“Piggybacking” RAM chips goes back to the days of 8bit & 16bit home micro computers, so it’s not a new concept but it’s cool to see an old hack like this still being handy & fun to do. Great video, thanks.
I wish this comment was higher, it's awesome this trick is being brought back but it is also on some level concerning that younger folk could see a concept this 'simple' and immediately surmise that it was never thought of before/just discovered for this first time
@@Ag89q43G0HyA Depends on the game. Not all necessarily can automatically scale their needs past 64MB. Some are hard coded and need to be hacked which is well beyond me. I would assume we can patch just about anything to run at a higher resolution than it did at retail simply because we do have double the RAM available. That doesn't guarantee the GPU will like that at all or the CPU will hold up it's end of the bargain.
I literally laughed out loud when you said stack the RAM chips on top of each other. That was so unexpected, and I never would have thought that was the solution.
I’m surprised this wasn’t found earlier. I didn’t know the Xbox had a RAM upgrade mod let alone that r1.6 wasn’t compatible. This is the same techique used for some Dreamcast BIOS mods from back in the day. Again suprised it wasn’t found earlier O_o
Awesome stuff! The fact that you are providing a guide for difficult, small percentage mods is great for preserving older consoles even if they are less sought after for modders. I thankfully had 2 Xbox OGs with blown caps and defective HDDs restored and modded locally, although I don't currently have much use for them. it would be cool to see a totally wreaked Xbox getting restored, im sure there are tons like mine out there.
When you said that the method is to literally _stack memory chips on each other,_ that immediately became the most ingenious idea that I have heard in a while. I was originally thinking that they were going to replace the ram chip with a bigger one but the stacking method is a much cooler way of doing it
Having failed to install a GBHD due to not being able to solder the tiny part of the ribbon cable to the GBA chip, I just want to say how impressed I am with your skills, Tito. Jealous, too lol
@@mirabilis I need to get some liquid flux, because the flux pen I have wasn't working very well. The ribbon might be fine, and the GBA isn't busted, I just gave up after not being able to get every point soldered to the chip haha
Truly groundbreaking. Modding community have come very far in just 4 years. Back then we used to say that the gb color was impossible to backlight the screen.
no. I honestly cannot believe that you can literally stick two ram modules on top of each other, and it actually works, that is literally the most crazy thing I have heard all month.
This took me back!! I started my dive into my development career starting with modding my original Xbox! I used to visit XBINS IRC and download a bunch of homebrew games like X Bomberbox and did a bunch of Halo modding :)
Do you still have any halo 2 mods like the fun ones we used to get banned with? Super speed super jump Etc. every where I used to get them are now archives with no links.
@@kiellmorphet262 Haha none of those types of mods! Didn't have Xbox Live either so they were mostly silly things, like putting a Wraith cannon on a Warthog 😂 I remember one of my close friends on the modding forum was able to add AI Elites to a multiplayer map and that was a huge event in my mind! They had full lobbies of people playing against Elites lol
Funny, I knew exactly where you were going with the solution on how to expand the RAM because of a video I very recently saw on Adrian Black's channel where he assured viewers that the piggybacked chips on some old hardware he was looking at were actually stock.
Amazing work! Honestly, I'm impressed by how many of these videos you can put out, between not only doing the mods, but also having to film everything and produce the video... I made a simple one of the installation of the PicoBoot since there weren't any in my language, and it took me an entire month working the hardest I've ever worked lol
@@MachoNachoProductions One thing to note is that heat seems like it could be a concern in some devices with chips stacking (it is for SSDs, although those are now built to take outrageous heat, I'm talking 70-80C!), but I don't think the Xbox is an issue with this. Especially since as you said in the video, you need to reach hard to even use the extra RAM. (unused RAM isn't going to generate heat, if anything your new RAM is a pseudo-heatsink FOR the original RAM when using under 64MB haha). The RAM is also unshielded from heatsinks to begin with meaning Microsoft did not think it was an issue that it'd ever get remotely hot. I wouldn't do this on, say, a PS3 or 360, as I believe those do run very toasty RAM, and do guard it with a heatsink.
@@acumenium8157 some of them manage to sandwich conductive metal foil in between the stacked chips to help with heat dissipation. The high-capacity enterprise drives are sandwiches of PCBs filled with NAND chips and linked with ribbon cables, and they fold out like an accordion. Crazy dense capacity also gives you crazy heat output with equally crazy packaging solutions to overcome it lol
After watching the scene for years, I never thought that this would be possible. But I think it was a month or two ago when I saw the first guy who had done this mod posting about it being possible (Reddit). Hopefully I can find someone with the appropriate skills who can do this to one of my 1.6 boxes, might make for a wild time 😁👍 Awesome video! Keep up the good work!
piggyback is the term and I done this many times on old 8bit and 16bits systems. Heck it's also a way to troubleshoot old arcade systems. I did this a few years ago. With the chip select lines I used a older revision motherboard to find where they were located and used a buffer to protect things. I don't have the ROM anymore for it. I only used that xbox for running Linux.
So I remembered about a good thing about the Ram Chips, they were also used in some TKons of Sony/Scamsung LCDs. That would cost me around 2-3$ per card/chip. Yus.
You might be interested to learn that there is a Windows clone that has a port for the original Xbox, it's called React OS and is a open source open room reverse engineering of Microsoft Windows. I would try running some lightweight titles on the original Xbox with 128 megs of ram in it. Of course they would need to be added to the console manually via a modified game card or something like that.
@@CovenantAgentLazarus you can talk all ill all you want about any form of Linux or Windows clone that you want, just don't spread it in a light-hearted area. You're not needed here, you should not have commented.
This reminds me I really need to get a mod chip for my 1.6 xbox since there's no easy way to just flash the bios on that model and at some point the hard drive is going to die. At least I don't have to worry about a clock capacitor destroying it since it's the only model without one.
Just softmod and swap the drive, I have two 1.6 systems that are going strong with new HDD's thanks to the Rocky5 method 👍 you can get a kit on eBay with everything you need (USB flash drive with save exploit, USB to XBOX cable, and a physical copy of an exploit friendly game) for $20-$30, then you use CHIMP with a new drive and your set! A 2tb HDD with a Startek SATA to IDE adapter, plus a new 80pin IDE, is what I would recommend, though you can go cheap if you're in a pinch. 1.6 systems also have clock caps, they're just considered "less leaky" when compared to 1.0-1.5 systems. The problem is, 1.0-1.5's can run without a clock cap (modded), a 1.6 can't. If yours ever stops working, you'll have to swap it with a new cap.
I wonder if it would be possible to go beyond 128mb's of ram using this idea. it's crazy, that the OG community is still very active, and i suspect they will be for many years to come.
Modded-ish my MSI GL65 Leopard i7 10750H, 2060RTX laptop. MSI left the pads for a 2nd m.2 drive so I added the 10 caps, the m.2 connector, and the nvme hold down stud. Once done, I threw in a 2TB stick and now have a dedicated drive for my games. Was lucky my laptop version had the pads still, some laptop reviewers showed one on the locations without them.
I've modded lots of 1.0-1.4 consoles with the extra ram but am yet to try a 1.6. I must source some more ram chips and give it a try soon. Nice video :)
should look into the amiga vampire mods, they do something similar, but they use a special socket to attach to the top of chips, might make doing this mod easier
When you said the pads were not there the first thing I was thinking was that they probably piggybacked the chips on top of the existing once. Since they probsbly only need separate enable lines. Going to watch the rest of this video anyway :D
Two additional pros I feel you missed: 1: The 1.6 Xbox tends to run cooler and has the newest hardware (also no clock cap that explodes) so is arguably superior. 2: The RAM upgrade (regardless of Xbox version) does allow for higher quality videos to be played in XBMC, which can be a decent benefit if you're using your Xbox as a bit of a media machine.
The clock caps in 1.6 systems are considered "less leaky" when compared to other generations, they still have clock caps and they still can leak. The big problem you run into is 1.0-1.5 systems can run without a clock cap (modded) while 1.6 systems require the cap, so if your cap starts leaking your only option is replacing it with a new one. I just had to go through my units to check / remove caps, two 1.4's and two 1.6's.
I recently bought a crystal xbox for dirtcheap, 25 euro with all cables, 2 crystal controllers and a stack of games ... and I intend to mod the snot out of it. Already replaced the stock fan with a Noctua fan and bought an Aladdin mod chip. Also got a donor Xbox lying around with a broken disc drive that would be perfect to harvest the RAM from and put it in my crystal xbox. I can't wait to start working on it hehe. Thanks for another great vid Tito ;)
I thought you were going to place the chip onto what appeared to be an empty socket then pass through what would be the dead connections to an existing chip. I was sorta right, but I really wasn't expecting it to be that silly of a solution.
Combining this with a 1.4GHz Tualatin Pentium 3 (or if you're adventurous, a 1.5GHz Tualatin Celeron) would allow you to theoretically run the software one of those red and grey media center Xbox consoles can. It also makes XBMC4Xbox and emulation/homebrew even better.
btw just as an added, make sure to trim your wires to be fairly tight. You want signals to travel about as fast as through a trace for memory performance (not as important on some older consoles) but is still a good idea nevertheless.
A big reason many didnt like the v1.6 back in the day was because MS used memory chips of varying quality to keep up with demand or save costs. There are v1.6 xbox with low quality memory might only ran 180MHz instead of the original 200MHz of prior xbox versions. The 1.6 bios tests on boot to see how high the memory can stably run from 200MHz to 180Mhz in steps of 5MHz if i remember correctly. So there could v1.6 xbox's out there with up to 10% lower performance in some games, its crazy to me actually.
oof. You'd have measurably decreased performance in just about every game, but unless you put a 200mhz next to a 180mhz system you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. I guess they're bending the limits of what's considered acceptable to the public.
Another cool video. I really appreciate this style of content, no bullshit, you state what you are going to do then clearly and thoroughly go through the entire process in a way that is repeatable by anyone with the skills necessary. Thanks Dude!
I thought this was going to be too much work before I realized you have to do this with four chips. My hands feel strained just watching this. So many tiny little pins.
Nowadays I use it to play a bunch of games in 720p or sometimes widescreen where before they weren't compatible (running the 720p mods on most games before would crash the system due to the ram cache being too small)
This kind of reminds me of AOL users in the mid-nineties who always had 40 megabytes of RAM on their Performa 600s and the like because the computer store said it would "make it faster."
That's how it was done all the time in 80s home computers. Now seeing, that this was considered as 'impossible' before, is another example on how quick human wisdom still gets lost every day, even within just a few decades. From this tought, I am pretty sure, that neary anything we learn about past centuries and millenia being absurdly wrong ..
Just remembered there's a pro to the 1.6 revision Xbox. It doesn't have the clock capacitor battery issue that could render your console unplayable (I know this because of Cvit's video on the Dino Crisis trilogy. Where he had to get an OG Xbox for the third game since it's not backwards compatible with the Xbox 360)
I used to run Gentoo on my old XBOX, we had this Traktor FinalScratch (first gen) that ran on WINE. I build WINE for the XBOX and dropped the required asound files from the Traktor ISO and bam we had a cheap DJ box that just needed a TV :D So yea, you could also use the extra RAM to run Linux on it... I still have two or three Xboxes, sadly the 160Gb drive that was used for them has long passed away :(
Man I love how niche this is,. I just found out that their are XBOX players on the PSO Server that I play on, which is so cool! Any Phantasy Star Online players still active here?
Omg great work Tito! I have been been really frustrated because I keep fragging my Xbox and it looks perfect I cannot get the LPC reboard to work either (modchip led or red and then will go green and back to red) so I'm also going to remove it now I think. I've been really stubborn and felt like I was going crazy or something, so glad to know you had to rebuild yours!
@@MachoNachoProductions I was Into GameCube. I guess I'm a Nintendo "fan boy" only in the sense that most games I like/liked tend/tended to be on nintendo products
I have done more than 65 xbox 1.0 to 1.4/1.5 128mb upgrade and never thought that this could be possible, good on you mate!! I have an xbox 1.6 and I will do that as well, thank you for this great tutorial!! Amazing...
I think the other pro that you missed is the added experience doing this gives you. If you can complete it, it makes your next soldering job that little bit easier to perform.
In one of my Electrical Engineering classes we had an option to solder capacitors and/or resistors on top of each other, but I didn't know you could do that with actual ram chips.
While reading "The impossible 128MB XBOX... " my thoughts were "wtf there might be difficult, I did that, lets see". Ok, ok...What, stop. An 1.6 upgrade sandwich like installation! Like old x360 Dual NAND mods. Well, Your chanel got one more sub and this video gets thumbs up. That "1.6" was unexpected at all.) Great soldering skills you have, hats off.
Damn who would’ve thought just stacking pretty much made it work, that’s cool! He probably saw a sandwich and was like hmmm I wonder 🤣great job on the video!
Native support for Chihiro games is the only reason I'm interested in doing this to begin with. Especially when games like Virtua Cop 3 never got a home port.
back in the days it was normal to stack the RAM modules, older SDRAM modules have this done :) and i even worked in productions where we did this on some systems that we designed.
You are such a hidden gem. Top grade camera work and such interesting topics you deserve so much more subscribers. I believe you are going to blowup real soon 😉.
Greta video Tito!! Would love to see you do some the mods to the Colecovision, like the FPGA F18A video mod, Super Game Module, controller port fixes etc.
@@MachoNachoProductions There is a whole crazy Colecovision scene out there. So many mods and amazing new homebrew games and conversions from the MSX and SG1000.
This is pretty cool I wonder if this could lead to a way to possibly get more than 128 MB of RAM on older consoles? It's definitely Overkill and probably wouldn't serve much purpose but it would definitely be cool and you would definitely have bragging rights being able to claim you have 256 MB of RAM (maybe even possibly more) in your original Xbox.
7:11 Good advice to watch for the correct alignment. But the text on a chip is not a reliable method! Better is it to align pin 1, which is marked by a dot on the package (as visible in the video).
![PASULOL รามเกียรติ์ ตอนที่ 4 นนทกพบรัก [Ramakien Ep.4: Nonthok in love]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/tMUQgmZzf_A/mqdefault.jpg)
“Piggybacking” RAM chips goes back to the days of 8bit & 16bit home micro computers, so it’s not a new concept but it’s cool to see an old hack like this still being handy & fun to do.
Great video, thanks.
Yes i got a device that piggyback ram. My Hp 71b calculator/computer does
how is it fun to do? are you daft?
Glad you enjoyed the video! It’s definitely a pretty cool method of adding ram
@@rachelannkrueger7638 very cool.
I wish this comment was higher, it's awesome this trick is being brought back but it is also on some level concerning that younger folk could see a concept this 'simple' and immediately surmise that it was never thought of before/just discovered for this first time
Higher resolution game patches are also another main advantage of installing this mod. Enabling XBMC4XBox to play more file types in HD as well.
could they be programmed to handle 128 mb?
@@Ag89q43G0HyA Depends on the game. Not all necessarily can automatically scale their needs past 64MB. Some are hard coded and need to be hacked which is well beyond me. I would assume we can patch just about anything to run at a higher resolution than it did at retail simply because we do have double the RAM available.
That doesn't guarantee the GPU will like that at all or the CPU will hold up it's end of the bargain.
Can someone one who has these upgrades tell us if halo ce runs with the pentium III. Is it a smoothe gameplay with compatability mode?
I literally laughed out loud when you said stack the RAM chips on top of each other. That was so unexpected, and I never would have thought that was the solution.
I know it’s a pretty wild solution!!
I did the same thing! Impressed and funny
I’m surprised this wasn’t found earlier. I didn’t know the Xbox had a RAM upgrade mod let alone that r1.6 wasn’t compatible.
This is the same techique used for some Dreamcast BIOS mods from back in the day. Again suprised it wasn’t found earlier O_o
@@MachoNachoProductions it's so easy in concept that straight away feels to obvious to be possoble😅
I seen this on my HP 71b calculator/computer ram was soldered on top of the other.
Awesome stuff! The fact that you are providing a guide for difficult, small percentage mods is great for preserving older consoles even if they are less sought after for modders. I thankfully had 2 Xbox OGs with blown caps and defective HDDs restored and modded locally, although I don't currently have much use for them. it would be cool to see a totally wreaked Xbox getting restored, im sure there are tons like mine out there.
agreed! Have not seen to many of these out in the wild.
When you said that the method is to literally _stack memory chips on each other,_ that immediately became the most ingenious idea that I have heard in a while. I was originally thinking that they were going to replace the ram chip with a bigger one but the stacking method is a much cooler way of doing it
Not sure there is any real other way of doing it.
MVG is going to be extremely happy when he sees this video haha.
I hope so 😁
I see you are a man of culture.
Still waiting for MVG comment
Never would have thought you could stack RAM chips to get more RAM. This was quite an interesting video!
Thanks! Glad you enjoyed the video!!
Having failed to install a GBHD due to not being able to solder the tiny part of the ribbon cable to the GBA chip, I just want to say how impressed I am with your skills, Tito. Jealous, too lol
Thank you so much bucktwenty! Definitely got here with tons of practice. I’m sure you can do it too with the right amount of practice. Cheers buddy!!
Practice my guy, also make sure you invest in decent equipment
Scrub 💅
Flux is the secret sauce.
@@mirabilis I need to get some liquid flux, because the flux pen I have wasn't working very well. The ribbon might be fine, and the GBA isn't busted, I just gave up after not being able to get every point soldered to the chip haha
Truly groundbreaking. Modding community have come very far in just 4 years. Back then we used to say that the gb color was impossible to backlight the screen.
I know dude! It’s crazy how fast things are moving. I’m having a hard time keeping up 😅
I cant speak for the rest of society but the collaboration within the tech community is always astounding!!!
100% agree!!
Great to see the love the OG Xbox continues to get from the modding community. Beautifully done my man!
Thank you dude! 🙏 totally agree man! og Xbox is definitely getting some much deserved love. Cheers buddy!
no. I honestly cannot believe that you can literally stick two ram modules on top of each other, and it actually works, that is literally the most crazy thing I have heard all month.
Haha, it totally surprised me too!
DAMN DUDE, YOU DID IT! Great work brotha :D
Thanks buddy! Your Aladdin mod chip came in clutch! Cheers dude!
It seems such a simple idea but the work that went in to discovering this must be so much more. Excellent video as usual Tito, thanks for the content!
Thank you so much🙏Glad you enjoyed this one 😁
This took me back!! I started my dive into my development career starting with modding my original Xbox! I used to visit XBINS IRC and download a bunch of homebrew games like X Bomberbox and did a bunch of Halo modding :)
Do you still have any halo 2 mods like the fun ones we used to get banned with? Super speed super jump Etc. every where I used to get them are now archives with no links.
@@kiellmorphet262 Haha none of those types of mods! Didn't have Xbox Live either so they were mostly silly things, like putting a Wraith cannon on a Warthog 😂
I remember one of my close friends on the modding forum was able to add AI Elites to a multiplayer map and that was a huge event in my mind! They had full lobbies of people playing against Elites lol
Funny, I knew exactly where you were going with the solution on how to expand the RAM because of a video I very recently saw on Adrian Black's channel where he assured viewers that the piggybacked chips on some old hardware he was looking at were actually stock.
Nice!
Amazing work! Honestly, I'm impressed by how many of these videos you can put out, between not only doing the mods, but also having to film everything and produce the video... I made a simple one of the installation of the PicoBoot since there weren't any in my language, and it took me an entire month working the hardest I've ever worked lol
RAM stacking is a technique used nowadays too, especially in the SSD or GPU field. Interesting idea to use it here too.
Cool!
@@MachoNachoProductions One thing to note is that heat seems like it could be a concern in some devices with chips stacking (it is for SSDs, although those are now built to take outrageous heat, I'm talking 70-80C!), but I don't think the Xbox is an issue with this.
Especially since as you said in the video, you need to reach hard to even use the extra RAM. (unused RAM isn't going to generate heat, if anything your new RAM is a pseudo-heatsink FOR the original RAM when using under 64MB haha).
The RAM is also unshielded from heatsinks to begin with meaning Microsoft did not think it was an issue that it'd ever get remotely hot.
I wouldn't do this on, say, a PS3 or 360, as I believe those do run very toasty RAM, and do guard it with a heatsink.
@@acumenium8157 some of them manage to sandwich conductive metal foil in between the stacked chips to help with heat dissipation. The high-capacity enterprise drives are sandwiches of PCBs filled with NAND chips and linked with ribbon cables, and they fold out like an accordion. Crazy dense capacity also gives you crazy heat output with equally crazy packaging solutions to overcome it lol
After watching the scene for years, I never thought that this would be possible. But I think it was a month or two ago when I saw the first guy who had done this mod posting about it being possible (Reddit). Hopefully I can find someone with the appropriate skills who can do this to one of my 1.6 boxes, might make for a wild time 😁👍
Awesome video! Keep up the good work!
Thank you buddy 🙏! Will do!
piggyback is the term and I done this many times on old 8bit and 16bits systems. Heck it's also a way to troubleshoot old arcade systems.
I did this a few years ago. With the chip select lines I used a older revision motherboard to find where they were located and used a buffer to protect things. I don't have the ROM anymore for it. I only used that xbox for running Linux.
So I remembered about a good thing about the Ram Chips, they were also used in some TKons of Sony/Scamsung LCDs. That would cost me around 2-3$ per card/chip. Yus.
You might be interested to learn that there is a Windows clone that has a port for the original Xbox, it's called React OS and is a open source open room reverse engineering of Microsoft Windows. I would try running some lightweight titles on the original Xbox with 128 megs of ram in it. Of course they would need to be added to the console manually via a modified game card or something like that.
I’ll definitely have to take a look!
@@CovenantAgentLazarus you can talk all ill all you want about any form of Linux or Windows clone that you want, just don't spread it in a light-hearted area. You're not needed here, you should not have commented.
This reminds me I really need to get a mod chip for my 1.6 xbox since there's no easy way to just flash the bios on that model and at some point the hard drive is going to die. At least I don't have to worry about a clock capacitor destroying it since it's the only model without one.
Just softmod and swap the drive, I have two 1.6 systems that are going strong with new HDD's thanks to the Rocky5 method 👍 you can get a kit on eBay with everything you need (USB flash drive with save exploit, USB to XBOX cable, and a physical copy of an exploit friendly game) for $20-$30, then you use CHIMP with a new drive and your set! A 2tb HDD with a Startek SATA to IDE adapter, plus a new 80pin IDE, is what I would recommend, though you can go cheap if you're in a pinch.
1.6 systems also have clock caps, they're just considered "less leaky" when compared to 1.0-1.5 systems. The problem is, 1.0-1.5's can run without a clock cap (modded), a 1.6 can't. If yours ever stops working, you'll have to swap it with a new cap.
Nice, reminds me of the 360's nandwich dualnands which are always fun to do.
Wish I had a 1.6 to try this but both of mine are 1.0s!
I wonder if it would be possible to go beyond 128mb's of ram using this idea. it's crazy, that the OG community is still very active, and i suspect they will be for many years to come.
At first, I thought this would never work because the chips can't share the chip select pin. But they did account for that. Well done.
That's intense. I'm always amazed at the resilience of modders.
Totally agree! Where there is a will, there is a way!
Wow done thanks pulled xbox out of storage and added the ram didn't think this was possible tried many years ago.Awesome video 👍
The chihiro can use up to 512MB of memory. Outrun 2 has this config.
Modded-ish my MSI GL65 Leopard i7 10750H, 2060RTX laptop. MSI left the pads for a 2nd m.2 drive so I added the 10 caps, the m.2 connector, and the nvme hold down stud.
Once done, I threw in a 2TB stick and now have a dedicated drive for my games.
Was lucky my laptop version had the pads still, some laptop reviewers showed one on the locations without them.
I wouldn't have risked tbhh
I've modded lots of 1.0-1.4 consoles with the extra ram but am yet to try a 1.6. I must source some more ram chips and give it a try soon. Nice video :)
I would probably add a little bit of thermal paste between the chips just to be sure that the bottom one is not cooked too much.
should look into the amiga vampire mods, they do something similar, but they use a special socket to attach to the top of chips, might make doing this mod easier
CPU and RAM upgrade LESSSGGGGOOOOOOO
bro the production quality is out of this world for your channel size
When you said the pads were not there the first thing I was thinking was that they probably piggybacked the chips on top of the existing once. Since they probsbly only need separate enable lines.
Going to watch the rest of this video anyway :D
Hey, me too! I think we nailed it!
You are baba vanga
@@salamiwallnut had to ask my wife what that means, she says the description does not fit
Yep you got it!
Two additional pros I feel you missed:
1: The 1.6 Xbox tends to run cooler and has the newest hardware (also no clock cap that explodes) so is arguably superior.
2: The RAM upgrade (regardless of Xbox version) does allow for higher quality videos to be played in XBMC, which can be a decent benefit if you're using your Xbox as a bit of a media machine.
The clock caps in 1.6 systems are considered "less leaky" when compared to other generations, they still have clock caps and they still can leak. The big problem you run into is 1.0-1.5 systems can run without a clock cap (modded) while 1.6 systems require the cap, so if your cap starts leaking your only option is replacing it with a new one. I just had to go through my units to check / remove caps, two 1.4's and two 1.6's.
oh yea we used to do this to certain 8 bit machines. Glad to see the oldschool techniques are still in play.
I recently bought a crystal xbox for dirtcheap, 25 euro with all cables, 2 crystal controllers and a stack of games ... and I intend to mod the snot out of it. Already replaced the stock fan with a Noctua fan and bought an Aladdin mod chip. Also got a donor Xbox lying around with a broken disc drive that would be perfect to harvest the RAM from and put it in my crystal xbox.
I can't wait to start working on it hehe. Thanks for another great vid Tito ;)
I thought you were going to place the chip onto what appeared to be an empty socket then pass through what would be the dead connections to an existing chip. I was sorta right, but I really wasn't expecting it to be that silly of a solution.
I've done NAND sandwiches on Xbox 360s, and it is always a nightmare to solder... Bring patience 😄
Congrats on the mod, awesome video!
Nice! Thanks Sebastian!
Damn dude, the cinematography in this video is insane! How did you do that Xbox disassembly bit at the start? looks flawless.
Thanks! Glad you enjoyed the intro. It’s mostly practical effects. No CGI 😁
can you share timestamp
Combining this with a 1.4GHz Tualatin Pentium 3 (or if you're adventurous, a 1.5GHz Tualatin Celeron) would allow you to theoretically run the software one of those red and grey media center Xbox consoles can. It also makes XBMC4Xbox and emulation/homebrew even better.
Definitely a cool video. Not something I would do. But seeing the process was fascinating and not something I would have considered. Thanks Tito!
Thanks Imad 🙏! Glad you enjoyed this one!
sooooo basically this is 3D RAM
I am not kidding
When you said "He found a novel idea"
my direct thought was "Haha, how about just putting them onto each other"
It will be a new 128ram series on the 1.6 board, let's see what happens. very good video.
It figures this mod comes from the UK. Some old computers from the UK use memory chip stacking to increase RAM. What an awesome mod for 1.6 owners.
Actually they are from the US. only real way to upgrade a 520ST to 1MB. Pretty sure same with the 8bit atari (memory works like memory works(
I'd orientate the ram chip based on that circular dimple rather than rely on the text. Good work as ever though!
That’s true! Thank you!
btw just as an added, make sure to trim your wires to be fairly tight. You want signals to travel about as fast as through a trace for memory performance (not as important on some older consoles) but is still a good idea nevertheless.
Doing this mod reminds me of ppl who would softmod a wii mini, just like you said, because they can 💪
100% 😁👍
id love to see a behind the scenes of the intro, those shots were amazing!
I may have to do that!
Modded 360's do so much more. Legit. TENFOLD!!!!!!!!!! Still, got a soft spot for the modded OG XBOX's. Love them equally as much.
A big reason many didnt like the v1.6 back in the day was because MS used memory chips of varying quality to keep up with demand or save costs.
There are v1.6 xbox with low quality memory might only ran 180MHz instead of the original 200MHz of prior xbox versions.
The 1.6 bios tests on boot to see how high the memory can stably run from 200MHz to 180Mhz in steps of 5MHz if i remember correctly.
So there could v1.6 xbox's out there with up to 10% lower performance in some games, its crazy to me actually.
oof. You'd have measurably decreased performance in just about every game, but unless you put a 200mhz next to a 180mhz system you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. I guess they're bending the limits of what's considered acceptable to the public.
Another cool video. I really appreciate this style of content, no bullshit, you state what you are going to do then clearly and thoroughly go through the entire process in a way that is repeatable by anyone with the skills necessary. Thanks Dude!
Thank you Nick for the kind words! So glad you enjoyed the video buddy!
I thought this was going to be too much work before I realized you have to do this with four chips. My hands feel strained just watching this. So many tiny little pins.
The 128mb mod was always fairly niche in use, but very cool to see the 1.6 can pull it off. I remember the 1.6 was a pain with any mod....
Nowadays I use it to play a bunch of games in 720p or sometimes widescreen where before they weren't compatible (running the 720p mods on most games before would crash the system due to the ram cache being too small)
Yeah, the 1.6 is definitely not the most mod friendly.
This kind of reminds me of AOL users in the mid-nineties who always had 40 megabytes of RAM on their Performa 600s and the like because the computer store said it would "make it faster."
Done about 10 so far = 2022 showing old consoles love.
You've done it again. Just amazing my dude!
Thank you buddy 🙏☺️
That's how it was done all the time in 80s home computers. Now seeing, that this was considered as 'impossible' before, is another example on how quick human wisdom still gets lost every day, even within just a few decades. From this tought, I am pretty sure, that neary anything we learn about past centuries and millenia being absurdly wrong ..
Just remembered there's a pro to the 1.6 revision Xbox. It doesn't have the clock capacitor battery issue that could render your console unplayable (I know this because of Cvit's video on the Dino Crisis trilogy. Where he had to get an OG Xbox for the third game since it's not backwards compatible with the Xbox 360)
Lol. Prehistoric man sounds like a hacker name from the movie hackers. And with the skills to back it up.
Love hackers! Total classic!
Sick!! Stacking for more RAM! Wow!
Now, don't tell me that I could download on the internet for more RAM 🤨
I used to run Gentoo on my old XBOX, we had this Traktor FinalScratch (first gen) that ran on WINE. I build WINE for the XBOX and dropped the required asound files from the Traktor ISO and bam we had a cheap DJ box that just needed a TV :D
So yea, you could also use the extra RAM to run Linux on it...
I still have two or three Xboxes, sadly the 160Gb drive that was used for them has long passed away :(
Yeah, Linux would certainly benefit as well!
I'm 99% sure I saw someone doing this mod in a forum back in the day. Awesome mod nonetheless!
Man I love how niche this is,. I just found out that their are XBOX players on the PSO Server that I play on, which is so cool! Any Phantasy Star Online players still active here?
Smoking legal weed here in Detroit while watching. I couldn't ever imagine doing something like this, but I love your video!
Back in the early 2000s I just put a stick on 128 MB into the dimm slot of the PC. Job done :D
Omg great work Tito! I have been been really frustrated because I keep fragging my Xbox and it looks perfect I cannot get the LPC reboard to work either (modchip led or red and then will go green and back to red) so I'm also going to remove it now I think. I've been really stubborn and felt like I was going crazy or something, so glad to know you had to rebuild yours!
Absolutely love your videos!! Super great production value, SUPER professional. I aspire to reach this level someday
Thank you 🙏
I never got into xbox, but I think the fact that you can do this is amazing.
Same, I was more into the ps2 at the time
@@MachoNachoProductions I was Into GameCube. I guess I'm a Nintendo "fan boy" only in the sense that most games I like/liked tend/tended to be on nintendo products
I have done more than 65 xbox 1.0 to 1.4/1.5 128mb upgrade and never thought that this could be possible, good on you mate!! I have an xbox 1.6 and I will do that as well, thank you for this great tutorial!! Amazing...
Microphone still shaking like there's a continuous earthquake, I see.
Haha true, my table is a bit wobbly
I think the other pro that you missed is the added experience doing this gives you. If you can complete it, it makes your next soldering job that little bit easier to perform.
In one of my Electrical Engineering classes we had an option to solder capacitors and/or resistors on top of each other, but I didn't know you could do that with actual ram chips.
I've been wanting to see someone do this method on modern chips! Well DONE!
At this point, I believe you have some degree in electronics 👍👍👍👏
Edit: And make a very clear closeup video while doing it make even harder.
Thank you Ken Law! I’m always learning and trying to improve. Cheers!
While reading "The impossible 128MB XBOX... " my thoughts were "wtf there might be difficult, I did that, lets see". Ok, ok...What, stop. An 1.6 upgrade sandwich like installation! Like old x360 Dual NAND mods. Well, Your chanel got one more sub and this video gets thumbs up. That "1.6" was unexpected at all.) Great soldering skills you have, hats off.
its almost bifurcated ram.... interesting. Editorial note: you say "actually" at very random times, may be something worth looking into. Great video!
Oh no! The ram pads are gone! How will I expand my Xbox's memory now?
modders, probably: "ahhh just put the ram on top of the other ram it'll be fine"
I love the sony pvms! Show those beautiful CRT monitors in more videos!
Damn who would’ve thought just stacking pretty much made it work, that’s cool! He probably saw a sandwich and was like hmmm I wonder 🤣great job on the video!
Yeah, it’s a pretty wild solution. Glad you enjoyed the video 😁
Yeah I like sandwiches
Native support for Chihiro games is the only reason I'm interested in doing this to begin with. Especially when games like Virtua Cop 3 never got a home port.
Heck yeah. I was super interested in this for my 1.6 but wanted to see the process.
I was sure you'd do a video, and here it is.
Nice! I hope you enjoyed the video 😁👍
Awesome! I've also heard that there is a possible cpu upgrade on some xboxs..... next project? :)
back in the days it was normal to stack the RAM modules, older SDRAM modules have this done :) and i even worked in productions where we did this on some systems that we designed.
how do you not have more sub!? dat production quality
Thank you 🙏
I spent an entire Sat. recapping my $5 2004 Sony Goodwill DVD player, simply because I could.
Nice!
This reminds me of the ram mods for old micro PCs like the C64.
On the subject of flexing... how many times can we stack? Can we have a 256 megabyte+ xbox? You would definitely get some bragging rights there.
Somebody upgraded the Xbox with a 1.4ghz Tualatin Pentium III. That's pretty much double the processing power.
I tried this and failed years ago. You are a true mad man!
video title : *i did something impossible*
video intro : *some brave modder that isn't me did something impossible*
Tito my man your videos are gold right to the point
Thank you 🙏!
That intro was sick
Glad you liked it 😁
You are such a hidden gem. Top grade camera work and such interesting topics you deserve so much more subscribers. I believe you are going to blowup real soon 😉.
Really appreciate it Miha!! 🙏☺️
Greta video Tito!! Would love to see you do some the mods to the Colecovision, like the FPGA F18A video mod, Super Game Module, controller port fixes etc.
I’ve never tried a colecovison before! Could be fun to mess around with! 😁
@@MachoNachoProductions There is a whole crazy Colecovision scene out there. So many mods and amazing new homebrew games and conversions from the MSX and SG1000.
This is pretty cool I wonder if this could lead to a way to possibly get more than 128 MB of RAM on older consoles? It's definitely Overkill and probably wouldn't serve much purpose but it would definitely be cool and you would definitely have bragging rights being able to claim you have 256 MB of RAM (maybe even possibly more) in your original Xbox.
Probably would work for people that use Xboxes as media centers.
7:11 Good advice to watch for the correct alignment. But the text on a chip is not a reliable method! Better is it to align pin 1, which is marked by a dot on the package (as visible in the video).