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

No worries hah. If I had answers, they wouldn’t still be looking :slight_smile:

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Man the dvd drive on my OG Xbox is getting worse, I’m so glad I soft modded it to be able to install games to the hard drive on it and also have faster load times. Goldeneye Rogue Agent for example couldn’t even be read properly at all on my OG Xbox but when I played it on my Xbox 360 it ran perfectly fine. I love OG Xbox but their disc drives can be a pain to deal with.

Is Steel Battalion worth experiencing? I’ve always had a mild curiosity for it but never the space to own it. Is as fun as it looks?

Its worth the experience, but I say that having bought it new years ago. Its not an easy game though, and can be more frustrating than you might imagine.

It was worth it to me but I really love mecha so I have a bias. The campaign is still fun to play through and the learning curve wasn’t as bad as people made it out to be. If you are interested in MP then there’s still a huge discord/Reddit group that play Line Of Contact weekly together over system link(through tunneling of course).

The only downside is trying to hunt down a set of the sticks but if you live in the states it’s probably a bit easier to come across a set. I bought mine through eBay from a local buyer who was doing local pickup and I had to clean a bunch of grime off it and he was missing one of the little plastic pieces that hold one of the 3 sections together but it works fine thankfully without that.

I now managed to install a new hard drive into my soft modded Xbox, and it’s an IDE one with 160GB! Installing games to the hard drive is so much better than using discs as the load times are also improved on games as well.

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Yeah it is a blessing to be able to run games from the HDD.

Feels like it should have always been that way.

I’ve been doing some extensive refurbishments on several xbox consoles though and finding leaking caps on the PCB inside the Samsung optical drives, which probably not helping their reliability.

I have my old Xboxes here - I mixed up the hard drives when I had them open and I’ve never been able to put them back together the right way. FML

Yeah… the HDD’s are tied to the specific xbox firmware…

According to my notes it was something to do with mixed up harddrive encryption keys.

I found software to get the key from the drive, but at the time I didn’t have any pc with ide to connect the drives.

Now I do, so I’ll put it back on my to-do list.

Yeah, fun times. I just to hot swap the IDE cables to get the xbox to unlock the drives first, then the pc to read the content.

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You can bypass the requirement with a hardmod.

Though I cloned my original drive onto the larger drive and locked it with the original key.

You can also swap over the small 8 pin IC that i believe is above the TSOP Flash to transfer over the keys to another Xbox.

At the time this all happened I bought the gear to TSOP read/write/flash and found it the other day. Sounds like a plan is coming together.

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Been working on 3 different Xbox consoles the past few months.

A v1.1 (my main) a v1.3 and a v1.6…

Will be doing detailed write ups in the next week or so if I don’t get another set back where I need to purchase and wait for even more additional components to turn up before proceeding.

But my thoughts overall is simply that these Xbox consoles are ticking time bombs maybe on the level of Game Gear’s and the PCE. Also the older revision the Xbox is the more reliable it seems to be overall…

As for ticking time bomb, is that because of the clock capacitor? I removed that as well last week. Didn’t even leak either.

Nah there are far worse issues going on. But I’ll detail all that soon enough.

Oh god…I got to see that!

Here is a preview:

A non leaking but totally failed 3300uf cap for power rails to CPU/GPU

Any Nichicon HM series caps you see remove and replace ASAP before they kill something major!

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Oh wow, that is pretty nuts!

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A few days ago Brook updated their Wingman XB to work with the original Xbox with the use of a USB adapter cable:

I picked one up, and this thing really opens up a lot of doors on Xbox. I’ve tried the following out and gotten great results:

  1. Several arcade sticks modded with a Brook Wireless PCB for use in games like Soul Calibur 2 – syncs really easily in Switch mode but seemed like I needed to use a USB cable to sync in PS4 mode
  2. Xbox One controller via Bluetooth; syncing was simple via button press and this is a great controller for use on Xbox when there aren’t a lot of great options for wireless
  3. Wireless Xbox 360 controller synced to the Xbox 360 Wireless Controller Adapter plugged into the female USB slot on the unit; I had been reluctant to pick up a community made adapter for a variety of reasons but this thing does the job just as well and again a great choice for an Xbox wireless controller

Also was able to use the same adapter to get my arcade sticks working on Xbox One X which was handy, and it supports a ton of other controllers & sticks as well.

Unfortunately the Series X/S controller doesn’t sync over bluetooth as it uses a newer version of bluetooth but it does work wired.

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