This one’s late thanks to my cable modem. I don’t know how I feel about the color, but Dave built a nice portable XBox. He crammed the system along with (what looks like) a PSone screen and couple stacks of batteries inside the thing. He vacuum formed the case out of plastic over a plaster mold.
Xbox Hacks193 Articles
Saturn Controller For The Xbox 360
With a slate of old-school 2D fighting games like Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat 3 being released on the Xbox 360 [twistedsymphony] thought it would be nice to have a decent old-school gamepad to play them with. His final interface board lets you use an unmodified Saturn controller with the Xbox 360. He used a chopped up Saturn cable extender to attach the controller to a PIC16F690. The PIC decodes the Saturn pad’s button presses. It then triggers a corresponding analog switch that acts as a button press on the actual 360 controller. He did it this way instead of the much harder task of figuring out what the 360 controller protocol was actually doing. Future plans include support for other system’s controllers. Here’s a demo video.
Xbox Rapid Fire Mod
[Xboxplaya978] has posted instructions detailing how to add two rapid fire trigger buttons to your Xbox controllers. He got the original plans from Mattie on Xbox-scene, but his site has since gone down. The circuit is based on an a-stable multi-vibrator used to flash LEDs. Halo players have been drawn to this mod because it makes using the battle rifle or covenant carbine a lot more enjoyable.
Related: Xbox 360 Hacks, Xbox Hacks
Computer Remote Using Xbox Receiver
[Odin84gk] always wanted a remote control for his PC. He didn’t want to spend a lot of money to get a good one or waste money on a cheapy. He decided to go with something he already had: an Xbox DVD kit. He built an adapter cable for the Xbox receiver using instructions on redcl0ud’s site. Using the standard setup the remote driver just spits out key combos, but to make the remote truly flexible he combined it with AutoHotKey. AutoHotKey catches the key sequences and can execute complex scripts based on them.
Industrial Strength Dance Pad
Inventgeek has just posted their latest project: an industrial strength dance pad. It’s built out of 14GA 1″ steel tubing and acrylic. I brains are from a generic set of DDR pads. There is also a separate lighting system. The pad was built it for an Xbox, but they’ve got a USB adapter for use with Stepmania as well. Although the construction looks really solid, [jared] is careful to mention that this is just the first prototype. It definitely looks better than anything you could buy or find in the arcade.
Dualboot DVD Firmware Mod For The Xbox 360
Monday brought news of backups successfully booting on Xbox 360s with modified DVD firmware images. LittleJonny put together a tutorial on how to boot two different DVD drive firmwares. To perform this mod you need a second SST 39sf020a flashrom plus some resistors. The two flash chips are soldered directly on top of each other except for pin 15. Two wires are then attached. Which flash chip is used depends on which wire you pull to ground. Just add a switch and you can install a modified firmware on the second chip while keeping your original. I’m guessing Microsoft will put firmware detection into the dashboard to combat this, but this will keep your original firmware intact so you won’t have to reflash if something breaks.
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Xbox 360 DVD Firmware Hack
Backups can now be booted on the Xbox 360 according to Xbox-scene. The firmware was released by Commodore4Eva who previously released a functional Xbox 1 firmware. It works under the same idea as the final Xbox hack: it patches the response to the media check into the DVD drive’s firmware. So the drive responds with an all-clear without even checking the DVD. This hack works on units with the Toshiba-Samsung drive. The new firmware also lets you use the drive under Windows for easy game ripping. There are some quirks to it, but it sounds like everything you need is included. It’s unfortunate that this happened before they were able to get executable code running on the machine. Now that the bootleggers have what they want I’m afraid it might take some steam out of the homebrew movement.
