>> About 2 weeks ago we reported that Kreon was working on an DVD firmware for the Samsung SH-D162C PC DVD-ROM drive to allow dumping original Xbox 360 discs and extracting the Secuirty Sectors (SS).
Kreon now released a first version of his firmware for this PC DVD drive. It doesn't have all the features implemented yet (no SS extracting for now), but he's working hard on including this in a future version:

XBOX 360 enabled alternative FW for the Samsung SH-D162C drive - V0.5

Well ok...it's not fully completed yet, but I thought it was time to release some of the goodies I've made for the SH-D162C during the last month. The challenge/response functionality ISN'T included in this release, so you will NOT be able to make complete backups of 360 games unless you can obtain the SS from some other source. This said I'm quite certain, that you'll appreciate the other features that have been completed and included in this release.

This is what you get..
* Two types of unlock for XBOX 360 game discs. One for making xtreme style images and one for making wxripper style images. Both types of iso can be made using isobuster. Ripping using wxripper isn't supported for the time being
* A 'lock' function that will cancel any enabled unlock state. This can be very useful for custom applications.
* 'Error skipping' which basically speeds up the error handling of the drive. A complete wxripper style image (including video) can be obtained in 15-16 minutes, when error skipping is enabled. Getting through the critical area of LBA 19408-20479 will take you more than 20 minutes alone, if error skipping is disabled Sad
* Read and decrypt of SS. The SS returned from the drive is complete except for the missing C/R data at offset 0x200. This is very handy since you can compare the SS from the game in the drive to a SS found on the internet. No more coasters due to an incorrect SS.
* A much more streamlined command interface which is good news if you intend to write an application that makes use of the drives extra features.
* The drive will default to unlock state 2 and error skip enabled when a 360 media is inserted. You can in other words use isobuster to obtain a wxripper style image without issuing any commands to the drive Smiley

This is what you'll have to wait for..
* Full challenge/response functionality.
* RPC1 support

I've been working hard on the challenge response part for a couple of weeks now, and I have to admit that there's still a lot of work left to do.
More than 6000 C/R related lines of code have been extracted, and well... I do expect the implementation and debugging to take some time ;)
I don't know when this part will completed, but I can assure you, that I'll be working to complete this as my main priority.

Ripping using Isobuster..
Not much to add here except for the number of LBA to read when using unlock 2 is 3697696 as opposed to 3567872 for unlock 1.
A successful wxripper style image will have a size of 7.572.881.408 bytes, while a successful xtreme style image will have a size of 7.307.001.856 bytes.

To those of you that might be wondering if this release will work with XBOX games... well it probably will... in theory at least. No extensive testing has been made at this point, so I guess you will have to test that part by yourself :)

That's just about it for now. I hope to be back with more goodies soon and that this release will be helpful to you all.

Official Site: www.xboxhacker.net