“This left me with the distasteful choice of either setting foot in an Apple store or spending the next couple of months laboring in my garage, with the potential for serious injury. I of course took the easy way out…”

This man is my hero.

Posted at 9:24 am on Nov 29th, 2009 by DeadNixons

@DeadNixons – save yourself some time, cash and an Xbox. Use VMWare to run a virtual Mac partition on your PC.

Posted at 9:46 am on Nov 29th, 2009 by supershwa

@supershwa

VMWare is NOT A HACK!

The “Hackintosh,” however, is.

Posted at 10:17 am on Nov 29th, 2009 by RoboGuy

Wow, inside the case of Microsoft’s original gaming console – the MSX? Looks like an xbox, their third console.

Posted at 10:19 am on Nov 29th, 2009 by rex dart

Paul’s build was very impressive. A lot of hardware packed into such a small space. Though personally I would have put a small SSD in the Cube and streamed content from a larger server (with redundancy) elsewhere in the network. I don’t get the logic in putting all of your content on a single drive crammed into a hot and difficult to maintain device like a HTPC, but it seems like that’s what everyone is doing now.

I’m also going to assume he went with OSX just for the fact the machine was built into a G4 case. In terms of HTPC usability, it seems like it would have been much easier to put the x86 build of XBMC on it instead of going the Hackintosh route.

Not sure I get the idea behind Will’s build though. Seems like he could have just as easily built the thing into a regular PC case, as it doesn’t seem like there was any reason for it to be so small if it wasn’t going to be a HTPC. Also seems like a waste of an Xbox development kit, though I don’t personally know what sort of value they have on the open market.

Posted at 10:23 am on Nov 29th, 2009 by MS3FGX

Wow he used an original deve kit for the xbox.

Posted at 10:39 am on Nov 29th, 2009 by Anonymous

mad fab skills 10 out of 10
disguising a computer as a gaming system 8 out of 10
the need to do it, i can’t answer that one, i don’t know him. I doubt i would ever know the need to do that, i have plenty of spare cases i can sacrifice to the modding gods. still a good hack

Posted at 10:56 am on Nov 29th, 2009 by aztraph

That’s one wicked mod. The final product is excellent.

Posted at 11:16 am on Nov 29th, 2009 by mordak

It looks like he did a great job, but it made me sick to see him destroy a development console to do it while there are thousands of normal consoles or shells out there.

Posted at 11:57 am on Nov 29th, 2009 by scoobyroo

Not liking it. Would’ve been cool to stuff this into a 360 (WITH GOOD COOLING FOR ONCE), which is what I thought it would be based upon the title.

Posted at 12:08 pm on Nov 29th, 2009 by Tatsh

@Tatsh

Seriously, stop with the Xbox original hating. Every time there’s an amazing Xbox mod like this there’s people who say it sucks “because it’s not a 360 and I thought it would be”. Give the guy some credit, he turned an Xbox into a Hackintoshed PC. Thats pretty amazing.

Posted at 12:29 pm on Nov 29th, 2009 by greeny

@supershwa – Saving time, money, and a dev kit xbox is not the point here. The point is the process. This guy obviously has talent, with skillz in the shop and video production. Any monkey can install VMWare on their machine, but this guy took it to another level.

If the man’s still looking for a job, this production just might be the edge over other lackluster candidates that gets him hired.

Posted at 12:42 pm on Nov 29th, 2009 by DeadNixons

The Xbox was pretty cool but the cube I certainly can do better.
Even some of the G4 upgrades are faster then the Atom 330.
But if I had a dead G4 cube and wanted to go with an atom based board for a hackintosh I certainly would not use the 945GCLF2 and instead would use the much superior ASUS AT3N7A-I.

Posted at 2:11 pm on Nov 29th, 2009 by Nitori

he had to use the dev kit versus the traditional original Xbox. The dev kit is taller, and he used all the available volume…

Posted at 2:12 pm on Nov 29th, 2009 by robogearhead

I’d kill for a garage like the one in Will’s video.

Posted at 2:18 pm on Nov 29th, 2009 by 2econd_draft

Slick work on the Xbox. My only worry is the heat management — even with the open grid on the sides, there’s not a lot of room for air circulation.

The video was really well done, too. His taste in music sucks, but the video speaks volumes about his production skills.

Posted at 2:41 pm on Nov 29th, 2009 by Will (the other one)

the guy has wicked mod skills on that xbox. that’s some awesome finished product there.

as for the ITX mobo suggestions for the HTPC (well done as well… few bugs to work out of the touch switch though), the intel little falls 2 is almost half the price of everything else out there. I would suggest to anyone using it, to replace the stock heatsink with a custom HSF. My NES-PC (http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendId=126778581&blogId=512160511) uses that intel board and it works fine (after putting on the custom HSF). I would have liked to use one of the other ITX boards out there to take advantage of dual channel ram, among other things, but those boards would have added another $100-200 to the price of the build. And when you’re going for a cheap build, that’s not helpful.

Posted at 2:42 pm on Nov 29th, 2009 by sly

Nice hack… Not sure why everyone thinks it should be in a xbox 360, but whatever. Kind of a slap to Apple to make it in a Microsoft product. Which I think is awesome.

Posted at 3:24 pm on Nov 29th, 2009 by Jim Foster

View from the sidelines: Credit the effort & thoughtfulness to document and share with the community woe to those who merely post negative commentary. Constructive critiques add value, rationale or coulda/shoulda/woulda of mods seems off the mark. dos centavos

Posted at 4:00 pm on Nov 29th, 2009 by JP Armstrong

@MS3FGX:
Since it is an original xbox, there is not much value in a dev kit. the 360 dev kits can be found on eBay and go for upwards of double, maybe more of a typical console.

Posted at 4:38 pm on Nov 29th, 2009 by darksim905

I like it, though I think the photo that was posted here should be replaced with one of the finished xbox, it’s much more impressive-looking.

Posted at 6:43 pm on Nov 29th, 2009 by Andrew

my jaw hit the floor when i saw this

Posted at 8:06 pm on Nov 29th, 2009 by Wes

So, is it just me, or is this basically just a computer in an xbox case that’s been hacked up with Hackint0sh?

Posted at 10:25 pm on Nov 29th, 2009 by Laser Pup

best. mod. video. ever.

Posted at 3:54 am on Nov 30th, 2009 by onlywhenprovoked

but the desk he made is horrendous. lol

Posted at 3:55 am on Nov 30th, 2009 by onlywhenprovoked

This is horrendous.

1.) It’s not an xbox-intosh. It’s just a hackintosh in an xbox case. WTF.

2.) He destroyed a dev console. Albeit an older one; Still those are hard to get a hold of.

3.) He’s going to digi-hell.

Posted at 12:38 pm on Nov 30th, 2009 by Mikey

“Kind of a slap to Apple to make it in a Microsoft product. Which I think is awesome.”

Yes, because Apple is the evil one. Not Microsoft.

Posted at 6:57 am on Dec 1st, 2009 by Kevin

Hah! Next banned 360 I buy is going to become a 360-intosh (and the 360 parts in a cool case of its own). You wait.

Posted at 12:48 pm on Dec 7th, 2009 by Tatsh

beautiful

Posted at 11:41 am on Dec 12th, 2009 by k

EFI-X is pretty useless ,never buy it ,i said never never buy it. Its just a usbpendrive with the chameleon bootloader installed which is free.

Posted at 2:01 pm on Dec 25th, 2009 by Alex

checkout http://www.tomshardware.com/news/asem-efix-mac-chameleon,8617.html

Posted at 2:03 pm on Dec 25th, 2009 by Alex