Is the original X-Box worth it?
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lordofduct
- Next-Gen
- Posts: 2907
- Joined: Sat Apr 01, 2006 12:57 pm
- Location: West Palm Beach
my opinion:
As a video game console - it's got some good games, a few of witch I couldn't jam on my 360 as they didn't add support for them (Panzer Dragoon Orta for one... but they added it). Over all I find the game collection a little slim to my likings, but I feel that way about most modern game consoles. But the gems collection review Racket puts on shows really the great games it does have to offer and a very fun.
lots of people already brought up games, and the fact you can back those games up on a hard drive when modded and adding a bigger HDD.
There is a reason I still have my Xbox hooked up though along side my 360. And that is the media capabilities. Along side the mass amounts of homebrew emulators, games and the sort for it. The Media side is outrageousily good.
I have XBMC (Xbox Media Center) as my dashboard on my modded XBOX. I have Samba set up on it to search through the network towards all my computers (most specifically my server, but it can look through any computer you want it to). Mount my movie folders, and now I have a slim fit media center for my living room.
For ever I've gone through several different media center set ups for my living room. And several different OS's to run it on. I've used Linux, Unix, Windows, lite Unix/Linux self boot disk, even Mac OSX... running on different types of hardware from: PCs, laptops, embedded systems, macs. The Xbox does everything I want it too, and fairly easy.
well easy is kinda an over statement... but compare the amount of work required to set up a PC to your TV, get the video looking nice, and keeping it affordable. THEN finding your OS and software. I set up a Linux distro with Freevo and SageTV before... both were insane headaches. Just setting up the auto login, and software loading scripts is a freakin' nightmare....
and don't get me started on getting the video resolutions, fonts, and everything just right... UGH!
Xbox on the other hand... shit it takes EVERYTHING I throw at it. Supports subtitles, multi-audio tracks, multi-video tracked containers, direct disc-image reading (just rip your DVD, no reencoding... just load). It plays music from wav, FLAC, mp3, aac, wma, haven't found an issue yet.
AND if you happen to have freevo on your PC (oh God...) you can stream directly from it and watch your TV episodes. Personally I just have my XBOX looking at my Vista machines video directory and I can watch pre-recorded TV shows that way. Alas no Tivo options really...
I hope one day someone develops a XBMC style thing for the 360. It drives me mad the limited format support the 360 has. It does almost everything, but come on... only support wmv and Mpeg? WTF! grrrrrrrr (oh and don't get me on the annoying process of getting it to link to a secure Samba network... XBMC was so much easier then the 360. What does MS think that we all leave our networks WIDE open. The Wii was the same way... getting that thing onto a secured wireless network is like knocking teeth. I just don't even bother with the bitch)
oh and one other complaint from the XBOX360 media center extender. Why the hell does it have to "stream" everything? What is the processor to weak to decompress video itself? HUH!? What the gay? I can watch very high resolution, DTS audio, great video files over my freakin' XBMC set up, and still have huge amounts of LAN bandwidth left for my buddies to constantly hit the server with large file requests... but the damn XBOX360 "streaming" technique bogs out my network at crappy TV quality resolutions... what the gay?
As a video game console - it's got some good games, a few of witch I couldn't jam on my 360 as they didn't add support for them (Panzer Dragoon Orta for one... but they added it). Over all I find the game collection a little slim to my likings, but I feel that way about most modern game consoles. But the gems collection review Racket puts on shows really the great games it does have to offer and a very fun.
lots of people already brought up games, and the fact you can back those games up on a hard drive when modded and adding a bigger HDD.
There is a reason I still have my Xbox hooked up though along side my 360. And that is the media capabilities. Along side the mass amounts of homebrew emulators, games and the sort for it. The Media side is outrageousily good.
I have XBMC (Xbox Media Center) as my dashboard on my modded XBOX. I have Samba set up on it to search through the network towards all my computers (most specifically my server, but it can look through any computer you want it to). Mount my movie folders, and now I have a slim fit media center for my living room.
For ever I've gone through several different media center set ups for my living room. And several different OS's to run it on. I've used Linux, Unix, Windows, lite Unix/Linux self boot disk, even Mac OSX... running on different types of hardware from: PCs, laptops, embedded systems, macs. The Xbox does everything I want it too, and fairly easy.
well easy is kinda an over statement... but compare the amount of work required to set up a PC to your TV, get the video looking nice, and keeping it affordable. THEN finding your OS and software. I set up a Linux distro with Freevo and SageTV before... both were insane headaches. Just setting up the auto login, and software loading scripts is a freakin' nightmare....
and don't get me started on getting the video resolutions, fonts, and everything just right... UGH!
Xbox on the other hand... shit it takes EVERYTHING I throw at it. Supports subtitles, multi-audio tracks, multi-video tracked containers, direct disc-image reading (just rip your DVD, no reencoding... just load). It plays music from wav, FLAC, mp3, aac, wma, haven't found an issue yet.
AND if you happen to have freevo on your PC (oh God...) you can stream directly from it and watch your TV episodes. Personally I just have my XBOX looking at my Vista machines video directory and I can watch pre-recorded TV shows that way. Alas no Tivo options really...
I hope one day someone develops a XBMC style thing for the 360. It drives me mad the limited format support the 360 has. It does almost everything, but come on... only support wmv and Mpeg? WTF! grrrrrrrr (oh and don't get me on the annoying process of getting it to link to a secure Samba network... XBMC was so much easier then the 360. What does MS think that we all leave our networks WIDE open. The Wii was the same way... getting that thing onto a secured wireless network is like knocking teeth. I just don't even bother with the bitch)
oh and one other complaint from the XBOX360 media center extender. Why the hell does it have to "stream" everything? What is the processor to weak to decompress video itself? HUH!? What the gay? I can watch very high resolution, DTS audio, great video files over my freakin' XBMC set up, and still have huge amounts of LAN bandwidth left for my buddies to constantly hit the server with large file requests... but the damn XBOX360 "streaming" technique bogs out my network at crappy TV quality resolutions... what the gay?
The biggest problem are the earlier ones with the ghetto Thomson drives, but those aren't that hard to replace if you get stuck with one. They're not too hard to identify, but even then, getting stuck with an old Xbox with a Thomson is a blessing in disguise. V1.3 and earlier Xboxes with the Conexant video output chip allow you to play Panzer Dragoon Orta (and apparently GunValkyrie, Jet Set Radio Future, and Voodoo Vince) in 480p. 1.4 and later Xboxes will give you a distorted output when you try to play 'em outside of 480i.marurun wrote:I would worry about the system's long-term durability.
That always kinda upset me (I'm a late adopter with a 1.6 xbox). At least PDO is backwards compatible with the 360 now
I have a 1.0 xbox I bought used and it's working fine. It doesn't like CD-rs, but DVDs work fine. It's not like I even use the dvd drive much anyways, since it's modded w/ a 160gb hd. I just stream everything over the network or store it on the harddrive.
It's the best system for emulation BY FAR, and some of the games are really fun. The media capabilities that lordofduct mentioned are bar none the best feature for me. XBMC is the THE killer app for homebrew xbox, and probably my favorite program of all time.
It's the best system for emulation BY FAR, and some of the games are really fun. The media capabilities that lordofduct mentioned are bar none the best feature for me. XBMC is the THE killer app for homebrew xbox, and probably my favorite program of all time.
Not so hard. If you can't buy it in-store, you can always check pawn shops. I got mine there for $80. As far as the HD problem, it's just IDE, so no big deal if it takes the crap. You can use the EEPROM (easy to get when you mod) to lock a new standard HD and replace it. I haven't needed to do it yet, but I know I could if I needed to. My buddy's xbox just broke and I expect it's the harddrive, so that's the first time I can think, and that's not even definite.
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Gamerforlife
- Next-Gen
- Posts: 10184
- Joined: Thu Jul 12, 2007 5:15 pm
- Location: Florida
Don't think they've been mentioned, but Kingdom Under Fire Crusaders, Oddworld: Munch's Odyssey and Buffy the Vampire Slayer are all awesome games in addition to what's already been mentioned. Definitely enough exclusives for the system to be worth it, even though it's library is not nearly as impressive at say, the PS 2.