Slot Loading Xbox 360

November 22, 2008 by Eliot 11 Comments

File this one under: “Wow, that’s even possible?” xbox-scene hacker [RDC] has been hard at work converting his Xbox 360 to slot loading. To start, He removed the slot loading drive from a blueberry iMac G3. The loading mechanism is the top half of the drive. He split this off and married it to the reading mechanism in the Xbox’s Hitachi drive. The difficult part came with getting the drive to properly signal when it had a disc. He put together a custom circuit to do the detection and has a thorough description of how he solved the problem.

[Thanks, bic]

Acidmods Custom FPS Controller

November 7, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 12 Comments

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Yet another custom X Box controller has come out of the acidmods foundry. This one, specialized for FPS games opts for two analog sticks up front, and complete removal of the D pad and buttons. They break down the process quite nicely with very detailed pictures of how to modify the case and move the analog stick. Check out the video of it in action after the break.

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Inductive Charging Going Mainstream

November 3, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 31 Comments

The recent announcement of Psyclone’s TouchCharge kit has us moderately excited. Though inductive charging has been used in electric toothbrushes for ages, we have yet to see it infiltrate the rest of our lives. The kit is a bit pricey at the moment, but it is a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, you have to have an adapter for your specific product and their selection is pretty limited right now. Why not make your own to power your devices? Warning: it is written from the perspective of [Arnold Schwarzanegger].

Update: Is the TouchCharge kit inductive? It appears to require contacts to touch the base.

Flaming Lips Guitar Hero Mod

October 27, 2008 by Eliot 16 Comments

Here’s a fun little suprise that showed up in a recent Flaming Lips interview. Frontman Wayne Coyne built this custom guitar rig out of a double-necked Epiphone. It has a neck from a Guitar Hero controller, which triggers a built in KORG Kaossilator touchpad synthesizer. Checkout the video interview at around 1:55 for a demo. He went with the Guitar Hero controller because he feels that it’s replacing regular guitars in childrens’ perception of how guitar is played.

[via Joystiq]

Pelican Case Xbox 360

October 8, 2008 by Eliot 13 Comments

We were surprised the last time [Ben Heck] was building a Xbox 360 laptop, yet here’s another one. Well, it’s not a laptop exactly, but an Xbox 360 built inside of a Pelican case. After receiving several requests for a similar device for people stationed overseas, he finally decided to try it out. The goal is to get all the components into the case so that the watertight seals are intact. It’s only partially complete right now and he notes that one of the major hurdles will be converting the DVD drive to top loading. The light ring and USB ports will probably be moved to the top surface, and the hard drive will be made removable. We look forward to the final writeup since there aren’t many tutorials on working with Pelican cases.

Access Controller Now Shipping For PS2/PS3/PC

October 8, 2008 by Eliot 10 Comments

[Ben Heckendorn]’s Access Controller is now shipping. The controller is designed to be used with just one hand. It has six openings that the five control modules can be placed in. It’s easy to reconfigure depending on the player or game. While the prototype was built using Xbox 360 controller parts, this newly released unit is available for the PS2, PS3, and PCs. The Xbox 360 version is still being reviewed for final production. [Ben] says that in the coming weeks he’ll post a how-to for building your own modules. There’s always one empty slot and the bus like design should make this fairly simple.

Boxee On The Apple TV

October 6, 2008 by Eliot 7 Comments

[blip.tv ?posts_id=1333256&dest=-1]

Boxee, the social XBMC, is now easy to install on your Apple TV. We first covered Boxee in June when the alpha was released. It’s great to see how much the project has advanced to this point. To install on the Apple TV, you first download a USB “patchstick” creator. The program puts a mac partition on the drive and copies over the necessary files. You reboot the Apple TV with the stick installed and it patches in both Boxee and XBMC. When you restart the the device it will have two new menu items and the rest of the system will be intact. [Dave Mathews] shows the entire process in the video above. He notes that they’re currently not taking advantage of the GPU, so 1080p is a little too much for the system.