Often Cloudy

The reign of the original Xbox has been over for a while now. I haven’t played an actual game on this old console for months, I use it only as a DVD player. I plan on getting an Xbox 360 Elite relatively soon; so the question is, what to do with this older hardware? The solution came to me from the Xbox Media Center Project. Since I will no longer need it as primary hardware, I might as well see whats inside and try to “hack” the box without killing it.

Initial preparation
First you will need to read up on exactly what you are getting yourself into. From the Xbox Media Center page:

XboxMediaCenter is a free open source (GPL) multimedia player for the Xbox™ from Microsoft. Currently XboxMediaCenter can be used to play/view most common video/audio/picture formats such as MPEG-1/2/4, DivX, XviD, MP3, AAC, JPG, GIF plus many more less known formats directly from a CD/DVD in Xbox DVD-ROM drive or of Xbox hard-drive, XBMC can also stream files from a PC over a local network and even stream media streams directly from the internet.

After deciding its worth the risk, you will need to buy a modchip. My best resource for modchip comparisons was here. This site also has links to a few online retailers of the chips.

Determining Version
You will need to know which version of Xbox hardware you have for the correct modchip. Usually you can do this by reading the serial numbers on the back and following this guide. For later versions where it is more difficult, you should follow this guide to open the case. I needed to open my box, and it was actually kind of exciting. Once I had everything open, I used this guide to determine which version I had: Version 1.6. After determining the version, I suggest immediately and carefully putting the box back together and giving it a test run. As long as you aren’t completely new to computer hardware and you didn’t spill or shock anything inside, you should still be okay.

It was a good thing I went the distance, because I needed to purchase a special version of the solderless adapter for this latest hardware version. I want to avoid soldering to make the install as easy on myself as possible.

Decisions
Now that you have the hardware version number, you can go back to this page and finalize your chip decision. For my needs I chose the SmartXX V3 chip with the Spider 1.6 no-solder addition. I went through one of the online retailer links given on the site (even as seedy as they may seem) and have ordered my chip.

In the meantime…
While I am waiting for my chip, I plan on heading back over to xboxmediacenter.com and reading up on the OS install and the possible features I will want. This is looking to be a very good project, as long as I don’t botch something. With luck and skill, I will have an open media pc in my living room streaming music, video, or picture slide shows on my *future* LCDTV. Well… the xbox is a start.

Part two will include chip install and initial boot tests.

Digg this |