HOWTO make a BeagleBone Black be a flash drive for Xbox modding

[slab]

If you're wanting to softmod an original xbox, the procedure involves using a small USB flash drive to function as a memory unit in order to get a carefully-crafted save file into the system.

I didn't have a USB flash drive small enough to work, but I do have some BeagleBone Blacks around.

I was able to make a BeagleBone Black act convincingly like a 512MB flash drive with the following process:

• Grab a firmware image and put it on an SD card. I used "AM3358 Debian 10.3 2020-04-06 4GB SD IoT", which was the current version at the time of this writing.


• In /etc/defaut/bb-boot:
  • set USB_NETWORK_DISABLED=yes


• In /opt/scripts/boot/am335x_evm.sh:
  • change usb_ms_ro=1 to 0
  • comment out or remove the following lines for the serial gadget function in run_libcomposite:
    • #mkdir -p functions/acm.usb0
    • #ln -s functions/acm.usb0 configs/c.1


• By default we load cape overlays, but we don't have any capes, so to improve boot time, in /boot/uEnv.txt:
  • change enable_uboot_overlays=1 to 0
  • change enable_uboot_cape_universal=1 to enable_uboot_cape_universal=0


• Set up the image file with:
  • rm /var/local/bb_usb_mass_storage.img
  • dd if=/dev/zero of=/var/local/bb_usb_mass_storage.img bs=1024 count=524288
  • mkfs.vfat /var/local/bb_usb_mass_storage.img

You'll probably want to have a external FTDI cable, as this process disables the serial and network interfaces over USB. However, with this setup, I was able to have the Xbox recognize the flash drive as a memory unit and reformat it. ("The memory unit you inserted isn't working correctly. It has been erased.")