soft-modded x-box on live?

[gamelife]

i currently have a modded xbox which i want to take on xbox live. it has been modified the cheap way, so it has no chip. i think the guy who did it flashed the bios or something?

anyway, do you think it will run on xbox live without getting banned? if not is there somehting i can do so it will work or am i phucked?

also - do you need to have original copies of the games for them to work on xbox live? will they work from the hard disk etc?

cheers for any help : )

[sharky_ob]

I've heard that the way xbox live checks if you've modded the machine is via the hard drive serial number, so only boxes which have been hard modded after live account creation get banned. Thus, you should be okay, as long as you only use original games, obviously. Don't know if anyone else can comment on this?

[EvilBoris]

That is the main way they check, but obvisouly if you have a softmodded box then the files have been tampered with so it is going to be banned regardless.

[Yoshimax]

Yeah sounds like you're in for a ban. It's modded now anyway so you might as well try and then you can enlighten the rest of us

[mid]

Definitely a ban, yes. Even before they start doing fancy things with HDD ID numbers, they have a look for any custom BIOS stuff.

Since you can apparently switch your box from PAL to NTSC (as in video, not game region) then turn your chip back off safely, presumably it wouldn't be impossible to have a way to do a soft-mod that switched this (so you can run progressive) then buggered off, never to be seen again. Never found one, though.

[EvilBoris]

I switched my xbox from pal to NTSC , but that was all running from the 007 exploit and a memory card. So nothing but the eeprom got changed

[mid]

So that didn't break Live for you? Cool. I'll have to dig further if/when I get an prog-supporting display.

[Pistol]

Depends how your box was softmodded, there are plenty of Live-safe solutions out there. Sounds like you're going to need to do some research into it yourself though - "my mate did it for me" is usually a recipe for disaster when something goes wrong down the line.

Basically, you need to be able to completely uninstall the softmod and reinstall it yourself before trying to use Live with a softmodded box. There are hacked gamesaves out there that make this fairly easy, it's just a case of loading the game up, selecting the hacked save then following the prompts to install/uninstall the mod.

You'll also be wanting to ensure that the bios you use has Live-blocking, so the Xbox will not be able to connect to Live when the mod is active.

Basically, you can use Live with a soft-modded box because of the Xbox's boot sequence. If you boot without a disc in the drive, the Xbox starts its normal boot process off the HD. The hacked files kick in, and you lanunch into a modded state.

If you boot with a disc in, the Xbox boots straight off the disc, so you never go into a modded state - the game can then access Live safely.

The problem is creation/maintenance of your Live account. Your Xbox needs to be completely 'virgin' whenever you access the MS dashboard, or you'll get banned. So long as you uninstall the softmod before messing around with the dash, you'll be fine.

For example, I had to uninstall my softmod before I could download the Halo 2 updates, since downloading content uses the dash. For just playing on Live, you don't have to uninstall it though. Oh, and set a passcode for your account too!

(On mine, the bios I have blocks Live, and turns the LED red when it's on. So it's pretty obvious when not to go on Live.)

[Hitcher]

If your Xbox boots up any dash apart from the official one it'll be banned.

[EvilBoris]

So that didn't break Live for you? Cool. I'll have to dig further if/when I get an prog-supporting display.

I've been using Live since november trouble free, I think quite a few people have done this