I just bought an oXbox for the first time (sorta)

[Jagosaurus]

Glad to hear it's up and running! I hear ya on some hiccups along the way. I once completely ripped a ribbon cable during that timed cloning shuffle. Somehow it was wedged on there & I completely pulled the ribbon away from the connector in a rush .

Hey! Now you have 2 working copies of Spikeout! Not many can say that

Hm, odd on boot slowdown. I've never experienced it, but I'm still using a new, old stock IDE drive. I know it aged even when sitting on a shelf. I'll eventually convert to a new SATA.

Most strangeness I've experienced was certain skins & custom icons seems to slow down my dash. Not sure if the theme assets were taxing or what, but moved back to standard UnleashedX skins.

Yeah, when I get disc read errors when ripping, its usually due to scratches. There are a ton of "HDD Ready" titles archived on the web. Those are built to DL and FTP straight over your home LAN. You can also find DLC also. OGX DLC is super interesting to me for some reason.

I get wanted to rip your personal titles though. I do that also. Seems somehow like "my" digital copy lol.

[Reprise]

Thanks. Yeah, everything is working fine now. Running games from the hard drive is great. It's really convenient too, as I move my Xbox around between my living room and the study quite a lot, so it's nice to have my whole library of games I own on the actual console without having to go get the games I want.

Yeah, the slow boot up is a bit strange, but I have learned to live with it. If I get my console recapped, I might ask if it's something they know about or can look into. Otherwise though, everything seems fine. Everything else is fast and runs as expected. Games run fine from the hard drive.

Yeah, I know about those HDD ready titles from the web. They proved useful for Enter the Matrix. I ripped all my original games, but there are a few titles where I wanted to obtain the American versions instead, due to PAL issues that stop a handful of games running in NTSC mode (meaning I couldn't take advantage of the higher resolution modes). I was using a program to download the NTSC xiso files and then create my own HDD ready versions, but Enter the Matrix is one of the games that doesn't work for (some of the filenames exceed the character limit that the Xbox can read), so finding a HDD ready version of that on the web was really useful.

[Jagosaurus]

Nice. Didn't realize you were in a PAL territory.

Any PAL OGX exclusives worth tracking down (outside of sports titles)?

https://xbmcxbox.blogspot.com/2013/04/l ... -xbox.html

[Reprise]

Nice. Didn't realize you were in a PAL territory.

Any PAL OGX exclusives worth tracking down (outside of sports titles)?

https://xbmcxbox.blogspot.com/2013/04/l ... -xbox.html

I don't think so to be honest, at least off the top of my head. A lot of them are football (soccer) and sports games if they're your thing. I picked up Senisble Soccer 2006 which is pretty fun.

Annoyingly many of them were made to run in 50hz or have region protection to stop them being booted in NTSC mode, which means you need to switch the console to PAL mode and stick with 576i/480i, which is hard to go back to after playing games in 720p and 480p.

Edit: Oh I just saw Mashed on your list. That's a fun PAL exclusive that plays like a more modern Micro Machines. I can also confirm it runs in NTSC mode fine.