Console Mods
by I just went on a site for XBox modding. I haven't been on any lately, and I was amazed at what some of the people were doing. Copying their games to 120 Gig hard drives they installed in their XBoxes, burning multi-game discs and such. pretty amazing. I remember way back when I had my Playstation, I installed my mod-chip so i could play a bunch of import copies a friend of mine sold me. something about opening up something you're not supposed to do and altering it. reminded me of how when I was little I used to take apart all my toys to see how they worked.
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Check out http://xbox-linux.sourceforge.net/ Really cool web site on making your Xbox run Linux, or run Xbox on your Linux PC. There are so many
diferent things you can do. I going to buy one, and run multi hard drive with regular Xbox OS and Linux.
Xbox is really cool and all, but when it comes down to all these mods why not just use your PC. It is a cheap PC though if you dont own one. 179 bucks for a system. not bad. just throw in a hard drive and mod chip and you got a pc.
yeah the xbox has a pentuim4 in it. so you are right its more pc then anything, but as far as games its better playing on there then on a pc i think.
true dat. you dont gotta use a mouse and keyboard. but you can always get a controller for your PC. you are right, though, its much better to sit on your couch and play games thru your tv. which is most likely larger than your computer monitor.
good question.
1) its small, fits under your tv
2) has cool controllers, (yeah I know they are just usb)
3) has built in TV out
4) much quieter than a computer
Ok, i'm going to try this whole thing again and save it somehow....
I heard about modchips and my life went upside down. I fell in love with the thought, i was obsessed really. Reading all the forums, finding all the sites about them, watching clips of installs, clips of the actual bios installed and the scrolling thru the totally unfamiliar menu. I was amazed. So I talked to Ian about it, and told him I was going to get one.
First thing, which is the best one to get? there are a lot out there. I found that alot of people were saying Xecutor2Pro was the best. Most upgradable, up to 4 bios' at once, external on/off switch (for Live play) and a list of other reasons. It cost me $58 including shipping. Not too bad. It came. I Rejoiced. As I openned it i knew there were going to be at least 10 solder points but I thought I'd be able to handle it. No way. So I called a friend who works with electronics. I asked him if he knew anyone who could, HE could. So he did, it took him 10 minuts, he's my hero.
So after I got the box open, took the hdd out and the DVD rom out, he could fit in there and do his thing. No i need to flash the Bios. Thats where Ian became my hero. (Basically I was a man with a dream but no skill) Ian had dled some stuff and we installed it, there were some very strict rules to follow to make it work. But it did.
I could put all my games on the hdd (and then some) but after installing one game I qickly realized that there wasn't that much space on the stock hdd 8g to be exact. The game I had Installed was about 3g (Games vary from .3-6g) So I knew I needed a bigger hdd.
Back to the forums I went. I found that most people preferred the Maxtor 120g @ 7200rpm. Thats what I got. It cost about $85 from staples.com after rebate. So that took some more of ian's tallents. I read about a way to trick the mb into thinking that hdd was the original hdd by using the same serial numbers and what not. I don't know really. But its so you can play with the chip off, back to normal. So after we got it working and did some trouble shooting I went home. I went home and put all my games one there and a few 'bonus' ones. So after having 14 games on there I still have 75g of free space..... thats like a MILLION more games.....
In addition to being able to put games on there and never putting the game disc in there again there are several cool features. Ian happened to have some emulators on his comp. so he sent them over. I can play F-Zero on my xbox. Ther is also an awesome Media Player, I can play all my MP3's over the local network, including any movies I might have, also I can play streaming radio stations thru it. There are even more things I can do I just need to beat KoTOR first then I will have time to mess with it. KoTOR is a courtesy of a friend who came to play 16 player Halo, he happened to bring it with him...
So thats my story... Mod Chip -120g HDD.... makes for a complete life change.
Enjoy.
ok. i like this. this is very good. here are my questions-
did you know about clamping the mod chips on? or is ian conning me on this idea??
does the HD ONLY work with maxtor hard drives?
and how much space approx. did f-zero take up? (i'm figuing on putting goldeneye, mario kart, and one or two other favorites on the hard drive)
n64 carts are like 256 megabytes max I think. don't worry about it.
yeah they got the clamp on chips. its more like the connectors touch and are held in place by a screw. They say it works, but they also say if you bump it hard you can jog it loose so your hade to go back in and fix it... it might be worth it if your can't solder.
as far as the hdd, you got a problem with maxor??
they just said its the most compatable. you can really put whatever you want in there. if you got one specifically read some forums about it and see if anyone had trouble with it.
yeah and i didn't even notice the emulators were on the hdd b/c i had so much room like dean said they take up nothing
it's *ROM*s guy.
emulator is the program that emulates the console.
rom is the game itself (its literally a copy of the contents of the cartridges ROM - um, a little chip with info on it.)
so i think i got 3 emulators on there, nes, nc17, N64,snes... thank you
well i wrote a huge story about how i went about it, but it was deleted when i was auto matically logged out... so forget it.
I just finished helping my bro mod his xbox. He put in a chip, and a new hard drive (120gb), and he can now play games right off the hard drive, and play n64, nes, and snes games and tons of other stuff. Also can play mp3s from pc over the network, or internet streams. It's sweet.
that is really awesome. what emulators is he using for each?
I think I set him up with fce for nes, xsnesx, and a project 64 variant for n64
dude! ian! help me do that!
i mean, ian, can you PLEEASE help me with that...what's a good page to get started doing all this stuff? I've never soldered before...