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

Dude, same here, heck just recently my Xbox 360 slim died(and that was my 3rd one) so I had to get a new 360(now on the 4th one), while most OG Xboxs I had have disc reading problems(and my current soft modded Xbox still has that issue so I decided to rip the games to the hard drive to play off it and that decreases loading times as well).

Yep. I’be probably owned about 8 Xbox systems total between OG and 360. It sucks feeling burned by them.

Xbox games always looked so damn blurry to me. At least the 480i over rgb.

The jump in quality moving to component 480p was astonishing.

For example being able to see to the horizon in RalliSport Challenge 2 just isn’t possible without progressive scan. It actually made the game easier (but not easy)

so ive heard. I dont have any crt which can handle 480p. The weird thing though. ps2 and gamecube does not look blurry 480i/rgb.

That’s because MS applied a soft filter when running RGB :frowning:
How are you running your games ?
Is your Xbox soft modded ?
If so, if you install them to the hard drive then start them through XBMC, this has an option to turn off the filter entirely, this makes a night and day difference to the look of the games. I only found this out after years of ownership.

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Started Ninja Gaiden Black today (on, erm, Xbox One X). It’s amazing so far, the game expects much more from the player than Sigma did, and it’s all the better for it.

It also scales really well to higher resolutions. Normally I’m not keen on playing old games at resolutions much higher than they were designed for, because it exposes elements of the presentation that weren’t meant to be visible to the player at the target resolution: LODs, sharp textures become low res, polys become visible and so on.

But Ninja Gaiden Black scales very well since more pixels does suit Team Ninja’s clean approach to image quality that era. They weren’t really focusing on highly detailed environments and models, instead going for a stylised, clean look instead. Hard to explain. But this looks great:

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It looks great. I know what you mean about old games in higher resolutions, but another old series which looks really nice on the X are the Splinter Cell games. I did a direct comparison, SC1 running at the same time on my OXbox @480P on a PC CRT Vs the X on a flat screen PC 1080P monitor. As much as I didn’t want to admit it, it looks even better on the newer hardware.

UI and skybox stand out (especially that 16:9 UI stretch) but yeah it’s better than most games.

I really prefer playing 480 line games at 480, ideally on an era appropriate system and increasingly era appropriate TV. The look of it is one thing but the authenticity of all of it gets me more into the experience and more into the game.

Still I’ll trade that off for a more convenient play experience in some cases, especially on Switch where it’s portable but even on PS4/XB1 where I can get sleep mode. Really wish back compat on XB1 supported sleep mode!

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I’m with you guys. Playing on 480 lines of resolution keeps everything at the right scale, especially 2D elements. Otherwise, you can begin to see how the sausage was made.

I don’t, however, feel the same way about HD era games. At that point it feels like the higher res the better since it was pretty clear higher resolutions would be the target with better hardware. So I think the games were designed to scale up better and are likely more “future proofed” in that regard.

I’m sure some 720p-original games get “exposed” at 4k native, but I think the disparity of 720p elements is probably not as extreme.

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In that regard, extremely interesting to see how well 3DS games scale up to HD resolutions! Heavenly.

I think by the time 3DS came out, it may be that Nintendo wanted to “future-proof” their games for easier remastering since HD screens were extremely commonplace by then. Or, alternatively, they just mastered the art form so much that the games simply look good at any resolution even if it wasn’t an intentional goal.

Fortunately, jaggies never bothered me as much as some people so 3DS games still look otherworldly to me even on the hardware (well…, at least when the 3D effect is good).

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Indeed, but I think this 3DS phnemomenon is not limited to just Nintendo games but also some 3rd party.

Replacing the capacitors fixed my xbox! It’s booting again and seems to be working just fine.

It was weird though, of the 5 I replaced one of them I just couldn’t get one of the holes melted enough after removal to get a new cap through. I guess the xbox has a multi layer board design and that particular via must have gone through enough ground that I wasn’t able to melt the solder? Never run into anything like that before. I ended up having to surface attach a couple wires to the board and run them to a separately mounted capacitor.

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I’ve been fairly fine with my stuff. None of my clock capacitors have blown yet(I should get to changing them out). My first 360 had an RROD but I managed to fix and salvage it. I feel most disc based consoles ended up suffering in the long run due to laser issues and that’s the only issue that bothers me for the future. I’m going to stick to putting games on the HDD though for my OG boxes. My dream is to have a full lan setup with at least 8 CRTs and 8 xboxes to be able to have some massive lan parties easily

What filter are you referring to and how can I turn that off using xbmc. I’ve never heard of this :open_mouth:

It’s called the Flicker Filter add you should be able to switch it off using the settings of your custom dashboard or launcher on OG Xbox. For example in UnleashX is in the Display section.

For XBMC https://github.com/Rocky5/XBMC-Emustation/issues/14

It’s in settings or program settings within XBMC. You have flicker and soften. Turn soften off and reduce flicker to 0. Then launch a game, it will look much better, removes all bluriness. @matt I don’t know if anything changed but the last time I tried these settings within UnleashX it didnt seem to work for games, only emulators. I’m pretty sure I can remember that the changes get overwritten when launching games from UnleashX.

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You may be correct. My Xbox is in storage and my memory is hazy. I had it working and used UnleashX, but I may be forgetting something else.

My 1.6 system is having a sticky tray issue. I think it just needs a new belt though.

I may have to re-do my softmod because no matter what I do I can’t get a new HDD to work with my current machine.

For 360 I have one of the later (Jasper?) original-form-factor models and have since I had 2 RLODs on some earlier units. I don’t play it too much but it has been fine since about 2013 I guess.

Overall still way more issues than I’d had with any other console, but then again original Xbox was probably the disc-based console I played the most over the years before moving mostly to PC.