Hey friends, anyone into modding consoles and things? It's a bit of an obsession of mine... :P

Today I finished everything but the dashboard/OS portion of a pretty lengthy upgrade process to an original V1.0 XBox. It's been fun :)

Things done:

1. CPU upgrade from 733MHz to 1.4GHz PIII "Tualatin"
2. Doubled the RAM to 128MB
3. Swapped the spinny 8GB disk for a loaded 2TB solid state drive
4. Removed the DVD-ROM and buttoned it up to make it look good, giving a ton of cooling benefit to the internals but also removing redundant parts since I won't need it (and also it speeds up booting and quiets things down).
5. Low noise/high speed fan upgrade (this thing is near silent at this point) 6. Stellar modchip

I'm pretty pleased with how this has turned out. My only gripe is that it looks kinda shit on my CRT for some reason and I'm not sure why. Well, I should say, the dashboard looks like shit, but games look quite good.

I've modded a bunch of consoles and continue to obsess over this....anyone else into this type of stuff? Would love to discuss more. I'm about to embark on a complete new Game Gear build. The only original parts I'll be sourcing are an ASIC of an original game gear as well as one connector that's proprietary. Everything else will be scratch built. :)

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A49 2023/02/26 (Linux/64)
* Origin: m O N T E R E Y b B S . c O M (911:1719/0)

on 23 Dec 2023, esc said...

I've modded a bunch of consoles and continue to obsess over
this....anyone else into this type of stuff? Would love to discuss more.

Sweet!

I still have my original Xbox which is in almost new condition despite me playing a shit ton of games on it back in the day. Well, I thought it was in great condition until I read about the clock capacitor which is notorious for leaking all over the place. Opened up my Xbox and, sure enough, mine was leaking. I cut it out and cleaned up the board a little. That was 5 or 6 years ago, and while it seemed to work fine, I *vaguely* recall seeing some other bulging caps while I was in there, so I've been planning to re-cap the board for a while now, including replacing that clock capacitor.

Now, I have the original component cable HD kit, as well as one of the Pound HDMI cables which, for a while there, were highly praised, although it seems like there are a number of internal HDMI mods that are recommended over the Pound cable these days, so that might be the second thing I do. Whether I take it any further and mod it to let me play disk images, or do anything else, I haven't decided - I like the idea of keeping it more or less original.

|07j |15A C K |07p |15H L A S H |07!
|08[https://jackphla.sh]

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/25 (Windows/32)
* Origin: d i s t o r t i o n // d1st.org (911:1423/0)