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Wave 4 disc confirmed, new firmware will required

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Posted: Tue Nov 03, 2009 21:30

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Painless

Once again, Microsoft has started including the most recent major Dashboard Update on new game discs. This time it is the recent Summer/Fall 09 update which brings the NXE dash to 8498, closing the exploit used for the Free60 JTAG/SMC XeLL (Linux homebrew) hack. The first game confirmed to have this update on the disc is Cars Race-O-Rama. They added the new update into the video partition on the disc, which makes the partition larger than it always has been on older games. Previously there were 3 known good sizes for the video partition, they were known as wave1, wave2 and wave3. One of the security features in all iXtreme firmware (except Hitachi 1.51) is a check on the size of the video partition to make sure it matches one of the known waves. The firmware will not boot any game that does not match a known wave, this is done to prevent booting bad backups and getting banned on Live. Since this new game has a larger video partition that does not match any of the 3 known waves, it does not boot.

This new game with the larger video partition is the start of "wave4" and our hacked firmware will need to be updated to accept this new size as a good value. The ETA for this new firmware is unknown. All drives will need to be updated to the new firmware once it's released in order to play backups of new games! *

If the switch from wave2 to wave3 last year is any indication, there will be short cross-over period starting now where new games being released will be a mix of wave3 and wave4. After that it's safe to assume all new games will be wave4 going forward.

* If you have a Hitachi drive you could choose to downgrade to iXtreme 1.51 to boot wave4 games. iXtreme 1.51 for Hitachi did not check the size of the video partition or PFI so it will boot any wave. This will not work for any drive other than Hitachi (see update from abgx360 team below for more info). iXtreme 1.6 brought the video partition size checks back for better security, but a workaround was coded in that allows "one shot" booting of non-stealth or unknown sized discs (new waves). To do this you use the 0800 disc (activate.iso) that is available on this site and is also included with the iXtreme 1.6 firmware. Additional details on usage are in the iXtreme 1.6 README file. Obviously this method may not be safe for Xbox Live and should be used offline only and at your own risk.

abgx360 will also need to be updated to recognize the new wave4 size.

Once again, the ETA for this new firmware is unknown. Please don't bother asking for an ETA as this is all of the information we have at this time, we'll update the site as we know more.

UPDATE 10/17/09:

The abgx360 team posted an update yesterday clarifying iXtreme 1.51 compatibility with wave4. It turns out that only Hitachi drives on 1.51 will boot wave4 due to a change in PFI. For now, the only option for Samsung, BenQ and Lite-On owners to boot wave4 is to use the "one shot" 0800 disc mode with iXtreme 1.6.

Thanks for reading, i take no credit, plz, Thanks