Xbox Mods

Ok, get ready because this one is a doozie.

Last week I bought a mod chip for my Xbox.  Some folks that may, or may not, work with me were talking about it and I decided that it sounded good enough to try.  I bought the Xecuter3 chip from  http://www.system-mods.com/index2.php and it ROCKS!  They produced an excellent walk-through to get it installed here.  Don't be afraid of the soldering as it was quite easy to get done.  The one spot (D0) that I was worried about ended up being quite easy.  I did have trouble getting the solder out of the holes to install the mounting pins, but that was just due to me not having the right hardware.

 

To quote one of the guys:
" The trick – and I mean trick – to the soldering is to get a TINY soldering iron and a tiny roll of solder"

I ripped out the 8 Gig drive that came in the Xbox and put in the only drive I had around..  40Gig.  Some of the others are installing 250Gig drives as this helps later on.

Once I got the unit fired up the first thing I did was flash the BIOS as the team keeps making updates.
Next I FTPed the Xbox Media Center application and added a skin that makes the Xbox look like MCE Windows.  Even my DVD remote works with this thing.

I pointed the music and videos folders to my big drive in the living room that runs BeyondTV.

Now I am going to take all of my Xbox games and rip them to the hard drive of the Xbox so I can lock the discs up for safe keeping.  We have gone through 2 copies of Halo and ruined many games because of the kids stepping on them

Here are some links that I have found useful:

http://xbox-scene.com/
http://www.system-mods.com/index2.php
http://teamxecuter.com/
http://www.x-b-o-x.net/modules/news/

Enjoy!