tell me making the Xbox an awesome media center!

[Dakinggamer87]

Good oXbox games? *Sigh* Where's h8b1llg8s when you need him? Panzer Dragoon Orta, Conker: Live and Reloaded, Crazy Taxi 3, Jet Set Radio Future, Crimson Skies, Outrun 2, Psychonauts, Ninja Gaiden, House of the Dead 3, Dreamfall: The Longest Journey, Phantom Dust, and a whole lot of other stuff. I may not be a fan off the 360, but the oXbox had a lot of quality titles, particularly from Sega.

As for its media center capabilities, I staunchly maintain that an oXbox with a custom hard drive is the absolute best media center for its value, and one of the best overall. If you put in the effort, it will be more than worth your time. First, make sure that oXbox of yours works before you spend any more money on it. Get a power cable and see if it powers on. If it does, congratulations! You're on your way to an awesome media center. Next, get a cheap component cable off of Ebay. The oXbox can output video in 1080i and has surround sound. If you already have a home theater setup [Speakers, Audio Receiver, the whole shebang], skip the cable and get the Xbox AV Pack [http://www.ecvv.com/product/134000.html], which has support for optical audio for 5.1 surround sound. Next, softmod your Xbox. Or, if you're feeling adventurous, install a modchip. A modchip is more expensive, but it makes installing a new Hard Drive significantly easier. Other people here have already explained how to softmod an Xbox, so I won't go into detail about that. During/after the softmodding process, you should install XBMC [Xbox Media Center] onto the system as your default dashboard [the dashboard is the system menu for the Xbox], so you can load media and games onto it. After that, order a 500 GB IDE hard drive, and follow a tutorial online to install it. Once you have all that sorted out, you can transfer files to your Xbox over the network over FTP. There are a million fun ways to customize XBMC to make it look really gorgeous and efficient, so play around with it for a while with the PC version of the program to get acquainted with the software.

Like I said, all this will be worth the effort once you have it up and running. Plus, unlike its younger brother, the oXbox is a sturdy, hardy machine that will last you for ages, and for thousands of hours of media playing.

I totally agree it's an amazing media center

[vlame]

do all that but don't forget to put in an ATA-133 cable, they're only $2 shipped.

[Bikeage]

why did you even get the xbox if you got all this hate for it?

it was $5. I figured I'd sell or trade it for more than that.

power it up! if you got to slice one of those power cords to make it fit.

that... doesn't sound smat. I'll power it up when I stumble upon a cheap AC. I'm in no rush.

Reminds me of the Xbox I found for $5 at Goodwill. Within 5 minutes of getting home I busted out the Dremel to round the end of an old power cord , and it works! I've not done anything with it since, thinking about just using it for emulation.... is the stock 8GB enough for that if I go balls out and fill it with SNES, Genesis, and Neo-Geo roms?

[vlame]

why did you even get the xbox if you got all this hate for it?

it was $5. I figured I'd sell or trade it for more than that.

power it up! if you got to slice one of those power cords to make it fit.

that... doesn't sound smat. I'll power it up when I stumble upon a cheap AC. I'm in no rush.

Reminds me of the Xbox I found for $5 at Goodwill. Within 5 minutes of getting home I busted out the Dremel to round the end of an old power cord , and it works! I've not done anything with it since, thinking about just using it for emulation.... is the stock 8GB enough for that if I go balls out and fill it with SNES, Genesis, and Neo-Geo roms?

i would say about 2 dozen games for each system.

[deathclaw]

do all that but don't forget to put in an ATA-133 cable, they're only $2 shipped.

what for?

Well, you can always get yourself a cat-5 cable and hardwire the Xbox to your router/modem if that's an option.

nah. It would be nowhere close to my router (I'm on wifi with the modem in the bedroom). If I can't just pop in a DVD movie in the box, rip it, and be done then I've already lost interest in working on such a project.

you sure can do it, it's easy

why did you even get the xbox if you got all this hate for it?

it was $5. I figured I'd sell or trade it for more than that.

power it up! if you got to slice one of those power cords to make it fit.

that... doesn't sound smat. I'll power it up when I stumble upon a cheap AC. I'm in no rush.

Reminds me of the Xbox I found for $5 at Goodwill. Within 5 minutes of getting home I busted out the Dremel to round the end of an old power cord , and it works! I've not done anything with it since, thinking about just using it for emulation.... is the stock 8GB enough for that if I go balls out and fill it with SNES, Genesis, and Neo-Geo roms?

I have a softmodded xbox myself and I put there all NES roms + all PC Engine ROMs + something like 1 GB of games for DOSXBOX + 1 Xbox game (Crash Bandicoot:Wrath of Cortex) + 3 PSX games (Crash Bandicoot 2, Zanac X Zanac, Vib Ribbon) + some games for Neo Geo, SNES, Genesis, GBA and maybe some other consoles.

So I think you can fill it with all SNES + Genesis + Neo Geo ROMs ever released, if you don't put there several versions of each game (like Super Mario World Europe, Super Mario World US, Super Mario World Japanese, and so on)

[deathclaw]

And BTW, I would not bother putting there a 500 GB HDD, they are expensive comparing to bigger drives. The best value you can get is for 1 - 2 TB. I don't know about any size limit for xbox, I've seen one person putting a 3 TB HDD into his Xbox

But of course, you will have to get a PATA to SATA adapter. And whatever the size of HDD is, be it 20 GB or 3 TB, make sure the drive is lockable. If it's not, I think there's no way it could work, unless you buy a modchip. Try this site http://xboxdrives.x-pec.com/?p=list

EDIT: And here's a nice list of xbox games with their size. According to this, on average a game has around 2-3 GB. There are mostly older games though. http://fileforums.com/showthread.php?t=43604

[vlame]

the high speed ATA cables will lessen the load times of files, ive seen drastic changes especially if the game is copied to the hard drive as well. for any hard drive larger than 137 you will need to flash the bios to enable these large drives.

[gtmtnbiker]

the high speed ATA cables will lessen the load times of files, ive seen drastic changes especially if the game is copied to the hard drive as well.

I haven't heard of this before but it looks like it will improve load times between 20-30%. See this web page for details:

http://www.llamma.com/xbox/Mods/xbox_at ... chmark.htm

[deathclaw]

the high speed ATA cables will lessen the load times of files, ive seen drastic changes especially if the game is copied to the hard drive as well. for any hard drive larger than 137 you will need to flash the bios to enable these large drives.

Wow, I would never thought of that cable. Thanks for the info.

[vlame]

the high speed ATA cables will lessen the load times of files, ive seen drastic changes especially if the game is copied to the hard drive as well.

I haven't heard of this before but it looks like it will improve load times between 20-30%. See this web page for details:

http://www.llamma.com/xbox/Mods/xbox_at ... chmark.htm

don't forget im talking about ATA 133 cables so that might be an additional 15% on top of the 30% since the jump from 33 to 100 then to 133 is about half.