Exclusive interview with the xKey developer [font="Verdana]Modrobert from eurasia.nu ot the opportunity to interview the xKey (aka x360Key) main developer. What products have the xKey Team developed in the past? XKey, Wode, Wiikey, Drivekey, d2pro, xenoGC, Qoob, Crystal Chip, Aladdin XT/XenoFX series mod chips for Xbox 1. How long has xKey been in development now? Approximately 6 months. Will xKey work with all Xbox 360 consoles, including Slim? Yes and as new drive versions appear we will add support for them too. How do you install xKey, is it easy? Very easy, it's Plug 'n' Play, if you can dump the firmware from your drive then you can install the Xkey. Both PS3 and Wii software backup loaders have compatibility problems with some game titles when loading from hard drive, due to firmware version requirements or protection in general, how is xKey in that regard? This is where drive emulations really come into their own, because the console sees a real drive with a real disk inserted there is no need for any patching or hacking. Everything 'just works' as normal. In relation to xKey; what exactly is the Xbox 360 DVD drive needed for? The Xkey offers two modes, emulation & passthru. In emulation mode the drive is not required at all, in passthru mode the drive works as normal. Does the Xbox 360 DVD drive need any custom firmware flashed to work with Xkey? No, quite the opposite in fact. You need a dump of the original drive firmware to configure Xkey. The good news is that's all you need to configure Xkey. How safe is xKey on Xbox Live compared to iXtreme? While we take every care to accurately emulate the XBox's drive we do not recommend using Xkey with XBL at launch. Shortly after launch we will release updates that address this. Also, plenty of people have been banned while using CFW and there are still issues even with the latest iXtreme. For example, in order to pass the new Slim FW checks a lot of data has to be swapped around (C4E's so called 'rootkit'). This takes time and the checks take a lot longer to perform than they would on a stock drive. In the worst case it takes CFW takes 5 times longer to perform the check (15 seconds instead of 2-3). If MS have noticed this then it is quite possible that every Slim owner using CFW has already been marked for a ban. [See timing graph [url="http://www.eurasia.nu/images/submitted/xkey_vs_ixtreme_timing_explained.png"]http://www.eurasia.n...g_explained.png[/url] for details.] By comparison Xkey features a powerful ARM9 CPU that can perform the FW checks *faster* than the real drive running stock FW. We have the horsepower & the storage capacity to handle anything the future brings. How will the new XGD3 disc format (eg. Halo Reach) be handled by xKey, any special backup considerations? We do not anticipate any problems with XGD3, game ISOs are stored on HDD andare not limited by the capacity of a DL DVDR. Xkey supports any number of HDDs upto 2 TB in size." [/font]
