Drive emulator?

[TeckniX]

Just thinking out loud more than anything, but we know that software like Daemon tools can mount just about any image and emulate the security and other gimmicks needed to run images like the originals.

I was wondering if there would be a way to create something similar, so that an xbox 360 drive could be emulated.

What's the point of having your x260 connected to a PC all the time just to load an image? Well simply to make sure the image backup you made is working, or if you are starting to mod/hack certain parameters of your game, test them all out prior to burning the final DL.

I'm not sure if there's a real need behind it, just though it'd be also nice for those that have lost their drive but still have the key - this way you could connect the 360 to your pc and load your backups that way.

I am no way knowledgeable enough to provide any information, or if any of it is actually doable, I'm really just thinking out loud in hope to get some feedback from the more experienced guys.

[Arakon]

the issue and major difference to daemon tools is simply that daemon tools tells the OS that there's a virtual (software) drive. you can't do that on the 360, since you can't run your own code on it. so the only option would be a hardware emulator, which will require to be quite fast to supply the data in time.

[vax11780]

This is certainly doable. MS provided a DVD emulator as part of the development kit for the original XBox to allow game developers to fine tune where the data was stored on the disc. What you are proposing is easier since you do not have to match the performance characteristics exactly.

As I suggested to another poster, start with a development board with a microcontroller and an FPGA. Implement a device ATA interface in the FPGA and connect it to a SATA<>PATA bridge card. Then all you need is firmware that emulates the drive functions. Easy, Peasy.

VAX

http://www.xboxhacker.net/index.php?topic=6931.0

[TeckniX]

the issue and major difference to daemon tools is simply that daemon tools tells the OS that there's a virtual (software) drive. you can't do that on the 360, since you can't run your own code on it. so the only option would be a hardware emulator, which will require to be quite fast to supply the data in time.

I probably didn't make myself too clear- I was thinking about an emulator that would run on your PC and provide by means of  a SATA card a drive to the xbox360.
Really your xbox would see it's normal dvd drive, when in fact the drive would be emulated by your OS.

I think Vax understood the request, if only now i understood all that it entailed.

Thanks for the prompt reply to all.

[Arakon]

that won't work, since the sata ports on your PC are SATA hosts, and so is the SATA connector on the 360. you have to emulate a sata client (i.e. a HD or DVDrom) in hardware, like vax said.

[vax11780]

As Akron pointed out, the host and drive SATA ports have different functionality. For example, the host generates COMRESET (a pattern of illegal transitions on the wires) which the drive responds to in a specified way. The 360 is going to generate COMRESET, but a PC will not respond to it. Thus, the 360 will never detect anything connected to the other end of the cable.

You need to build a piece of hardware that provides device functionality. I am not aware of any company that sells an ASIC which provides only the ATA device functionality, though you can get SCSI chips that do.

Another possibility would be to use a bridge chip that will map SATA to a non-rooted bus, something like SCSI or Ethernet. Don't know anyone that makes that either, but google can be your friend.

VAX

[XLysogenX]

I actually started work on this, as i'm currently programming a usb development kit. 

Here's how it *should* work.   Connect your xbox usb to you're computer.  Now make your computer send the same venderID/productID as the real HD-DVD drive does.  When you connect a usb device to a host (computer), the usb device sends some information to the host to tell the host what type of device it actually is.  This is called the usb device type.  Since you can connect digital cameras, printers, scanners, mice, keyboards, mp3 players, etc to a computer, the device must tell the computer what category of device it is.   Each device type also has with it a venderID and product ID, which is unique to the particular manufacturer/brand it is.  The host then can lookup that device's particular driver and load it so that i can begin communicating with it.   So an apple ipod 2gig nano, when plugged into a computer, tells the computer it is an mp3 player, made by Apple, and is more specifically, a 2gig nano.  THis is how a computer knows whats plugged into it via usb.  (note side note:  each device types, such as flashdrives, external hard drives, external cd-roms, external dvd drives, etc. don't need a specific device vender's individual driver, as all flashdrives are designed to implement the same i/o functionality and therefore windows can use a generic driver for all flashdrives).  On the 360, the same is true: when a usb device is plugged into it, the device tells the 360 what type of device it is, followed by what its venderid and productID are.   The 360 then loads the appropriate driver to handle this device.  It is known and proven the 360 can handle most, but not all, usb devices such as flashdrives, mp3 players, digital cameras, the HD-DVD drive, EVEN USB HUBS!  (another side note: perhaps an exploit can be found through a flaw in the 360's built in drivers for different devices, perhaps malformed usb communication could crash the 360??)

So far so easy..  just plug your 360 into your computer, make your computer tell the 360 its the HD-DVD drive, and load our own custom driver that mounts a HD-DVD iso/evo/diskfile and the video play as it normally would if you connected a real 360 HD-DVD drive into it. 

Wait a minute, whats the custom driver you're talking about??  Thats crazy talk, we'd have to know the communications protocal of the HD-DVD drive to even begin.  Well we do know that the 360 HD-DVD drive can be used on a windows box, provided you download and install the driver, which is freely available to most.  So we have a driver for it, we'd just have modify it to deal with mounting files, like poweriso and deamon tools does. 

Ok, one really really big problem with this is that you cannot connect two usb hosts to each other.  ie, you cannot just directly connect two computers together via usb and have them "talk".  Since usb hosts  pass up to 1 amp to a device (think usb cell phone chargers), connecting to usb hosts together will cause a short.  If you've seen usb cables that do create a network via usb connecting 2 computers together, this is possible because these cables are special cables where, in the middle of the cable, there's a piece of hardware there that acts like a device, rather than a host. This way the cable looks like a device to each computer, it can pass info between the two.

We make our own piece of hardware that sits between our 360 and our computer.  It will talk to the 360 telling the 360 it is a hd-DVD drive.  It will have to tell the computer it is a device of some type, and that the deice is on with a venderID/productID of our liking.  WE just tell windows it needs to load a driver for this particular vendorID/productID, which is, of course- some software driver that we wrote that mounts a disk from file and transmits.  The device in the middle of our cable to the 360 just passes this info along to the 360.

I bought a usb development kit for about 90 bucks.  IT allows you to program it as any type of device and control communications to the host.  So far, i've been able to load open source flaskdrive firmware onto it, and the 360 see it as such.  I can then even make the 360 look at my computer's c:\ drive as if it were a 512 meg flashdrive.   But no luck with the hd-DVD drive.

Here's some external links to more info:

http://www.jungo.com/application_story_microsoft_xbox.html   <---  Here is the actual 3rd party usb software company who developed the xbox 360 usb development environmant.  They wrote the framework for how the xbox360 usb handlers work.  You can even download they're free trial of the same software microsoft bought to use with the 360.. 

http://www.getcatalyst.com/product-conquest.html?gclid=CK_U3p_T4YoCFRE0UAod9mOzcA  <--- quality usb devlopment kits and usb protocol analyzers. 

http://www.usb.org/developers  <-- usb development reference and faq's

Let me know if you are an elite usb driver developer, maybe you can help me, as i'm just a just a business programmer, not a low level type of guy.

[No_Name]

offering cracks is not what this site is about.

I am sure you will be hearing about mods in the near future

[streethawk]

offering cracks is not what this site is about.

I am sure you will be hearing about mods in the near future

and offering a way to pirate games is??? i know most use the fw hack for back-up purposes but c'mon.

Dont be so hasty to piss on his campfire, he has offered more than the noob population has.

[XLysogenX]

The point of the post wasn't about cracking usb development software, its about getting a 360 to play backed-up HD_DVD disks from a pc.

[No_Name]

I never slated the whole post and never made a comment about anything other than you offering a crack to a piece of trial software that you should pay for it you plan to keep using it.

This site is completly anti-piricy and more about cracking the system and thats the way it should stay.
The piriting kiddies have 101 other sites to use where rather than this one.

Offeing a crack is just as bad as piriting games, its theft no matter how you look at it and I can not or will not condone it.

[Zenofex]

I do not condone piracy either but since the user has a legitimate post other than that i feel the user or a mod should just take out that part of the post. So if a mod or the original poster is reading this please just take out the part about the crack and lets focus on the actually topic of the question and not if we condone piracy or not. Since this has been posted the only responses have been about 1 single sentence not really even pertaining to the whole post. So just do us all a favor and take out the part about piracy