the games on any dvd disc and run it on xbox?
Not without a modchip, but with a chip you could unlock your HDD and/or replace it with a much larger drive, and just put the games on HDD for easy access and fast loading times.
I love your videos about scene and its history. I always wondered why topic is rarely covered. There are many books on history of video games, but no so much on history of piracy.
That 5 1/4 floppy disk reader 🤣
And that loader/patch music😍
It was a 3.5 floppy on that demo intro, wasn't it? Great tunes, though.
@@NeuronalAxon I was talking about the computer in 3:11, it has both a 5 1/4 and a 3,5 floppy readers
@@soukai - Oh yeah, I saw the 5.25 on the actual PC, it was shown after the demo that I was thinking about.
Razor, Paradox, Skidrow omg NOSTALGIA !
One of your best mate ! It was so cool too get some insight into this 👍
hey mvg, the xbdvdread.exe is a c++ program. i tried using a c++ decompiler on it which did work but i am very sure it is nothing like the actual source. the decompiler i found reads the assembly code and attempts to translate it back to c++, so it could in theory work but i highly doubt it.
i think the source code could be lost, but at least i had a go.
if you still want the result it gave im happy to supply it though.
great video also :)
yep! you can decompile it with ghidra or even IDA Pro free version will work as its X86
I'm a simple man, if i saw MVG uploaded a video i like it before watching it. Also for a small message for you MVG. If you are reading you are awesome. I started to watch you last year and i'm in love with the things you do. When you talk about things like this i can see you love doing these kind of videos. And for us fans you give a lot of knowledge who are familiar with homebrew and hacks but know little about how they do them or how they hacked consoles. I love what you are doing and i can see your videos are very well detailed and putted together. Thanks for being so awesome and for doing these videos. And also thank you for making my childhood awesome with the Doom psp port.
Pagan Min was a very complicated man if i remember right. Best game in the series btw .
Appreciate the kind words man!
7:22 "... it performs sector-based ripping of the disc, and after a while the entire contents is dripped onto your hard disk, ready to package up and upload for those mad internet-reputation points." haha!
Xbox is just a pc from 2002
Xbox 360 is a pc from 2006
Xbox one is a modern gaming pc
Yeah ik
But xbox one is a pc you can watch UA-cam play games even acces files
Xbox one is just a PC from 2013.
every console/phone is a comupter, so?
@@pabloxd1239 everyting with a CPU is a comuter 😅
Used Hitachi GD5000 are like 80$ on ebay. jeez.
Step 1: go to Google
Step 2: search "HDD ready games xbox
Step 3: enjoy
😮
TheSlackassCrew you can always get accurate isos and unpack via xios
It honestly sounds similar to translation groups (extremely) common in China, for shows, movies and games, that more often than not would also act as a release group (to those who can't read English and/or Japanese at least) except requires more works than popping a DVD into a drive and run a command. It used to be that people have no idea how to get the legit copy would want the pirated version which is "better because it's in Chinese", but nowadays it's actually less of getting first to brag because "it'll usually be one of the major player right", and more of, because people feel like doing it, due to the official translation (quite common already) isn't good enough, at least except those that put tons of ads into their shitty translations and never bother fixing again. Same thing goes for video rippers that use tons of computing power for compressing and fixing videos, sometimes even go far enough to use leaked master tape, because the official release doesn't have the best quality for the bitrate (or even quality, sometimes even blu-ray can suffer from badly HD-ified video). Well, it is kinda funny that when people thought these guys are breaking the market, they are really just breaking the boredom, and could contribute more sold copies for the legit version than those that criticized such scene.
Love that music intro! Great video as always!
PRESTIGE Amiga MK2 Cracktro gave me a serious nostalgiadrenalin rush
memories of the 360 BenQ drive. FLASH!!! AHHH AHHHHHH
Benq drives are my favorite to flash , i used to get upset when i wanted to flash an xbox and the drive was liteon , i didnt have the requirement tools for that lol
@@RarePotatoHD you could have made your own, i did
wonder what happened to c4eva
i wonder if anyone has just used the original xbox dvd drive instead, mounded inside a pc?
it had a special power connector, and standard drivers wouldn't work with the firmware.
i remember looking on forums for mods and the huge community at xbox - scene..ah 2004 good times
CPY lookin for nothing but competition
Nice timing with the release of Xbox One SAD. Title can now be interpreted both ways.
All the Hitachi GD-5000's on eBay were sold on the same day when this video was uploaded.
*Scalpers are next!*