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First of all... I absolutely love this site & community. You all rock. Period. Grab some popcorn, this is the fist 'official' time I'm telling the "brief" version... So my name's Toby Dziubala and I was the most junior member of the very original handful of people who were on the "Xbox Advanced Technology Group" or "ATG" group. Through a series of wild twists of fate, I was hired sometime in late 1999, when it was only about maybe 10 of us. I worked directly for Seamus Blackley, who interviewed me, and I was working shoulder-to-shoulder with Drew Angeloff. My first responsibility was to coordinate with the MS Hardware fabricators, external "interns" that were writing demos for us, and Nvidia who was producing us experimental graphics cards -- in order to produce what you guys know as the "Prototypes" or "Silver X's". So basically, when BillG and Seamus climbed on stage at GDC in March of 2000 to officially announce our existence, and it didn't go perfectly... it would have been *my* ass, and we wouldn't be having this story time right now LOL. If you heard stories about the prototypes being tossed down stairwells and such, well that was me. Now you're probably asking yourselves, "who is this dude and how come there isn't a mention of him in the book?"... well, simply put, really s**tty politics. I'll explain: I was actually hired about 8 months or so before into a product called "Commerce Server" (Bldg 25) as a newbie SDE/T through "Volt" (I was an "A Dash"). Just prior to my arrival, Microsoft had lost a huge court case over benefits and hours to their contractors. I had no part in all of that obviously, but it was such a cultural blow to the company that to this day you'll most likely still pick up on a vibe of animosity towards contractors. Back then it was, palpable. So when Dean Takahashi (sp?) was making his rounds around the office gathering materials for the "Opening The Xbox", he was specifically instructed not to talk to me or include me in any way. On record, Seamus totally went to bat for me, but "they" wouldn't have it. There was no way in hell some contractor puke was going to receive any positive publicity in light of the loss of the lawsuit , and moreover, the massive blow-to-the-corporate-ego that came with it. I've actually got some really cool stories about that time, so I'm working on putting together a little "addendum" to the story that I'll probably put out in some kind of e-book format. My fiancé has been busing my chops for the last couple years to "tell my part of the story", so I finally figured what the hell... there are enough people out there that would be entertained by it, and, I guess if I don't tell it, it just dies with me some day heh morbid!! Which brings me to my final bit and title of this post. I don't remember actually bringing it home with me, but, what you guys call the "Alpha" controller, has been living in a moving box that's been following me around all these years. Except this wasn't used on any dev kit, *I* used it when I was testing out the prototypes. Also, the dev kits didn't even exist at the time heh... I included a couple photos of it. The serial numbers on the back should tell you the rest. I figured it would be a shame to just have it live out it's days in some featureless cardboard moving box when it could be loved, appreciated, and shared. My days of working for big tech companies are more than over -- take a look at my banner image on my profile and that'll tell you why. So, since I'm trying to get a new 'reality capture' business off the ground down here where I live in Vegas, I figured why not auction it off. I'm probably going to take a few months to get all my stories typed out and compiled for the little e-reader I mentioned. But I'm of co got to save at least a couple surprises for that, but I'm happy to share whatever memories I still have with you guys, so ask away. Anyway -- Again this site is so cool to see; you all are runnin with a piece of what turned out to be a part of cultural history -- and a surreal confirmation that we actually did put something out in the universe that brought some happiness and fun experiences people.... happiness, and gamer-rage because "f*$k that! That was bu#(%*it!" [[*throws controller across living room*]] Ta-ta for now! Tob

So I was roaming Kijiji in my area (Toronto, Canada), and I saw an ad for an OG Xbox, selling for $15 CAD. The main pic was just the dusty, dirty lid, so I'm not surprised it wasn't quick to sell, but the second pic was the front. I offered him $40 to meet me at a subway station near to him (across town from me) and he agreed. Long story short, it needs all the typical work (clock cap, power rail caps, deep clean and a new hdd), but it's all there and it works. It's a 1.2 with a Samsung DVD, a 300 gig IDE drive, a very old install of Avalaunch, and some screen flicker. Pretty sure the new power rail caps will take care of the screen flicker. It was starting randomly at first, but that stopped after I removed the clock cap and cleaned up all of the spillage. I've ordered the internal parts and I'm really looking forward to working on this. I've never had an X3 system before...it's like answering an ad for "old car" and discovering it's a Porsche. I'd be happy to update this post if anyone's interested!

My OpenXenium came in the mail today and I'm looking forward to installing it in my 1.6. I currently have Rocky5's Softmod running, with a 500gb SSD installed. My concerns are that I can't get a clear answer on if I need to remove my softmod before or after the installation, how I go about that, or if I even need to remove it at all. I'm a bit of a chip noob so I don't have much of an idea as to what I'm doing past the soldering. I have about 250gb of games on my F drive which I would like to not transfer over again. Any help is greatly appreciated.

I've got 2 XBOX's and one works perfectly and that's the one with a Xenium Ice chip in it, the other has an Aladdin chip I think, I can't recall as it was done about 15 years ago The chip requires that you hold down the power button for about 2 seconds to turn the mod chip on and boot the Xbox to UnleashX. If you don't hold the power button down the screen just goes to no signal and the Xbox doesn't work, it powers on obviously just no signal. If you do hold it down and enable the mod chip the Xbox boots up fine and works well, the only problem is if you do the two trigger / 2 button reboot trick with the M8 bios it does start the reboot process but just goes to a no signal screen. If I go to the option in UnleashX to boot to MSDash it just goes to this same black no signal screen. I tried reinstalling MSDash in case it was a problem with the dashboard, but that made no difference. Does anyone know a solution to this? it's not a big deal but I'd like to resolve it if possible. Thanks in advance.

Hey guy, I've been having an on going issue with my xbox's lcd screen. I've had the screen installed for atleast 6 months and im happy with it. But it seems it constantly blanks out mid game and sometimes will come back after a few minutes, there is a few times where the screen will actually dim(more than what I have it set to) then blank out shortly after. I've also notice after booting if I go into settings and switch it on and off it will not go blank. I've gone through the lcd.mxl and revamped it to removed most scrolling texts or any character that isn't supposed by the 2004a lcd, reflowed my solder, reprogramer my arduino, reflashed my openxenium but still no luck. It also does the exact same thing in xbmc4gamers. Any help would be great. Xbmc4xbox Origins skin + ui update Openxenium Spi2par backpack + smbus wires 1.0 xbox

Hello everyone, i'm new on the scene and a month ago i started with my first modded xbox project. I'm from the Netherlands and have a pal 1.6 hardmod xbox with EVOX M8 bios. I make it to ntsc so i can use all hd modes and using the pound hdmi cable. My goal is to have a xbox with all games that where release on it on 1 disc. So i put a Seagate 3TB disc so i get the max of 2TB and use xbmc4gamers as dash. I found almost all games now, its a pretty challenge to fit them all (using soms ntsc instead of pal games or deleting all un needed files ). i'm now in the mode to test al games (i start the game and go to the first level) and now i''m on the letter c with the club football games. There are around 36 titles (2003 and 2005 versions) but non of them starting. When i started it it goes to a black (blank) screen and nothing happend. I try different sources from games, all the same. Patching ith with 480p loader has no effect. I can find an ACL patch and default patching doesn't work. I don't think it's a image problem, because all club football editions don't start. All other games (so far i tested, now about 200 games) are starting fine (sometimes with patching or finding an other source\version of the game). Any idea how i can start these games to work? Greetings, Mpnet

Hey guys, i' got this 1.6 PSU that seems to be turning the 12v line OFF after some time until it stops feeding it at all. The PSU was burned and repaired by other than me. It seems to be working perfectly, as i made a jumper from the 12v capacitor and it does indeed boot and work for hours, so it must be some component that's responsible for turning off the 12v line on it that is shorted or not operating properly. The thing is, i can't see any damaged component. All the other lines do work and the power button does seem to function. I've been trying to track what component turns off the 12v line when i turn off the console, but to do that i'd need a spare 1.6 PSU which i don't have at the moment. It's a Delta PSU by the way. I've made another post on this forum about the issue but it was in the wrong section. Also i didn't had a clue about what was making the PSU turn off until i found it was the 12v line.

Hi - I have a choice between a Philips or Samsung DVD drive for my newly softmodded xbox - both read disks - which one is the better option as I have quite a large collection of games on disk and intend on copying as many as I can to my hard drive but at 260GB with Coin ops 8 massive on there and other emulators - the disk drive will definitely get some use.