Xbox 360 Hard Drive Adapter (redux)

July 19, 2010 by Jakob Griffith 24 Comments

[Chlazza] let us know about their Xbox hard drive to SATA adapter, allowing the use of an Xbox 360 (original) hard drive on a PC without voiding the drive’s warranty. Looking for a fun and enriching experience read: really bored and inspired by a previous adapter we featured, [Chlazza] set out to make their own and ended up succeeding with a board that costs less than $1 in parts. Of course the drive uses its own Fat32 based file system so there is still some hacking to do if you intended to read the data, but this is a step in the right direction.

GPU Cooling To Fix RRoD

March 22, 2010 by Mike Szczys 64 Comments

[Rbz] fixed his friend’s Red Ring of Death stricken Xbox 360 by improving the GPU cooling. Because an overheating GPU is a common cause of the failure, he first tried to replace the thermal compound for better heat conductivity between the chip and the heat sink. This helped a bit but within two hours the problem was back. Troubled by the heat discoloration on the bottom of the DVD drive, he removed it and screwed a cooling fan to the GPU heat sink. That did the trick, so he moved the drive to the outside of the case with the aid of a longer SATA cable. It’s not pretty, but it worked.

Xbox 360 Laptop More Laptop-y Than Ever

March 16, 2010 by Mike Szczys 30 Comments

[TheTwoJ] and his friend built a laptop-form-factor Xbox 360. Their extensively documented process was inspired by [Ben Heckendorn’s] work. The result is a brick when folded up but a good-looking (albeit loud with 8 fans) gaming rig. There’s everything you would expect; LCD screen, integrated WiFi, camera, optical drive, and a full keyboard. These poor saps seem to have spent a portion of their student loan on the build but we understand how easy it is to let your budget get out of hand. They’re trying to recoup through eBay auction.

Take a look at the walk through after the break. If you’ve got the spare dough, you can try your hand at this with our three part series on building an Xbox 360 laptop.

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Our Favorite XBOX To HTPC Hacks

February 2, 2010 by Mike Szczys 17 Comments

Let’s face it, the original Xbox is ugly. It might have looked cool when it first came out but now most would be embarrassed to display that old beast with the rest of their entertainment hardware. This is unfortunate because the old girl still has some life in her. If you have tools, time, and talent you can give the box a facelift and bring it back to see the light of day. We’ve got six of our favorite Xbox to Home Theater PC hacks after the break to inspire you.

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XBMC On Xbox Keeps Going And Going

January 18, 2010 by Mike Szczys 39 Comments

It’s no secret that XBMC just saw a major release with version 9.11 Camelot. What many don’t know is that development for the X in the name (Xbox) stopped two releases ago. That is to say that Team-XBMC no longer officially develops for the platform because of its inability to handle true-HD and many types of compressed content.

But, remember that this is an open source project. Just because the development team has moved on to more powerful hardware doesn’t mean the end of the 733 MHz wonder. There have been one or two folks maintaining the branch and backporting as much as they can.

It seems the that Camelot can now run on the original Xbox hardware. Both the skin and video playback must be set no greater than 720p to ensure smooth playback but that’s not much of a drawback considering that all video being played will still need to be upscaled to get to that resolution. There is also a repository of Xbox friendly skin hacks that allow newer skins to play nicely with the meager 64mb of ram available. So rejoice, you can have Camelot, and it’s crown jewel that is the new Confluence skin.

Bike Controller For Xbox 360

January 13, 2010 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

ProjectExciteBike is on its second iteration of an exercise bike controller for Xbox 360. The controller takes pedal input from the cranks of the exercise bike. The sensing is handled by a ring of five hall effect sensors that detect a passing magnet attached to the crank. The sensor data is collected and processed by an Arduino which connects to a wireless Xbox 360 controller for output.

This version of the gaming device includes a fine adjustment widget. It uses a row of LEDs to represent the speed of the pedals and has a slider to adjust how much of an effect this has on the game. This is what we envisioned for the trainer computer we saw yesterday. Take a look at some game play video after the break and dig through the code if you have an exercise bike waiting to be recommissioned.

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XeXLoader Reminds Us Of Xbox Glory Days

December 28, 2009 by Mike Szczys 8 Comments

The newest version of XeXLoader boasts a pretty slick GUI. This is a homebrew loader for the Xbox 360. Don’t get your hopes up, it requires an older kernel and you’re not getting on Xbox Live if you do this hack.

But think back to when the original Xbox was first hacked. Watching the XeXLoader (after the break) sends us back to the days of EvolutionX. Sure there wasn’t much that could be done in those early days (other than pirate games), but that slowly changed with the hard work of a lot of developers. XBMC came out of those first steps and became the greatest media software ever to grace your television. The GUI work here may be more beginning steps in another great community-driven legacy.

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