More on the causes of Red Ring of Death

After my Xbox 360 died earlier this week, I finally called Tech support. As suspected, there is nothing I can do about the issue, and Microsoft will be shipping me a box in which to ship them the console for repair (and for free, as my console is under warranty). The tech support line was a bit hard to hear, and one has to navigate through an automatic tech support drone (although not a bad one) to get to a real person, but I suppose that’s good as it filters out the people who forgot to plug their system in.

I’ve been trying to discern what might have happened to cause this error. I’ve found a nifty little guide which allows you to get some more in-depth information about the dreaded three blinking red lights. I won’t go through the entire procedure here, but if you have this issue, I encourage you to do so.

The particular error code I get is 0102. This code is an unknown error, an error not handled by any other of the escape conditions. Essentially my Xbox 360 has no idea what’s wrong with itself. The guide suggests that it can occur if components have lost contact with the main-board, due to a cold solder or a short, or possibly a broken contact.

As I have not physically relocated my Xbox 360 since this occurred, the only conceivable explanation is that my console has been overheating, and the heat has caused warping significant enough to damage the component connections on the system board. As my system IS under warranty, I’m not willing to open it up and poke around, nor try to repair it using heat reflow or other techniques.

My system was purchased in the summer of 2006, not exactly among the ‘first batch of 360s’. Additionally, the system is sitting on my wooden desk, upright, and has plenty of space surrounding it. In fact, there is not a single device within three feet of the console which emits heat (and even at that, an LCD monitor doesn’t emit much). If heat was the culprit, this points to a systemic problem with the 360, although Microsoft has denied this. Either the solder work in the pick-and-place machines used in fabrication are flawed somewhere (a problem which would be relatively trivial to diagnose and fix given large quantities of 360s suffering the same problems), or there is simply too much heat and not enough airflow within the 360 chassis. If this is the case, it will continue to be a major problem unless the physical case is redesigned (fat chance) or the system uses a lower-voltage chipset which will reduce the amount of heat being generated (would require another model of 360 to emerge). As both of these solutions seem to be unlikely to be implemented, my hopes of having my (repaired) 360 last as long as my SNES has are foundering rapidly.

How I Spooked the Puppetmaster

Warning: This post breaks TINAG.

I’ve always been fascinated by Alternate-Reality Games, although my participation in them thus far in my life has been cursory at best. There’s something about the concept of immersing your life in a game which is highly seductive, even though there are practical limits to such immersion (Not everyone can play The Game). I wrote earlier about an idea I had for using light-weight ARGs as a vehicle for inexpensive marketing. In that post I used, as an example, an H. P. Lovecraft-oriented ARG.

I subsequently received an email from Brian Clark, CEO of a certain GMD Studios. It turns out that some of my hypothesises turned out to be not far from the mark. GMD is running an interesting horror ARG dubbed Eldritch Errors.  The trailhead of which can be found at the website of B.A. Saint Feline, at BSeeingU.com.  The game was set to launch the week after I had made that post, and Brian was concerned I had somehow stumbled behind the curtain before it even launched!  It’s still in the early stages, so if you’re interested in Lovecraft or horror in general, and want someplace to step into the world of ARGs, this might be for you.  The cat is out of the bag now, so to speak, so I wish you all well in the hunt.  (If you’re interested in getting up to date, the best place to step into the community would be the Unforums).

I particularly enjoy the use of Craig’s list, by the way, although in retrospect I suppose it’s the perfect forum for such things.