As some of you know by now, Microsoft has started including the NXE (Fall '08 Dashboard Update) on new game discs. They added this update into the video partition on the disc, which of course makes the partition larger than it always has been on older games. Previously there were 2 known good sizes for the video partition, they were known as "wave1" and "wave2". One of the security features in all iXtreme firmware from 1.0 to the current version 1.5 is a check on the size of the video partition to make sure it matches either wave1 or wave2. The firmware will not boot any game that does not match wave1 or wave2, this is done to prevent booting bad backups and getting banned on Live. Since these new games have a larger video partition that does not match either wave, they do not boot.

They are calling these new games with the larger video partition "wave3" and our hacked firmware will need to be updated to accept this new size as a good value. c4eva has already started working on this and the new firmware will be released for all drives shortly. This new firmware will be version 1.51 and will simply add support for the new video partition size so that backups of new games will boot. All drives will need to be updated to 1.51 in order to play backups of new games!

c4eva has also stated that he plans on releasing firmware with 0800 mode (for ripping original games) for every drive in the near future. This means that all 360 drives, including Hitachi, will then be able to be used to rip original 360 game discs. This will be a feature of iXtreme version 1.6 which will come after 1.51.

There is no ETA on either version but we're told it will not be long on 1.51 and work on 1.6 will resume after that!