All Activity

Just got a great deal on this. $15 with free shipping on eBay. After your reply I did a little more research on The Third Age. Initially I thought it was Strategy RPG, but to my happy surprise it's standard Turn Base. Don't get me wrong, I like SRPG's, but I have to be in the mood for them. Anyway, thanks again for the suggestion!

don't forget pixelfx is also making their retrogem compatible with Xbox. lots of options very soon

I managed to digitize some of those tapes before this happened, the ones i digitized were shot on VHS-C, the rest Hi8 which i don't have a camera for. I'm actually not quite sure where the tapes ended up, hopefully they didn't get thrown out. I was unaware actually that those guys were all working on HDMI mods, that's super interesting. Harcroft is a good guy, him and i did some work upscaling old XBL ads together lol. I think i'll wait on it and see what happens. The HDMI space could definitely use some competition. Thanks for the info! PS. i love @ModzvilleUSA's videos. been watching him for a while.

It does? I haven't had any on all the consoles I've run it on... What issues are you experiencing?

Wanted to add that bridges are easy to avoid if you use a shit ton of flux (obviously) and then only add a little to the tip of your iron and do the drag method. You can always add more once you sap all the solder off the tip of your iron, but if you have too much, you'll end up with bridges and needing to remove it. Although I don't wick right away, I'll try to go along another side/row of pins and move some of the solder from one row to the next that I work on. Much easier... and you'll need less solder for that next row you started. And never get solder into the vias around the chips. I have no idea why, but it kills motherboards. If it happens, use braid to get it out of the via before you run power through the board... seriously.

If you just did the those I mentioned (and of course any that looked suspect) you’ll probably be fine for a while. Just thought I’d mention the full recap as an option for down the road. If you run in to issues finding the cpu caps on the board dm me your revision or a pic of the mobo and I can give you the locations and values. For the rf shielding I thought you might find this useful. Quite a few people chimed in with different methods they use (sanding, painting, replacing, etc).

I'll look at getting all caps replaced in time but I will do the main ones for the time being. Yes, it's the RF shield - sorry I wasn't specific. Ta

Glad you were able to get everything going! There are 3-5 caps (depending on revision) near the cpu and power connector that’ll be either 1500 microfarad 6.3v or 330 microfarad 6.3v (depending on revision). These tend to be common points of failure so they’re definitely caps to replace if you haven’t already. Given the age of all the of the radial caps they could honestly all use replacing but I’d start with those even if I didn’t do any others. As to your second query it sounds like you are referring to the rf shield underneath the mobo. Is that correct?

I forget where I saw it, but I read that to avoid the issues with power saving drives, you need to disable the head parking feature. Not sure if this is a permanent fix, or it just helps reduce the chance of issues. I saw someone on reddit say that they used Autosol for the shielding. I've never tried anything myself. I've seen some caps between the board and fan bulge, but I don't know if any others fail at a more extreme rate.

Thanks a mill FrostyMaGee! for all the great info and offer in further guidance. It has been a hell of a journey to say the least.In between reading posts, I managed to get one XBox back to stock and softmodded and upgraded the drive. I ordered the IDE(PATA) adapter 6 years ago along with the 80pin ribbon cable, so was all good to go. Had a few 2TB WD green drives that checked all the boxes. I know you said avoid them but they are very quiet and I haven't noticed any stalling when playing or loading - so far. After my negative experience above with the wrong unlock/lock adapter, I had the workflow down pat playing around with the Warmstor brand IDE adapter from eBay, FATXplorerBeta64 and XBoxHDM-2.3-Beta4 (on the borked but recovered drive above). Quick and easy. Did not tick the right box in FATXplorerBeta64 to format the drive correctly so quickly doing that gave access to the whole drive. Managed to rip most of my games onto the HDD (a few refused to work) and have been a happy chappy since. If anyone needs a link to the IDE unlock adapter in Oz, do let me know. The clock capacitor has been removed on this baby, but I need to replace the x3 caps near the CPU/GPU - thermal paste replaced on both chips. Parts coming in from abroad. Another XBox had a flashing orange ring after cleaning copious filth upon opening and stopped working - was working seemigly ok with carpets of filth - with the orange light indicator and refusing to show an image and then completely blank. I narrowed it down and replaced the ADM1032 Temperature Monitor with this https://au.rs-online.com/web/p/temperature-humidity-sensor-ics/7919623, which may have been indicating overheat and causing the issue. I ripped pads and spent a week micro-soldering to recreate connections but managed to get it onfor continuity. I'll confirm all is working once the caps come in so I can recap both xboxes and then add a 2TB to this one, too. Two remaining questions I have: 1. The damaged caused over time by clock and other cap leakage should not be underestimated. I have been lucky with these two I have and will ensure I get to all the other caps in time. Please please please remove the clock cap at minimum. Apart from the four caps I will have replaced, are there others that have a tendency to do the above mentioned damaged? 2. There seems to be a lot of corrosion/rust on the metal suppoprt frame at the bottom or near the fan. I tried soaking in baking soda but that did not help - maybe I should make the bath more acidic? If anyone has any experience with this corrosion any advice would be appreciated

Absolutely, it's on my list. I've already been able to pick up the other Tolkien games. Looking forward to getting the Third Age.

Welcome! Since you said you enjoy rpgs I thought I’d recommend Lord of the Rings: The Third Age. It’s an rpg I really enjoyed on the original Xbox.

Just done a v1.1 myself. Did get a bridge on chip 3 and whilst going to test on a Jafar loaded with Xblast, it started beeping. Just for future reference. All good now, just wicked it away. Quite easy to spot if you look at a cut across of the board at the chip pins, you've added.

Hello, I'm new to retro Xbox collecting but in a short time I've already amassed a nice, little collection (40 games in roughly 2 weeks). The current prize of my collection is a pristine CIB copy of Arx Fatalis, which I got last week, off an ebay auction for $62. According to PriceCharting I overpaid just a bit, but I'm happy with it. Along with Arx, I'm currently playing GUN and The Hobbit, which I think are both very solid games for the era. I'm a big Adventure & RPG fan, so those are the genre sets I hope to complete first. I also love Platformers, FPS' (even though I suck at them) and Sports games as well. I'm also running my Xbox on my Hitachi Flat Screen with the LEVELHIKE HDMI Adapter. Thanks to this adapter I've discovered that most of the backwards compatible games I own actually look and run better than their Xbox One digital counterparts. Any and all advice on how to get the most out of my old Xbox is very much appreciated. Again, it's great to be here!

I just realized that pic was in the OP. I actually found it on ebay.

olá, boa noite! Na hora que eu vou passar a imagem 2TB para o HD, com HDD RAW v1.20, para nos 50%, Aguem pode me ajudar por favor.

That part really sucks. I've recently been cataloging and digitally archiving all my old family photos (going back to the 60's). There's thousands. And digitizing VHS tapes. I couldn't imagine losing all that stuff. Sorry for your loss of this stuff. I'm sure there's other folks, but the 1st name that pops into my head for getting a new HDMI-kitted Xbox would be @ModzvilleUSA (https://twitter.com/modzvilleusa) Just FYI, there's about to be two new options for internal/digital HDMI mods. OXHD (by Ryzee and Harcroft) and an HDMI project being worked on by Nemesis. Both are close to being done. Point being- if you wait a bit you'll have more options beyond MakeMHZ to choose from.

As an alternative to Cerbios, which still has massive issues with non-component video signals

Definitely a real thing I've seen in many youtube vids. I most recently saw an lcd temp display on the front of a console. A bit of an eye sore, but a very nice feature.

Yes, I will do this! I intend to launch a version with all 4 games together with The Orange Box menu (it will probably only work on the HD) and also the games separated by ISOs, just as you proposed, each game will have its own separate version

Time to annoy Cerbios devs to include that now. Lol /s

Get them from pandora.

I've had some bad experiences with water, i've attempted to repair water damaged electronics (salt spreader speed controllers for trucks, among other things) before that weren't plugged in or anything when it got wet and the minerals from the water just don't come off boards no matter what i try, just ends up going bang. Anything i've cleaned dried & tested so far hasn't worked unfortunately. some of it i'm keeping around so i can have another look, like my shortwave radios which are very sentimental. I don't have an ultrasonic cleaner, but i'm not sure if it would have been worth the cost, judging by the size of them i'd be somewhat limited maybe as to what i could put in one. This all was caused by a week or 2's worth of non-stop rain in my area & a creek i'm pretty close to flooding as well. The sump pump never kicked on because of a bent rod that attaches to the float and this must have happened overnight, as i woke up and part of my morning routine is going downstairs to have coffee at my computer and there's water. I kept my stuff down here because i'm living in this house temporarily until i get married soon & get a house of my own, there's really not a lot of space for me here but i did what i had to do, and i honestly never pictured this happening somehow. I definitely learned now.

im in now

yes on their discord a few days ago.