Modding my Xbox…

[ This item ori­gin­ated at my pre­vi­ous (now defunct) blog bradblog.info — copy retrieved from the Inter­net Archive]

A while ago I man­aged to lay my hands on a refur­bished Xbox for a fairly reas­on­able price. Great, methinks. A game con­sole and a DVD player, all rolled into one. And hey, it’ll even play music from the built in hard drive too¦ but not stock from the fact­ory. No, my friend, you have to void the Microsoft war­ranty and mess with the happy tech­no­logy that lies bur­ied within your game con­sole. Once you do that, you then have unlocked the power of your Xbox, and cre­ated a Monster¦here’s how I did mine¦

Accord­ing to the folks on Xbox Linux:

The Xbox is a legacy-free PC by Microsoft:

• Intel Cel­eron 733 MHz CPU
• nVidia GeForce 3MX
• 64 MB of RAM
• 8/10 GB hard disk
• DVD drive
• 10/100 Eth­er­net

As on every PC, you can run Linux on it.

An Xbox with Linux can be:

• a full desktop com­puter with mouse and keyboard
• a web/email box con­nec­ted to TV
• a server or router
• a node in a cluster

Well¦yes, it is, so why not pry the cover off and see what’s under the hood!

With my trusty torx screw­driver in hand, I hand­ily peeled back the four rub­ber feet and two warn­ing labels, unscrewed the case and began my explor­a­tions. Now, I didn’t do this without first read­ing many excel­lent tutori­als and guides, mostly from the good folk over at xbox-scene.com. You can never read too much.

But back to the task at hand. Case cover set aside, this was my first look at the innards.

The grey box on the left with the Sam­sung label is the DVD/CD Rom drive¦making the grey box on the right the 10GB HD. Both must come out before you gain access to the mother­board. More unscrew­ing.

Thor­oughly unscrewed now, here’s what the mother­board looks like. Mine appears to be a ver­sion 1.3¦it’s import­ant to know that when you’re installing the mod chip, as each board has its own unique lay­out.. Power sup­ply sec­tion over on the right, fan, CPU and Graphic pro­cessor the shiny sil­ver things in the middle¦

and the area we’re con­cerned with, under the hanging yel­low cable bundle. This is where we’re mount­ing the pin header that the mod board will con­nect to.

Yes, that double row of holes.

I guess before I get too car­ried away, I should intro­duce you to the mod board I selected¦the OzX­odus Xenium (I know, where do they come up with these names).

The reseller I pur­chased it from shipped it overnight, Canada Post, triple-bubble-wrapped.

Very nice and it arrived in per­fect condition.

And here’s what it looks like out­side of the anti-stat bag. Nice little unit.

Ok [here I left the art­icle for a few weeks as life, yard­work, work, and other things happened], now that we’ve heated up the sol­der­ing iron, we’re ready for some hot metal-melting action!

Of course, I was more con­cerned with actu­ally sol­der­ing the pin-header to the mother­board than actu­ally tak­ing pic­tures of the pro­cess. Suf­fice it to say that after a bit of del­ic­ate work, one false start where the pin header pins kinda melted the plastic header and slid through (provid­ing a less-than-adequate con­nec­tion) I have success.

Make note of this odd little blue wire. This is the D0 (Dee-Zero) wire. It can be soldered in numer­ous loc­a­tions. This top-mount loc­a­tion is less than optimal, as the hole you have to find is very tiny, and not that great for sol­der­ing to. In the end, I ran a longer wire through a hole in the mother­board to an under­side D0 spot that was lar­ger and easier to solder to¦making a much bet­ter connection.

And here’s my happy little toy installed and ready for testing.

Viola!! It works¦and in the weeks since, I’ve man­aged to util­ize the rather cool Xbox Media Cen­ter (one of the key reas­ons for doing this mod).

Very nice. Pos­ted by Brad Grier at July 4, 2004 09:49 PM

Tech­nor­ati Tags: Xbox Mod, Xbox, Xenium, Mod, Hack, hard­ware, archive, homebrew

Tagged as: Entertainment, How to, Lifestyle Technology, Media, media centre, Mod, XBMC, xbox