[Martinus]

About a year and a half ago I was staying at a mate's place and noticed a rather dilapidated xbox sitting in his corner with the top sitting ajar, I asked him what was up with it and he told me that he'd killed it attempting to install a mod-chip. Being a bit of a fixit person I decided to have a look at it, he told me I could bring it home and keep it if I could fix it, rather nice of him if I do say so myself. Christmas had caught up with me and I was on the mend from a bit of a nasty episode where I'd fallen from a climbing wall (on my first go; I decided to get all of the accidents out of the way early), I'd broken my ankle at the time so it kept me out of uni for a month. I had to stay down in my flat and try and hammer through all of the coursework that I'd got an extension on due to the fall.

Anywho I was in a rather rickety set of flats, very literally on my own and I can tell you that places like that tend to wear one's sanity if you don't have anyone to talk to. I'd gotten as much of the uni work done as I could for the day and had ran out of reading material, the xbox was in my room but it was chock full of Torx head screws that I didn't have a bit for so I couldn't do much, we had a telly but the flat was some kind of limbo for radio signals so nothing to watch. There was pretty much nothing to do except go for a walk so I ventured down to the local 24 hour petrol station (it was about 11pm at the time) with the intent of buying some comfort food and a magazine.

I was browsing around and much to my surprise spied a set of those magnetic  screwdriver heads with a full set of Torx bits for a fiver. Wasting no time I switched on the kettle and dismantled the xbox. Having had a quick look at it in my friend's place, I'd seen what he'd done to it; basically printed circuit boards consist of insulating material onto which metal tracks are etched, apply too much heat with a soldering iron and those tracks can lift right off the board and break. On the bottom of the board are three points to which you must solder wires for the mod-chip to work, one connects to a HDD light, one to a NIC and the final one that allows a mod-chip to bypass the onboard BIOS of the xbox. The two LED points are realtively easy to solder to as they're pins sticking through the board, the other one is not so. He'd wiped out two tracks, one that the wire was to be soldered to and one right beside it.

A new problem presented itself; these tracks obviously needed replacing but I did not have anything that would do the job. All of the electrical devices barring my laptop belonged to the other guys I lived in the flat with so I couldn't scavenge a thin enough conductor from those, I searched the place from top to bottom (my tea was cold by now, of course). Just for completeness sake I had a look in the cleaning cupboard - vaccum cleaner, ironing board, mop, 15 meters of coaxial cable left by whoever had occupied the flat the previous year. I fired the kettle up again.

I carefully cut a few strands from the EM shielding of the cable and went to work. It's good soldering practice to pre-tin any conductors that you're going to join together so I very gently took a scalpel blade to the green, protective layer of the PCB and exposed a little of the copper of each of the two broken traces, I then heated them just enough and applied the tiniest amount of solder. Trying to solder two centimetre-and-a-half long, hair-thin wires to a PCB is quite a task, the wires have to stay in place, you need one hand to hold the soldering iron and you need the other to apply solder; three objects, two hands. After what felt like a few hours I finally got both wires in place and proceeded to connect the wires from the mod chip. Soldering a relatively large insulated wire to a hair thin strand without lifting it off the board is yet another issue that took one or two attempts and a held breath. Finally I won out and the result was this:


I checked all of the solder joints between the pins and the chip-connector on the top-side of the board and when I was happy they were good I connected the chip and installed the motherboard back into the xbox base:


I rebuilt and fired up the xbox with the mod chip switched on and the TV screen greeted me with what looked like an image of victory; the mod-chip flashing interface.

I'd had an 80GB Maxtor IDE drive lying about and I'd brought a bunch of applications and all of the necessary software to get an alternative dashboard (Avalaunch) installed and running. Getting the BIOS tool to work took a little reading but I managed to figure it out from the documentation I'd downloaded before coming up to the flat. In the end I had a fully-functional xbox with a rather sizable HDD:


I had to wait until some time later to do further experimenting with my interesting little computer in disguise, the first thing that I had on my mind was to check out one or two of the linux distro's. There was a pretty bullet-proof walkthrough on the 'net for creating a NAS (network attached storage); a file server of sorts that you administrate from another, connected PC. After a bit of trial and error I managed to get it up and running.

The final thing that I wanted to do was to take advantage of the fact that the Xbox ports are simply USB ports with one extra conductor for a lightgun. I dismantled the xbox again and found the best location for a USB port on the front without having to take any cutting tools to the case, I had a USB extension cable from one of those little IRDA devices sitting around that did the job nicely so I decided on the following location:


There are easier ways to connect USB devices to the xbox like modifying an xbox controller cable but I wanted a more permanent affair. I cut a small section of the inner shielding away and fed the cable through one of the vents in the bottom of the case and into the interior. I then extracted the pins of the little molex that connects the controller ports to the motherboard and soldered the usb conductors to them, reinserted them back into the molex block and plugged it back onto the board:




Now I can connect and use pretty much any USB device that Linux has drivers for. All in all not a bad state of affairs. I ended up giving my friend £50 for the xbox as I figured something so useful was worth a little bit of cash.

[an0n]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but can't you just pencil-in broken PCB circuits?

IIRC the graphite works as a rather effective semi-conductor to bridge tiny breaks.

[Martinus]

Those breaks were almost 2cm long and graphite isn't a good, long-term fix.

[an0n]

Okay, did you even check to see if the X3 PCB-rebuild board woulda done the job?

[Deepblue]

Now, go install XBMC.

[Martinus]

Considering I was almost literally broke at the time it wouldn't have mattered if I had. Everything I used to fix the xbox was stuff I had lying around, it was a luxury and thus I did not consider any substantial expenditure worth it at the time.

When you're a student food and rent come first, everything else is something you have to think pretty hard about if it costs a lot of cash.

[Col. Fishguts]

Score one for EE

What are you doing with the 'freed' box now ?

[Grug]

Woah, nice effort dude, nice effort.

I'm interested in what uses you've applied for it too. Post on the boards using the xbox?

[Nuke]

pretty cool
have you tried running freespace on it yet?

[deftonesmx17]

Now, go install XBMC.

I second that 200%

Oh and go get yourself some of the emu's. http://xport.xbox-scene.com/
None of the ones built with the XDK will be on that site, you will have to find another way to get them 

[Wild Fragaria]

Cool bean    Very well done, bro

[Martinus]

Now, go install XBMC.

I've had this machine for quite some time so I've installed just about every piece of useful (and useless) software I could find.

Other than the N64 emulators being a tad slow (but still great fun) I'm bloody impressed with it overall. I must say though that I think I've played more games via emulation than I did official xbox titles, bear in mind that this is not due to lack of availability, I tried them and they bored me. Fable was the one that held my attention for the longest time but even it became tiresome. Just in case you don't think I got a representative view of xbox gaming I played the following:

Fable
Splinter cell 1 and 2
Burnout
Halo 1 and 2
Ninja Gaiden
Chronicles of Riddick
Soul Calibur 2 (1 was much better)
DOA (mindless mash em up)
KotOR 1 and 2 (supremely inferior to their PC counterparts)

Anyhow, before anyone goes loosing it please remember that this is all very much IMHO.

[Grug]

Cool.

Well you definitly earned the title Mr Fix It Guy.
Maybe you can do one up for me one day.

(Maybe one of those guitars too. )

[Deepblue]

Now, go install XBMC.

I've had this machine for quite some time so I've installed just about every piece of useful (and useless) software I could find.

Other than the N64 emulators being a tad slow (but still great fun) I'm bloody impressed with it overall. I must say though that I think I've played more games via emulation than I did official xbox titles, bear in mind that this is not due to lack of availability, I tried them and they bored me. Fable was the one that held my attention for the longest time but even it became tiresome. Just in case you don't think I got a representative view of xbox gaming I played the following:

Fable
Splinter cell 1 and 2
Burnout
Halo 1 and 2
Ninja Gaiden
Chronicles of Riddick
Soul Calibur 2 (1 was much better)
DOA (mindless mash em up)
KotOR 1 and 2 (supremely inferior to their PC counterparts)

Anyhow, before anyone goes loosing it please remember that this is all very much IMHO.

You didn't like Ninja Gaiden. :0

[Grug]

You didn't like Ninja Gaiden. :0

That was a list of what he played. He didn't say he didn't like Ninja Gaiden.
Regardless, why must he like it?

I played it, liked it for a bit, but it was one of the games I traded in...

[Deepblue]

Fable
Splinter cell 1 and 3
Burnout
Halo 1 and 2
Ninja Gaiden
Chronicles of Riddick

All of those are excellent games. Ah well, I geuss something like Geometry Wars can provide hours and hours of entertainment for the people who don't like cumbersome games.

[Martinus]

Ninja Gaiden had tonnes of potential, it just got very samey very fast and thus I got bored of it.

[Grug]

May I add, Fable was fun for a bit. Then I just got the sense Peter Molynx was screwing me up the ass with all the half finished quests and features. Then they have the nerve to release Lost Chapters. A seemingly patched version of fable. What a ****ing joke that was.

Splinter Cell was the same as Ninja Gaiden as Maeg mentioned, very samey. Once you play through it once... =/

[Deepblue]

Versus multiplayer on Splinter Cell 3 is so bloody awesome though.

[Grug]

I couldn't find many good servers when I tried it. The few I did get in were a little fast, and I dunno... completely different game to the single player that's for sure. It always ended in the splinter cell running around jumping and the merc chasing after them firing like mad.
Seemed a little tacky...

Maybe I didn't give it long enough chance though...