GoTeamScotch

It's not quite optical-drive-emulation, but the new CERBIOS version 2.00 BIOS that was released earlier this week offers dual hard drive support. The Xbox already supports IDE to SD/CF adapters, so it would be trivial to replace the DVD drive with one of these cheap adapters, then use SD cards in addition to the regular (or upgraded) internal HDD to hold game ISOs.

Fatxplorer is such a useful piece of software. Really helps make Xbox modding more viable in modern days.

The wireless adapter you linked to is not compatible with Ogx360. The Xbox 360 wireless receiver is, but not the newer Xbox One adapter (generically named "Wireless Adapter"). Hopefully support will get added someday because buying multiple 8bitdo adapters and a USB hub is kind of expensive if you want to run multiple Xbox controllers. I'm surprised to hear that Series X|S controllers aren't compatible with 8bitdo adapters. That's unfortunate.

It should be pretty straightforward. For me, the harder part was cutting the lframe trace on the top of the board. Technically, you don't have to cut it, but it's a good idea.

Using an LPC rebuild board is easier than soldering wires. At least in my opinion. Don't be afraid to use the board.

That's pretty clever. I usually use plastic cards or some janky solution like that when I have mine all disassembled and powered on. Can I buy one from you?

If you have your Xbox configured to look for your preferred dashboard at C:\Dashboard\evoxdash.xbe, then you don't need to keep virtually anything that's currently in your E drive. UDATA and TDATA hold your Xbox gamesaves, so don't delete those, but anything else there on E: can be deleted if you don't have a specific need for them. It would be a good idea to move your EEPROM backups to your PC if you haven't done so yet. "evoxdash.xbe" is a common name for Xbox executables that are intended to be used as replacement dashboards. EvolutionX (evox) was one of the earliest dashboards, so other mods that came later kept using C:\evoxdash.xbe or E:\evoxdash.xbe just to make things more compatible with one another.

Yup. That's a pretty easy one. If you don't want to de-solder it, you can just wiggle the capacitor back and forth until it snaps off. If it looks like it did leak, clean it up with alcohol. Also, take a peek at the other capacitors to make sure none of them are bulging.

If that screw caused a short in the power supply, then it's possible that the issue was contained within the power supply and replacing it will resolve the problem. As a reminder, these power supplies are interchangeable between Xbox versions: 1.0-1.1 1.2-1.5 1.6-1.6b

Welcome! Glad you've had a chance to rediscover the Og Xbox. There's a lot your can do with a modded Xbox and if you want to learn and explore more, browsing around these forums are a great place to start. Also, a good resource is the FAQ and Tutorials area on the Xbox subreddit here. Of course, if you run into problems, don't hesitate to ask. There's usually a few folks lingering around that are happy to help. Your drive belt should be easy to replace. It would be a great idea to clean the plastic mechanism parts with rubbing alcohol and adding fresh lubricant afterwards. Those drives are getting pretty old now days and can collect a lot of gunk. Remember to remove your clock capacitors if you haven't already done so! Cheers

What BIOS are you using? How did you format your hard drive? What app/method did you use?

Usually you don't need to. When your Xbox is softmodded, it boots up and tries to load the original Xbox dashboard, which then loads the exploit, which then loads your Dashloader app, which then loads XBMC. When using a custom BIOS (by either TSOP flashing or using a modchip), you're basically skipping the process and just booting up directly into your dashboard of choice (XBMC for example). But your Xbox won't really care that the softmod is there or not. I'm not familiar with that 'softmodding tool 1.1.7' disc. It might have BIOS flashing apps on it, but I'm not sure. Hexen can flash your BIOS though, so that's an option. To flash your new BIOS, you can either use Hexen OR use the app XBlast over to your Xbox and run it (no need to burn a disc). XBlast lets you pick a BIOS from your hard drive and it then flashes your TSOP with that new BIOS. Hexen comes bundled with a bunch of BIOSes, so in that regard it's a little simpler. I prefer XBlast personally. Instructions for using XBlast can be found here. No. This process doesn't format your hard drive. If you have a larger hard drive installed, then you'll need to use a BIOS that supports large hard drives (also known as "LBA48" patching). Many of them do by default, or they can be patched to support bigger hard drives. iND-BIOS, for example, has LBA48 support built-in. EvoxM8+ can be patched to support LBA48 (and there's pre-patched copies of M8+ floating around on the internet). In general, it's a good idea to, but like I said, you can leave those softmod files in place. After you flash your TSOP, they're not necessary anymore and if you try to load up the stock Xbox dashboard, it could try to load the softmod, which could cause your Xbox to freeze up. Once your TSOP is flashed, you can copy over a stock version of the Xbox's C drive to remove the softmod. If there's files on your E drive relating to the softmod, you can delete those too. Most BIOSes will try to load whatever app you have under E:\evoxdash.xbe. If you have your Dashloader app located here and it points to XBMC, then you should be all set. If you want to skip using Dashloader, you could configure your BIOS to point to a certain app on your hard drive. I have my BIOS set to load "E:\XBMC\default.xbe". If your flash your TSOP and something goes wrong, you can pop in a disc (like Hexen) and use the file browser to look around your hard drive to see what's going wrong. If it were me, I'd flash iND-BIOS 5004.67 to the TSOP using XBlast, then find a backup of the Xbox's C drive on the internet and copy that over to your C drive. iND-BIOS looks at E:\evoxdash.xbe for a dashboard to boot up into, but you can use the "Ind bios configurator" app for PC to make it boot up to an app in a different folder if you wanted to. Again, if Dashloader is already at E:\evoxdash.xbe, then you probably don't have to configure ind-bios. Tip: don't flash the "BFM" version of any BIOS to your TSOP chip.

Not all HDMI cables are made equally, no. Whether or not you'll notice or care about the difference in picture quality is a different story. The HDMI adapter cables made by Pound and Hyperkin are okay, but aren't as good as N64 Freak's internal HDMI mod or Kekule's HDMI cable. The Pound and Hyperkin cables can sometimes show lines or visual noise in the video signal (the amount of visual noise can vary per Xbox even). The cheap $6 Xbox component cables on eBay usually suck, so anything else is a better option. If your TV has component inputs and you can find a good set of component cables, then there's no real need to get an HDMI cord/adapter. Like Dave said, MakeMHZ's HDMI mod is supposedly the best option out there, but it also requires that you solder it onto your Xbox and not everyone is comfortable performing that process.

Are you sure? According to the Xblast manual, a partially working TSOP is needed for this method to work. I bought an Xblast from N64 Freak a few months ago with the expectation that I could use it fix a board that had a bad copy of iND-BIOS flashed to it. Apparently the "inject config into BIOS" feature of the iND-BIOS configurator tool doesn't work and leads to a corrupt BIOS. I tried and failed to fix the TSOP using an Xblast, then researched it and found out this is the reason why. I just have a cheap Aladdin chip on that board that lives there permanently.

Linking a few potentially relevant sites/projects. These projects could have some useful examples or serve as inspiration. ----------- pata-gpio: https://github.com/manawyrm/pata-gpio Purpose: Use Raspberry Pi's GPIO as an IDE interface. Allows you to connect IDE hard drives to a Raspberry Pi, which can then connect to a PC over the Pi's USB port. This basically acts like a IDE-USB adapter. Not exactly an ODE, but could provide some useful insight into reading/writing to an IDE cable over a Pi's gpio pins. One downside is that there's no pins leftover for handling the Xbox's tray state. Another is that the data transfer speeds top out at ~800 KB/s due to the use of libgpio, which isn't intend for data transmission like this. So passing data to an Xbox's motherboard in real time probably isn't realistic using this method. Xbox DVD drives send data to the motherboard at many times that rate. But again, this project could potentially just be used for reference to get an idea of how to tackle sending IDE signals from an Raspberry Pi. Also, in this same project, the author has a GPIO to IDE adapter board (with gerber files). ------------- The NetPi-IDE project (SVN: click here), mentioned in my 1st post, seems to have some interesting hardware to go along with the project. It has a custom board with an fpga that allows for faster transfer speeds. So, in its current implementation it is limited to 2MB/s, but can be clocked faster. An interesting concept. I wouldn't think a single Pi (or Teensy, etc) would have enough overhead to deal with ODE as well as HDMI signal processing. EEPROM tools might be an neat additional feature, but I think the limitation there would be a lack of GPIO pins (assuming they would all would be tied up on the IDE interface).