Xbox 360 Arcade Controller

November 25, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 18 Comments

360_arcade

[weirdo] sent in this sweet Xbox 360 arcade controller project(translated). He really wanted an arcade controller for the new Mortal Kombat game. After noticing that the expensive retail arcade controllers were missing the trigger buttons, he decided to hack his own together. After dissecting the controller, he soldered in some break out boxes. This will allow him pretty easy reconfiguration. Wanting some additional customization, he added LEDs to the buttons. Most people add LEDs to the buttons, so that’s not a huge deal, but he also added one to the ball on the end of the joystick. That added touch almost makes us forget that this thing is housed in a pizza box. To be fair, he wants to refine the button layout for a while before he makes a final enclosure.

We covered a very similar project last year, but it has since disappeared from its original site. You may also remember the slick Wireless PS2 arcade controller from back in June.

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]

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.

Xbox 360 Battery Pack Teardown

October 4, 2008 by Eliot 26 Comments

Reader, [Fox9p3400], opened up an Xbox 360 controller battery pack so we could all see what goes into one. It contains two Sanyo 2100mAh NiMH AA rechargeables (Model HR-3U 1.2V). In addition to that, there is an Atmel microcontroller (not pictured) and the copper temperature probe you can see above. He has more pictures on Photobucket.

New XBox 360 Downgrade Hack

August 25, 2007 by Will O'Brien 10 Comments

[Paul] let me know about a new way to get a hacked kernel on a XBox 360. A new timing attack will soon allow you to install an older kernel ~~with~~ without having the CPU key which was the catch 22 situation before. The proof of concept ressurected a bricked XBox by doing some interesting things to one of the NAND (memory) blocks on the machine.
Great news for the homebrew/hacking scene!

XBox 360 Hacking 101 Extra

July 24, 2007 by Will O'Brien 4 Comments

[BlueMoon] let me know about a translation of an interview posted over at xbox-scene. The original dutch version is here. It’s a very good overview of XBox 360 security and the exploits needed to take advantage of the hardware.

If you dig EVs, you might want to check out my latest experiment. I’ll be building a EV, but each step of the process will be defined by reader votes. It’s $1/vote, with the idea that the votes will pay for the project.
[Jay] sent in a little info on streaming audio and sometimes video to your Wii.

[Robert] sent in his research on building and testing diy GSM antennas for extending ~~rage~~ range.

How-To: Make Your Own Xbox 360 Laptop (part 1)

April 18, 2007 by Will O'Brien 4 Comments

Sure, maybe you’re sick of hearing about [Ben]’s work, but he’s finally giving up the goods on building that Xbox 360 laptop. It’s not your average slap it in a case and splinch on a screen project, so you’ll just have to deal with a few more posts as he pumps out this series.

To console you people who can’t stand the major pc board redecorating that’s [Ben]’s trademark, [kiwisaft] sent along this unique use for the ol’ laser toner transfer trick.

The ball point pin dot matrix printer reminded [Tesladownunder] was reminded of this funky servo based plotteroriginally built for the dearly departed vic20.