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

Sudeki was on PC? I never knew that.

Baldurs gate got a console release too? I never knew that either. I’ve never played any of these games.

The Baldurs Gate games are more hack and slash than DND style RPG. Not a direct port, just a spinoff really.

Has anyone replaced the IDE HD in their XBOX with a SSD or Compact Flash? I don’t want to install custom firmware I’m worried about the longevity of the IDE drive in those systems.

I replaced mine with an SD card in an SD to IDE adapter. I had some impressions on the old site which I will repost here:

So this worked:

http://i.imgur.com/MnBSmAY.jpg

SDXC to IDE to replace the internal hard drive. Formatted a 200GB card just fine (late edit: turns out these sd-to-ide adapters they can’t access >128gb so it’s best to stick to 128gb cards).

I had to install a modchip first since the SD card doesn’t feature drive locking (as mentioned here), which took damn near two months to arrive. Bit annoying but it means going forward I can pretty easily swap in a new drive/sdcard without having to worry about drive locking giving me an extremely heavy brick down the line. Installing it on my 1.6 revision meant I also had to rebuild the LPC header, but that was a good opportunity to try out kynar wire for the first time.

Main benefit is that I have loads of space to install discs now. Side benefit is that my Xbox is way lighter!

Followup:

If anyone is curious I did some research before going the SD card route. I actually looked into this when I set up a Win98 PC with an SD adapter.

One common thing to worry about with SD cards is repeated writes wrecking the storage chip, as NAND storage has a limited number of writes before it’s dead. I believe this to be a valid concern but depending on your application it’s not as big a deal as you’d think. All SD cards from reputable manufacturers (Sandisk/Toshiba, Lexar, Transcend, etc) come with wear leveling algorithms in the integrated controllers, which means it doesn’t just write to the same cell over and over again if the same file is written more than once – it writes to a different cell. This is effective unless your SD card is nearly stuffed full and you have data writing continuously.

For Xbox, most writes are savedata (small) and game cache (larger but not too bad). In this scenario, with a 200GB SD card at under 75% capacity (after filling with dvd2xbox game backups) you should have plenty of headroom to allow for cache partition writes without needing to worry for many, many years.

If you’re very concerned about this 1) make backups and 2) there are high endurance SD cards from Sandisk, Lexar, and Transcend which are marketed towards continuous write scenarios like car dashcams and are rated for many many hours of writes, and they’re not much more expensive than regular cards (just lower capacity ceilings), so buy those if you’re paranoid.

The biggest wrinkle was that because I had a 1.6 revision I had to install a modchip to use a modified bios in order to get around the sd card not featuring drive locking. If you have a 1.0 to 1.5 revision you should be able to change the bios without a modchip so that you can disable drive locking, but I’m not sure exactly how to do that.

If you want to go the SSD or compact flash route you’d have to either get a device that supports drive locking (SSD might, compact flash probably not but don’t quote me) or disable the drive locking feature. Either way you need at least a softmod; to get the key used by your system to lock the drive or some way of bypassing drive locks with a bios flash or modchip.

I love the OG Xbox!

I had one from when they first came out, but it died at some point (probably a bad capacitor). I’ve now got a 1.6 edition that belonged to a close friend. We both modded our systems with one of those awesome Xecuter 3 Mod Chips.

This was back when modding these things was super mainstream, and the soft mod scene wasn’t really a thing yet. I remember taking our Xbox’s to chinatown, into a “Lucky 97” chinese grocery store that had a modding center for the Xbox’s right at the front door! We dropped them off, went for coffee for an hour or so and came back to pick up our newly modded systems. What a time to be alive haha!

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Haha that’s awesome!

Xbox is great, probably the best system to collect for right now in my opinion. A lot of the classics were ported to PC later but some are still exclusive.

I softmodded my 1.6 Xbox a while back mostly to swap in a bigger HDD and play backups. I have a 300GB IDE drive that I confirmed is compatible, I just need to see if it works and throw it in there. I will have to look into it tonight and see what all I need.

Wait, 1.6 Xboxs can be softmodded?=O

I softmdded mine using pretty much the first guide I saw online. I didn’t know at the time it was a 1.6 but it seemed to work. I’ll try to find a link to the one I used when I get home.

1.6 Xboxes can be softmodded, but not TSOP flashed.

OG Xbox is the best Xbox, with Microsoft Game Studios, Bungie, Team Ninja, Sega, Bizarre Creations, LAN parties and a really cool Halo and Xbox Live community.

I found this on my old Halo 3 Zune of all things a few days ago, from way back in the day.

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Love the original XBOX, got a crystal with a mod chip, and what amazes me is how good the games still look…

Yea, the Team Ninja games in particular are way ahead of their time graphically.

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Thanks for the links and information! There’s still a lot I need to learn about modding Xboxes.

On the Back In My Play podcast the host mentioned there is an eBay seller that sells capacitor fixed consoles. Any heard of this?

I actually played this game. It was pretty awesome. I am still sad it never came out.

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Where? How?

It was at the first Blizzcon in Anaheim. I attended that con since I lived 20 minutes away.

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Cool. Starcraft Ghost looked so promising. I just watched the awesome opening cinematic again. I know Starcraft Ghost was fairly far along in development, but does anyone know how close it was to being complete?

It looked like a Splinter Cell clone, which would’ve been awesome! Hopefully this will appear at some point just like Warcraft Adventures.