Team Jungle and c4eva have released version 1.51 of the iXtreme Firmware – this time for all Xbox 360 DVD drives! This firmware update is required for newer games that are using a larger video partition. Two games that use this new partition are MLB 2K9 and Hawx. These games would not play on any of the iXtreme firmware versions prior to 1.51. Future games are almost guaranteed to use this larger video partition so you should update your firmware to be able to continue playing newer releases.

iXtreme 1.51 can be downloaded using Xbins.

A new version of JungleFlasher by Team Jungle coincided with the iXtreme update and has since been updated to version 0.1.55. JungleFlasher is a Windows application that can read and flash all Xbox 360 DVD drives on most SATA chipsets.

JungleFlasher can be downloaded here or here.

The tutorial for JungleFlasher has also been updated and can be downloaded here.

If you prefer using iPrep, there are updated definitions files to allow loading the iXtreme 1.51 firmware. There are updated definitions for iPrep versions 006.x and for iPrep version 008. You only need to download the definition file corresponding to your preferred version of iPrep.

iPrep 006.x Definitions Update

iPrep 008 Definitions Update

Thanks goes out to Team Jungle and everybody who made this possible for the quick response.

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!