xbox

116 Articles

Downloadable Xbox Thumbstick Toppers Give Gamers Accessibility Options

June 15, 2026 by No comments

Microsoft has a history of taking accessibility options seriously for gaming controllers, and that trend continues with downloadable thumbstick toppers for Xbox controllers. Being straight from the source, the 3D models should fit as well as can be expected with a minimum of fiddling. Just make sure you select the right controller model, because they are each subtly different.

The toppers themselves come in different styles, and there’s a design to fit a variety of needs, from a thumb cradle to ones intended for more serious adaptations —  the perforated X-shaped topper, for instance, is meant to anchor a custom shape molded overtop it.

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Hackaday Links: June 14, 2026

June 14, 2026 by No comments

Times are tough out there, and many are starting to feel the pressure at the grocery store checkout line or the gas pump. But whenever you start to worry about affording life’s necessities, take comfort in the knowledge that somebody is so flush with cash that on Friday they decided to treat themselves and spend $3 million for a sealed copy of Super Mario Bros for the Nintendo Entertainment System.

Although we’re not going to say it necessarily justifies the insane price — a new record for the most ever paid for a video game, incidentally — Heritage Auctions does note in their press release that this is an exceptionally rare version of what’s admittedly one of the most iconic pieces of software ever produced. This is only one of three copies of this particular variant known to exist, which Nintendo apparently distributed to test markets in the United States ahead of the game’s official 1985 release.

In slightly more modern gaming news, Asha Sharma, the new head of Microsoft’s Xbox division, has been making some big swings to try and get Microsoft’s gaming division back on track after years of declining sales. As part of that effort, she recently penned an article detailing some of the challenges the company is facing, which includes some interesting hardware details.

According to the blog post, she claims that in February, the cost of memory and storage components for the Xbox console had doubled compared to the previous year. But those numbers have jumped again, and by the time the holidays roll around, she expects they’ll be paying five times what they did in 2024. That’s bad news for anyone looking to put an Xbox under the tree come Christmas, but even worse news as the company works on the console’s successor. Considering that today’s hardware from Sony and Microsoft can already set you back $700 USD depending on which version you get, it seems like we’re approaching a point where gaming consoles could price themselves out of the market.

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Homebrew Webcam Support For The Original Xbox

June 6, 2026 by 8 Comments

These days, we take it for granted that a video game console will have multiple USB ports. There’s even an expectation that basic peripherals such as storage devices will “Just Work” when plugged into the system — a far cry from the days when each system had its own proprietary memory card.

The original Xbox from 2001 actually had USB ports as well, it’s just that they were used for the controllers and had non-standard connectors that kept you from plugging in other devices. But a simple adapter gets you a standard USB-A port, and after that it’s just a matter of software. Like this homebrew project to get generic USB webcams working on Microsoft’s first foray into console gaming.

Well, “generic” may be pushing it a bit, as the project by [Darkone83] currently lists only two compatible cameras. The first is the Xbox Live Vision Camera, which was never intended to be used on the original Xbox and was instead an accessory for Microsoft’s follow-up console, the Xbox 360. Interestingly, the other supported camera happens to be Sony’s PS2 EyeToy. Claiming that you plugged a PS2 camera into your Xbox would have been fighting words back on the playground circa 2003, but now it’s a reality thanks to the power of open source.

Now there technically was a camera for the original Xbox, but it was only released in Japan and is quite rare. Perhaps unsurprisingly it used the same OV519 chipset as the EyeToy and later Vision Camera, and reverse engineering how the console communicated with it was critical to the development of this project.

As of right now, there’s not much practical application for this webcam driver. It just shows the image from the camera on your TV in glorious 320×240 resolution. But now that the code to make it work is out in the wild, hopefully other Xbox homebrew projects will add support for it.

Although things aren’t quite as active these days as they once were, the hacking scene for the original Xbox is the stuff of legend. If you ever see one of this gargantuan consoles at a flea market for cheap, there’s still plenty of fun to be had pushing the system outside of its comfort zone.

Whipping Up A Quick Adapter To Hack The Xbox 360

January 30, 2026 by 2 Comments

[Androxilogin] had a problem. An Xbox 360 Slim had shown up in the post, but failed to give much more than a beep when turned on. Disassembly revealed some missing components, but replacing them failed to breathe life into the beleaguered console. Deeper repair was needed, and that would require a special adapter which [Androxilogin] was able to whip up from scratch.

When it comes to the Corona models of the Xbox 360, it’s often necessary to use something called a “post-fix adapter” to do certain diagnostic and repair tasks. These adapters consist of a bracket which wraps around the CPU, and probes the solder ball for the POST_OUT signal which is otherwise difficult to access on the motherboard itself. Adapters are readily available online, and are usually manufactured as a PCB with a protruding contact to make a connection.

For [Androxilogin], though, time was short. Rather than wait for adapters to ship, it was quicker to whip up a custom piece to do the same job. This was achieved with a 3D print which was able to clamp around the CPU, while snugly holding a piece of tinned 30 AWG wire to poke the critical point beneath the chip. After a couple of attempts to get the sizing just right, [Androxilogin] was able to make the necessary connection which enabled installing Xell Loader on to the machine to bring it back to life.

If you’re eager to make your own post-fix adapter, files are available on Printables, with more details over on Reddit to boot. While the Xbox 360 is starting to suffer some awkward symptoms of age. we nevertheless still see a steady stream of hacks come in for this vintage machine. If you’re tackling your own retro console mods, be sure to notify the tipsline.

Internet-Connected Consoles Are Retro Now, And That Means Problems

December 22, 2025 by 27 Comments

A long time ago, there was a big difference between PC and console gaming. The former often came with headaches. You’d fight with drivers, struggle with crashes, and grow ever more frustrated dealing with CD piracy checks and endless patches and updates. Meanwhile, consoles offered the exact opposite experience—just slam in a cartridge, and go!

That beautiful feature fell away when consoles joined the Internet. Suddenly there were servers to sign in to and updates to download and a whole bunch of hoops to jump through before you even got to play a game. Now, those early generations of Internet-connected consoles are becoming retro, and that’s introduced a whole new set of problems now the infrastructure is dying or dead. Boot up and play? You must be joking!

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Iconic Xbox Prototype Brought To Life

October 30, 2025 by 16 Comments

When Microsoft decided they wanted to get into the game console market, they were faced with a problem. Everyone knew them as a company that developed computer software, and there was a concern that consumers wouldn’t understand that their new Xbox console was a separate product from their software division. To make sure they got the message though, Microsoft decided to show off a prototype that nobody could mistake for a desktop computer.

The giant gleaming X that shared the stage with Bill Gates and Seamus Blackley at the 2000 Game Developers Conference became the stuff of legend. We now know the machine wasn’t actually a working Xbox, but at the time, it generated enormous buzz. But could it have been a functional console? That’s what [Tito] of Macho Nacho Productions wanted to find out — and the results are nothing short of spectacular.

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Building A (Not Very) Portable Xbox

September 21, 2025 by 24 Comments

Modern handheld game consoles are impressive feats of engineering, featuring full fledged computers in near pocket-sized packages. So what happens if you take an original Xbox and sprinkle on some modern electronics and create a handheld? Well, if you’re [James] of James Channel, you end up with this sandwich of PCBs held together with hot glue and duck tape. 

The first order of miniaturization in this Xbox was replacing the hard drive. Because a CompactFlash card uses parallel ATA, that could be a simple drop in replacement. However, the Xbox locks the hard drive to the system requiring a mod chip for the CF card to work. Fortunately, the sacrificial Xbox came with a mod chip installed. After using an arcade machine to flash the card and copy over the contents of the drive, the CF card install was a breeze. 

For the screen and batteries, a portable DVD player that had remained unused since 2006 was repurposed. The battery cells were rather unhappy, but managed to get resurrected with some careful charging. As it turns out, the iPod 30 pin connector inside the portable screen contains an S-Video line. By tapping into that and adding in some power management for the batteries, the Xbox became a pile of PCBs that could maybe be taken places.

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