HD-DVD drives are getting closer, but aren’t terribly easy to come buy – yet. [Dan] over at uneasy silence let us know that he cracked open an XBox 360 HD DVD Drive and plugged it into a windows box and a mac. With a light application of some drivers, they got the drive working pretty easily – the snag? You’ll need a mini-ata adapter if you want to mount it internally. (And there’s apparently no HD-DVD software support for mac… yet.)
[you can just use it as a USB drive.]
Here’s part 2 of my interview with Ben. (Or just grab it via the feed) We answer some more questions and go off on a few tangents about cnc machines, the PS3 and part sources. It cuts directly to the interview – I don’t want to wait 6 hours to record it. I should have a regular podcast up in the next day or two.
I’m posting this a little early because it’s gonna be popular. Ben Heckendorn has been up to his tricks again. This time he built a 14 pound, water cooled 17 inch XBox 360 aluminum cased laptop. It’s got all the outputs you could ever need. This one is very good. He was kind enough to write up the build and do a nice photo shoot. Oh, this is very, very nice.
[Update: Skyler] set up a mirror.]
[xbox guy] sent in this one. Luke built a dirt cheap vr headset for his xbox using the simplest of components. I decided to put this one up just because it looks so crazy. It reminds me of my power glove inspired garden glove joystick that I built just for playing Tie Fighter back in high school.
[Oh and I’ll definitely be at Toorcon with Eliot and Fabienne this year!]
Update: I fixed the broken links
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.
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.
[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
