My Debug Xbox is Dying...

Although I'm doing quite well these days, my debug Xbox is not.  Right now, it's currently suffering from an internal hardware issue that has been known to happen every so often to original Xboxes (mostly to the v1.0 and v1.1 models).  This is quite tragic, and highly disappointing.

What's wrong with it?  I came home from work one day, and upon walking into my apartment, I discovered that my debug Xbox was ON and Panzer Dragoon ORTA was playing because I had lazily left the disc in there.  Apparently, I had also forgot to turn off the TV, so I heard it as I was walking inside.  At first I was thinking someone else was in there, which shouldn't be because I live by myself, but nothing in my room was altered, so that wasn't the case.  Instinctively, I walk over to turn it off, and the power button wasn't working, nor was the eject button, IIRC.  So I ended up unplugging it, and off it went.  As a test, I plugged it back in, and not only did it turn back on, I heard a little spark as I put it in.  Strange, huh?

Baffled as to why this was happening, I made a post on assemblergames.com, and discovered that this was a problem that occasionally happens to original Xboxes.  My thread was especially sad, because they had never seen this happen to a debug Xbox before.  What typically causes this?  A number of issues can be the cause of this problem:

• A corroded bus line connecting the power button.
• A blown or leaked capacitor.
• And another issue I forgot involving the board that the power button is on, IIRC.

I haven't determined which one it is yet, because I don't have my torx screw driver set handy.  Since I have no soldering experience whatsoever, I'll probably look into finding someone else who can fix the problem, assuming it comes to this.  But looking on the bright side, my debug Xbox has lived a full and blessed life and it helped me learn more about Xbox's inner workings, much of which for the good of emulation.  Of course, I'm not letting it die without a fight, because it's a privilege to own one of these, and chances are I will never find another one.

And lastly, I just wanted to apologize for disappearing.  I didn't realize that it's been over a year since I've said anything.  Right now, I no longer have a healthy PC running 32-bit Windows to test on.  As of late, I've been primarily using a Mac to get my work done (don't worry, I'm not an Apple fanboy; although I like this OS, I only have a Macbook because I needed it).  I do have a working PC, but it's running x64, and x64 support still isn't too stable yet.  Frankly, I'd like to look into the issues with Virtua Cop 3 some more, and see if I can figure out why the JVS error is occurring.

Thanks for reading.

Shogun.