- Xboxes with a manufacture date of 2004-03-22 are v1.6. 2004-03-11 are still v1.4. So far these very recently produced xboxes are only found in US stores ... but it's only a matter of time before they come everywhere (when old stock clears).
- We now saw pictures (by pROvIs - see below) of the backside of the board. There's no TSOP there either - so bios/kernel (firmware) must be on another chip. First guess is still that new "Xyclops" labeled chip above the LPC. It's unknown yet if the onboard bios/kernel will be flashable or not. Will have to be researched by HW teams.
MS might have permanently strap "d0" on the "TSOP bus" (on MCPX) to "0", and build-in an LPC boot ROM instead (oz_paulb).
- We do NOT know yet if it's still possible to force boot from (external) LPC. Neither do we know yet if the LPC bus changed (apart from the visual difference that there is a LPC point #4 now - this point was not on older xbox versions). So it's also unknown yet if the current modchip hardware will be compatible with the v1.6
- The 5530 and 5713 retail kernel (seen in xbox v1.4/v1.5) has already support for the new xcalibur chip. There's is no hacked bios/kernel yet based on these builds. Yoshihiro (GueuX'NeT Team) said these builds would require a new init table.
- The audiochip is also gone. The new videochip (labeled xcalibur) is bigger then the one used before (conexant/focus) so it's possible audio and videochip are now combined in this new xcalibur chip (the joker).
- The new 'xyclops' and 'xcalibur' have not been identified yet as any known chips. These might be custom chips made by/for MS or maybe these are just relabeled/renamed chips.
- Modchip teams are showing interest for this new v1.6 xbox and will probably start research as soon as they manage to get one of these v1.6 xboxes. I saw in the forum thread SmartXX will get 2 v1.6 xboxes soon and Team Xecuter is doing a public request for v1.6 xboxes:
Quote:
If anyone has one of these boxes we will pay $300 for it (so you can buy a moddable version and get your money back in the process). There is no Xbox that we have been unable to crack before and we see no reason that we cannot do it again.
We have several hardware engineers who work for Xecuter so we will buy at least 4 of these boxes.
To help us in purchasing one of these boxes please use this thread on our forums.
We can bust this, we just need the console on our workbench 
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I'm sure OzXodus, Xbox-Linux and other teams interested in hardware will also do research on this new board.
DMS has the same offer for also 300 bucks plus shippin