@Excyber: Ok, I´ll look it up. Could be interesting ;-) btw, wasn´t Enigmah known under a different name, too?
edit: found it. OH god, not that thing!
He could even sell some of those? But the soldering diagrams seem interesting... don´t they look the same for the early homebrewn chips?
It suddenly struck my mind that if it patched the bios it was a device solely made for copy protection circumvention and therefore could be illegal according to the DCMA, right? But what if a chip is sold empty or with cromwell? Running Linux on a Xbox doesn´t circumvent anything, you can´r run pirated games with cromwell. If you flash another bios then you are responsible for anything that arises out of it yourself.
I mean you can copy a book printed blue on red with a standard scanner while filtering the colors out, that doesn´t make the scanner illegal because it´s not a device whose single intent is to circumvent a copy protection, or does it?
@Jurai: Depends on the country you live in. In Germany p.ex. you actually have the right to copy audio cds "for personal use", i.e. at most give one copy to a relative or close friend, this copy has to be made of an original cd etc... But circumventing a copy protection will probably soon be illegal here too (thanks RIAA!) and 7 out of 10 cds in the top10 have such a protection already. That also means I cannot play legally purchased cds in my car radio since it is also capable of playing MP3s and the radio detecs the data track on the cd with the low-quality WMA files on it.
You also have a right to make a backup copy of expensive or system critical software (i.e. operating systems, office suites etc...) because a loss of the original media could affect your work capabilities. You do NOT have a right to backup "entertainment software", this had been taken to court before and although iirc no penalty was issued to the person which was accused all copies were destroyed. This is because the loss of a game does not hurt you financially that much and it doesn´t affect your work capabilities. The companies should replace defective media for an acceptable amount of money though. Besides, most games can nowadays be had for very little money a few months after they´re out. N64 excluded, some games like Conker and Mario Tennis still sell for ridiculous prices long after the death of the system.