97 lines
5.2 KiB
Markdown
97 lines
5.2 KiB
Markdown
+++
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date = '2025-01-27'
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draft = false
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title = 'Softmod your Xbox Original Today'
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tags = ['technical', 'games', 'modding']
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categories = ['technical']
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+++
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The original Xbox is a phenominal little machine.
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In this post I will go over my journey of modding my own personal xbox.
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Feel free to follow along, but this is mostly just a recollection of my journey for the sake of writing it down.
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If you want to skip the personal story, the tutorial part starts [here]().
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## First Things First
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If you own an Xbox Original and you haven't removed the clock capacitor yet, DO IT NOW. YOU SHOULD'VE DONE IT SEVERAL
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YEARS AGO, IT *WILL* KILL YOUR XBOX.
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Even if you are not sure if it's removed or not, please check to make sure. This is incredibly important.
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With that out of the way, let's begin.
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## The Beginnings
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It all started with I was about 14 years old.
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I remember it clearly.
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It was early 2010 and I had saved up my allowance for a while and wanted to buy something for myself.
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So as any 14 year old buy with marginal financial freedom, I went to the local GameStop just to browse.
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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
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the other xbox 360 games showing off on the store shelves.
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But alas, I did not own an Xbox 360, or any (real) videogame console for that matter.
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So I opted to buy something else, I don't remember what excactly.
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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
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it the xbox 1) for sale!
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And only for 1001kr! Which was... not excactly cheap at the time, but hey, I didn't know better.
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I had saved up just over 1000kr! And the Halo 2 Collectors edition was bundled with it! Holy crap!!
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This was a match made in heaven and I bought it on the spot in favor of whatever else I wanted.
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Proud, and with my heart pumping (this was the biggest purchase I had ever done at the time), I took it home and
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deliberately hid it from my mother, because she wouldn't approve of me spending my hard earned allowance on a videogame
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console.
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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
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could watch movies and (some) TV in our rooms. This CRT had an S-VIDEO input.
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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
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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
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TV. And when I finally got it working I was rewarded with the comforting green glow of the internal clock needing to be
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set. I promptly pressed 'A' without changing anything, inserted the Halo 2 disc and played for the first time on my very
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own video game console.
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I sneak-play'ed so much Halo 2, that I missed a lot of homework, and sleep. I distinctly remember one night I played
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(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
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didn't actually care that I "wasted" the money. She only cared about my bedtime (ugh!) and my homework (double ugh!) -
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which is fair, but still.
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A couple months after the purchase, I wanted to try out the Xbox Live features and play Halo 2 online (I did not know
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you'd have to pay for it) so I found a way to connect an ethernet cable to the box and tried connecting.
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But I was not able to get any connection. I kept trouble-shooting and then I realized that LITERALLY THE WEEK BEFORE
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Microsoft had closed the Xbox Original live service down. What a bummer dude. Welp. At least I had the Halo 2 campaign.
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## Getting a Taste for Modding
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Much later. I am now in my ??'s.
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TODO:
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- Building my own PC
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- Building skills
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- Fixing my laptop (which broke all the time)
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- Modding the Wii
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- Modding the Playstation 2
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The first game console that I modded was a Wii that I bought on a flea-market for next to nothing.
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Side tangent: The Wii is the _easiest_ console to softmod. You only need an SDCard - that's it.
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This Wii modding lit a fire under me, and I started taking apart
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## Softmodding the Xbox
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There are a couple of directions you can take when it comes to modding the OG Xbox.
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I will be exclusively *softmodding* mine, as if I were to solder anything that is required for hardmodding it, I would
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at best brick the console and at worst burn my apartment to the ground.
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This mod _does_ require purchasing some hardware, namely:
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- An xbox (male) to USB (female) adapter.
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These are increasingly difficult to find, so if you tend to drag your feet on projects like these (like I tend to)
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buy it now!
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- An older USB stick
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- A DVD burner
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- Some (writable / blank) DVDs
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TODO:
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- Full list of required hardware
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- Link to MrMario (check for peertube link as a backup)
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- Xbox Controller USB thingy
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- Xbox softmodding tool disc
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- Extras (chimp)
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- Holy crap the IDE hot-swapping
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## Upgrading the Xbox
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Now that we have softmodded it, we can choose to upgrade the aging IDE harddrive with a slightly newer and larger
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harddrive! This is totally optional, but I highly recommend it as it'll enable you to store many more games on the
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console itself, rather than mucking about with DVD discs and a dying DVD drive.
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{{< centered image="/6616144.png" >}}
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