i would love to get a modded xbox but i was all into the xbox scene when the shiz started hittin the fan and bought one of the first modchips. it was 29 wires and i ended up overheaing my xbox mainboard and toasting it (bridged traces). so i havent had an xbox since..... im actually gettin an xbox this tuesday just not sure bout the moddin. can anything be done with that "007" trick to get a modified bios on? or maybe some foolproof modchip. id shoot myself if i toasted another box. but tht first one was so damn hard u have no idea. and the instructions were printed on a buisness card sized piece of paper that looked like it had been translated from chinese.
yeah, if you guys need any help, i would love to help out if i could. there are a few other guys in these forums that i know personally that could help out. so if any of you needs some help, shoot me a pm . . .
I just modded my xbox 2 weekends ago. Pretty easy actually Used the Executer 2.3b+ solderless chip. It's now all flashed and set up with a dashboard media player all the good stuff.
As for you 120gig harddrive. There is no special 'xbox' harddrive that you have to buy, just look to all your regular places that you buy computer stuff from. The trick is that the hard drive has to be lockable.
I found a list once for which drives are lockable and aren't but I can't find it now. I seem to remember that most newer Western Digitals and Maxtors had the greatest compatibility though.
yeah, get either a maxtor or WD for this. fortunately, modded xbox's have come a long way as far as HD compatibility goes. when i first got into the scene almost a year and a half ago, they had a hard limit of 138 gigs (i think that was it, maybe 137, 136, something along those lines), but they have overcome that. in addition, hd's with 8 mb cache's used to cause problems as well, but these are also no longer a problem. I would say as long as you stick with either of those two hd manufacturers, you should be fine. especially with some of the great deals that have been going on lately (this last semester i have picked up two separate 160 gig hd's from fry's and OD that were 68 bucks out the door. it doesnt get much better than that).
kryyst, how is your solderless chip going? i refuse to even touch those guys. last summer i had a friend that despite all our warnings about some of the problems with these guys, he bought one anyway, cuz he didnt want to solder on his xbox. of course, he couldnt get it working, so he brought it to me, and when all was said and done, we had 3 experienced xbox modders, and none of us could get it consistantly working. the stupid pogo pins were huge in comparison with the d0. anyway, i have heard they had gotten better and smaller, but havent touched them since then. lucky for me, whenever anyone wants an xbox modded i take it to this guy at work who is a soldering god and he solders it in our lab at work with all our tools in 2 or 3 minutes. anyway, did you have any problems with yours?
I have a 1.0 xbox so the bridge where the pins all sit had solder in the wholes so first I tried setting the board on and getting it to work but I couldn't get a good connection ie it'd work for about .5 secs then crash. The D0 wasn't hard to set you just have to scrap off the contact down to the copper and you get a good connection. Once I removed the solder where the rest of the pins were sitting (just scrapped it off gentely with an exacto knife) it set in no problem. It's a good secure fit as I bumped it around a little bit to see if it'd pop off. Last thing I wanted was to put the thing back together again and have it knock loose in the re-assembly.
The chip I used is the Executor 2.3b+ which is probably the best solderless chip around. I would recomend it to anyone that for whatever reasons can't or doesn't want to solder their board. The chip in general is awesome now mind you the x3 will be out or is out which is a step up from that. But with any mod chip I'd recomend one that you can boot either msdashboard or another dashboard at the flick of a switch.
thx for the advice, i found a 120gig Western Digital hard drive on sale at Circut City for $40. One more question tho can any one post a website where there is a list of all or most of the mod chips that i can buy
Hey I'm interested in this whole xbox modding thing. Can anyone tell me the basics about it or what I need to look for or what benefits I can get by modding one? As of now I am pretty much clueless except for some pieces of the puzzle scattered in the above posts.
ok here is the short answer. basically, the typical modified xbox is akin to back in the day when you used to have to unlock a processor to gain access to the higher multipliers. it essentially "unlocks" your xbox to more of a role of a regular computer or media center pc. there are many various advantages anywhere from using modified and homebrew games to running linux on it, but i would say that the main reasons that people mod their xbox is so that they can run games off of the hard drive and so they can watch divx movies on their television. running games off the hard drive is one of the greatest advantages in my mind. i always forget just how slowly games load when playing off of the disc until i have to. but basically, you are running games at hard drive speeds rather than at dvd rom (and shitty dvd drives at that, cept for some of the later samsungs). it really just makes everything better all around. and as far as a media center pc goes, i would much rather have an xbox. the vast majority of xbox's run evolution X which is basically just an operating system that allows you to manage the settings, programs, and games that you have on your xbox. for media files, most people use XBMP (Xbox Media Player) or XBMC (Xbox Media Center). XBMP used to be the standard for the xbox, but XMBC is the more popular one nowadays because XBMP used locked media player 9 code that could not be modified, so XBMP is fully open source. anyway, evolution x (also called evox or evo-x for short) automatically sets up an ftp server on your xbox so that you can transfer files and folders over with ease. this allows you to upload your divx or xvid (or pretty much any codec you can think of. occasionally i will need a new codec for my pc, but i have never found a file that wont play on XBMC) to your movies folder and then simply browse and play. in addition, these players have enhancements that often times will make your divx movies appear better on the xbox than they would on my pc (mainly because of the clarity of lcd's, but still ). in any event, there are tons of useful applications to be found. one of the really exciting communitys is the homebrew community for xbox. they focus on both coding new games for play on the xbox and modifying existing games for xbox. you can get all your favorite older pc games for play with a controller if you want such as doom, rise of the triad, duke nukem, and quake 2. quake 2 plays better than it ever did and it has full networking capabilities and can even run a quake 2 server for you right off of your xbox. anyway, thats enough about that, if you have any questions let us know.
in the meantime, maybe some of us folks can get together and start an official xbox modding thread and we can throw in all the collective knowledge that folks have and then we can toss together a general article about it . . .
Ok, so it's been two months. pyobliE, Coaster, Zecter... you guys modded yet or what?
I've got the DMS X-Bit modchip. Solderless. Can be connected to PC via USB and have bios flashed. External switches to disable the modchip. Have a 120gb 8mb cache Western Digital.
www.consolesource.com is a good place to get modchips and such. It's a Canadian company.
If you guys haven't actually looked yet, www.xbox-scene.com is a great source for n00b info.
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Drowd has contacted my Via PM with his contact detials, so I think I shall be annoying the hell outta him over the coming weeks.
Drowd has contacted my Via PM with his contact detials, so I think I shall be annoying the hell outta him over the coming weeks.
As for you 120gig harddrive. There is no special 'xbox' harddrive that you have to buy, just look to all your regular places that you buy computer stuff from. The trick is that the hard drive has to be lockable.
I found a list once for which drives are lockable and aren't but I can't find it now. I seem to remember that most newer Western Digitals and Maxtors had the greatest compatibility though.
kryyst, how is your solderless chip going? i refuse to even touch those guys. last summer i had a friend that despite all our warnings about some of the problems with these guys, he bought one anyway, cuz he didnt want to solder on his xbox. of course, he couldnt get it working, so he brought it to me, and when all was said and done, we had 3 experienced xbox modders, and none of us could get it consistantly working. the stupid pogo pins were huge in comparison with the d0. anyway, i have heard they had gotten better and smaller, but havent touched them since then. lucky for me, whenever anyone wants an xbox modded i take it to this guy at work who is a soldering god and he solders it in our lab at work with all our tools in 2 or 3 minutes. anyway, did you have any problems with yours?
The chip I used is the Executor 2.3b+ which is probably the best solderless chip around. I would recomend it to anyone that for whatever reasons can't or doesn't want to solder their board. The chip in general is awesome now mind you the x3 will be out or is out which is a step up from that. But with any mod chip I'd recomend one that you can boot either msdashboard or another dashboard at the flick of a switch.
http://www.system-mods.com/index2.php
for general info i go here:
http://www.xbox-scene.com/
good luck and let us know how it goes!
...hey, maybe someone could write up an article to go on the front page or something?
in the meantime, maybe some of us folks can get together and start an official xbox modding thread and we can throw in all the collective knowledge that folks have and then we can toss together a general article about it . . .
DOH! (I didn't mean to use yagga! Look at my posts!!! We need the delete option like at SM)
I've got the DMS X-Bit modchip. Solderless. Can be connected to PC via USB and have bios flashed. External switches to disable the modchip. Have a 120gb 8mb cache Western Digital.
www.consolesource.com is a good place to get modchips and such. It's a Canadian company.
If you guys haven't actually looked yet, www.xbox-scene.com is a great source for n00b info.
once you go modded, you never go back.