OG Xbox Appreciation: Life is Short, Play More (Across Three Generations of Xbox)

I THINK i saw it at a gamescom in Germany, but I decided to skip it.

Has anybody any experience in using a MicroSD-to-ATA for storage in an OgXbox? Is it feasable?

Yes I installed an IDE to SD adapter in mine and use a micro sd card in that.

The one problem I ran into is that the adapters + sd cards do not support drive locking. So you effectively need to have a modchip in your system or a modded bios or it won’t work.

Otherwise it works quite well. Everything is very snappy, there’s less noise when the system is on, no problems at all.

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Modern Vintage Gamer is a really good youtube channel. We should try to get him to sign up for RGB. Couple of weeks back, I started playing Matrix Path of Neo and quickly realised how…interesting…it is in terms of gameplay. Still getting a kick out of it (love the matrix) but often wonder “huh! Why did they design this like that?” and etc. Also, playing it through a VGA adapter, it is surprisingly jaggy/ugly. I think this game had 720p support (EDIT: just checked, it doesn’t) but it doesn’t really do the game any justice from a visual stand-point. Maybe it’s just me not adjusting my eyes to 2000s standard.

Just finished cleaning up my new acquisition. It’s no longer yellow from age, but a nice crystal clear!

It seems that these guys were a Canadian/EU exclusive, released as a 2 year anniversary for Zellers. 4 per store. They are not exceedingly rare though, and usually go for $140-$200 CAD in good condition.

Unfortunately the crystal controller that I got with it didn’t fare so well. There were two screws missing, and once I took it apart, I noticed that all the internal standoffs that the screws hold onto were broken or stripped. I’m going to try and find another front case for the controller. A black/crystal combo would also look pretty cool, if I can’t find one.

Yellow as can be… it doesn’t look it, but it was very dirty.

The drive works perfectly. I managed to pry off this plastic face to clean it individually.

Not too bad inside, a little dusty and that’s it.

Good shot of the board. It’s a later model, 2004 rev 1.6.

Bottom ESD shield out.

Bottom case looks quite yellowed in person.

This is the top ESD shield, it’s held on by these little metal tabs holding onto the plastic studs. I had to gingerly pry each of the 24 tabs up slightly to remove it… pain in the ass, but it worked nicely!

Top case free of the ESD shield, also very yellow looking!

Dust in-between the case and the shield, so glad I took the time to separate the two!

Bath time! Warm soapy water and some scrubbing did the trick. I used isopropyl alcohol on a few tough spots.

All clean and working perfectly!

It’s really tough to tell in the photos, but man… what a difference! I went from being “okay” with my buying decision to delighted. It looks fantastic!

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Congrats! Looks amazing

The before pictures look super clean to me, lol.

Great work though, always love the feeling of refurbishing/cleaning up gaming consoles! For the plastic standoffs in the controller, can you epoxy them back on? A couple options for the stripped holes should you want to try to use the controller, fill with hot glue then screw in before it sets, wrap the screw threads in teflon tape and fill the hole with epoxy, jam a small piece of plastic (zip tie, weed eater line, straw, etc) or thin solder in the hole and screw it in. Grabbing another controller to harvest parts would obviously be the easiest approach though, lol.

Yeah the before pictures really don’t show how yellow and dirty it was.

Nice tip on the epoxy fix, looks simple enough. You got me thinking… I could just go full industrial inside the thing, and it would likely look pretty cool. If I were to cut off the old mounts, mark the locations, and glue in some appropriate size nuts, then I could just use machine screws instead of the normal ones, and they would look all fancy and stainless steel shiny.

New hope on this old controller, thanks!

I used to own an original Xbox back in the day. I had JSRF+Sega GT combo disc, and I played the heck outta it(JSRF that is). I must confess that I bought an Xbox just to play Jet Set Radio Future… but then I played gems like Fatal Frame 2, which I still own.

Overall I’d say that I didn’t play my Xbox that much compared to my Playstation 2 in the grand scheme of things, but it was still a great system, and one that I would like to get again. I’m particularly bothered that I never played Project Gotham Racing, or Metropolis Street Racer on Dreamcast(Which I also owned at one point). I only played the original Forza and Outrun 2.

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PGR II is where it’s at. Fantastic game, and it has Geometry Wars built in!

You can pick up an Xbox on the used market for like $30, and soft mod it, effectively getting you the entire Xbox library for next to nothing!

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Beautiful Xbox there. I got a crystal Xbox used once and the owner had kept it in disgusting condition. The games he provided are disgusting too. It was so cheap I couldn’t pass it up. I ended just cleaning the Xbox a bit and spray painting over it all(blue with a white X and the silver jewel looks nice on it). I didn’t know the splinter cell mod didn’t work on it unfortunately till recently. I’ll have to chip it eventually down the line. Running games off disc sounds so terrible after getting used to running games off HDD

Oh PGR2 is a lovely racing love letter. Such a content filled package that I don’t feel was topped till PGR4.

Outrun 2 is a damn solid arcade racer as well, so it’s good to hear you played that

You can do the Splinter Cell exploit (and the Agent Under Fire one) just fine on 1.6 / Crystal xboxes. I did mine with Splinter Cell back in 2006.

Yep, it briefly didnt work back when they were new, but it got figured out pretty quickly.

I removed my Xecuter 3 from my black Xbox… And discovered a couple reasons why it wasn’t working.

The solder job was done really cold, and a few joints literally fell off when I touched them.

The ribbon cable was also jammed in there in such a way that the cable was frayed in a few spots.

I then cleaned it up and removed all the adhesive in preparation for install into the crystal one. I’ll install it later once I get it converted to SATA with a large HDD installed. I need to order a cd burner for my computer to do all the upgrades.

Yeah I used Agent Under Fire to soft mod mine.

Two questions about a recently acquired Xbox:

  1. Is there a recommended place to buy a custom console shell? I found this console at a thrift store and it is in rough shape on the outside (scuffs, scratches), even though it plays games fine.

  2. (If this is permissible) I’m looking for a complete guide on soft-modding and HDD swapping (preferably with info on IDE-to-SATA or flash adapters as well) so I can back up all my games. My original console sometimes has a lot of trouble with playing discs, and I would feel much better being able to run everything off of more sustainable media.

I have several spare IDE and SATA HDDs, and I have soft-modded before years ago, but I was just following an old guide I can’t seem to find anymore. Anyways, I’m sure there are probably superior methods compared to what there were 10 years ago.

A lot of the guides online are very old and somewhat outdated. This one seems OK but you might be able to find something better: https://gbatemp.net/threads/how-to-softmod-the-original-xbox.385064/

Today the best thing to get is a USB to Xbox controller adapter and a compatible USB stick which you can then use a PC tool to set up like an Xbox memory card with a game exploit on it.

Awesome, I have a controller adapter from my first mod, and we have tons of old unused flash drives at work I can try.

This looks pretty great. Others I have found seem to cover one or two parts, and then when you look at another guide they used a different method for step 3 so it’s not clear what works with what, if you understand what I’m saying.

Where can you buy those USB to controller adapters? Anyone have a link?

They are like 1/10th the price on ebay from china but you’d have to wait a while for shipping.