blog/xbox-modding.md at da0e95a44be7b6f99b039dd5c7eaf7c27da36894

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Asger Gitz-Johansen 01b83ea721 feat: start on the xbox modding post

2025-04-13 19:51:48 +02:00

5.2 KiB

Raw Blame History

+++ date = '2025-01-27' draft = true title = 'Softmod your Xbox Original Today' tags = ['technical', 'games', 'modding'] categories = ['technical'] +++

The original Xbox is a phenominal little machine. In this post I will go over my journey of modding my own personal xbox. Feel free to follow along, but this is mostly just a recollection of my journey for the sake of writing it down. If you want to skip the personal story, the tutorial part starts here.

First Things First

If you own an Xbox Original and you haven't removed the clock capacitor yet, DO IT NOW. YOU SHOULD'VE DONE IT SEVERAL YEARS AGO, IT WILL KILL YOUR XBOX. Even if you are not sure if it's removed or not, please check to make sure. This is incredibly important.

With that out of the way, let's begin.

The Beginnings

It all started with I was about 14 years old. I remember it clearly. It was early 2010 and I had saved up my allowance for a while and wanted to buy something for myself. So as any 14 year old buy with marginal financial freedom, I went to the local GameStop just to browse. I was already an avid Halo fan, so I was looking around at the Halo 3 and Gears of War copies that they had, as well as the other xbox 360 games showing off on the store shelves. But alas, I did not own an Xbox 360, or any (real) videogame console for that matter. So I opted to buy something else, I don't remember what excactly. What I do remember is that when I went up to the counter, I saw that they had a used Xbox original (back then we called it the xbox 1) for sale! And only for 1001kr! Which was... not excactly cheap at the time, but hey, I didn't know better. I had saved up just over 1000kr! And the Halo 2 Collectors edition was bundled with it! Holy crap!! This was a match made in heaven and I bought it on the spot in favor of whatever else I wanted. Proud, and with my heart pumping (this was the biggest purchase I had ever done at the time), I took it home and deliberately hid it from my mother, because she wouldn't approve of me spending my hard earned allowance on a videogame console.

A couple of years earlier, my sister and I received a small CRT TV with an in-built DVD player for our rooms so we could watch movies and (some) TV in our rooms. This CRT had an S-VIDEO input. I remember that it was such an adventure trying to figure out how to plug the Xbox to the TV. The figure-8 cable scared me when it sparked when I plugged it into the Xbox and I thought I broke it, but I just had to change the input on the TV. And when I finally got it working I was rewarded with the comforting green glow of the internal clock needing to be set. I promptly pressed 'A' without changing anything, inserted the Halo 2 disc and played for the first time on my very own video game console.

I sneak-play'ed so much Halo 2, that I missed a lot of homework, and sleep. I distinctly remember one night I played (with no sound mind you) for uncountable hours. Oh to be a kid again. I know that at one point my mom found out and she didn't actually care that I "wasted" the money. She only cared about my bedtime (ugh!) and my homework (double ugh!) - which is fair, but still.

A couple months after the purchase, I wanted to try out the Xbox Live features and play Halo 2 online (I did not know you'd have to pay for it) so I found a way to connect an ethernet cable to the box and tried connecting. But I was not able to get any connection. I kept trouble-shooting and then I realized that LITERALLY THE WEEK BEFORE Microsoft had closed the Xbox Original live service down. What a bummer dude. Welp. At least I had the Halo 2 campaign.

Getting a Taste for Modding

Much later. I am now in my ??'s.

TODO:

Building my own PC
Building skills
Fixing my laptop (which broke all the time)
Modding the Wii
Modding the Playstation 2

The first game console that I modded was a Wii that I bought on a flea-market for next to nothing. Side tangent: The Wii is the easiest console to softmod. You only need an SDCard - that's it. This Wii modding lit a fire under me, and I started taking apart

Softmodding the Xbox

There are a couple of directions you can take when it comes to modding the OG Xbox. I will be exclusively softmodding mine, as if I were to solder anything that is required for hardmodding it, I would at best brick the console and at worst burn my apartment to the ground. This mod does require purchasing some hardware, namely:

An xbox (male) to USB (female) adapter. These are increasingly difficult to find, so if you tend to drag your feet on projects like these (like I tend to) buy it now!
An older USB stick
A DVD burner
Some (writable / blank) DVDs