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OG Xbox Appreciation and Lack of Emulation Thread of the big black box of doom

Peltz

Member
I did some rearranging today, i'm about 10 games shy of finishing my xbox 1 and maybe 40 for 360 but, I moved them all to their own wall and flipped games front/center to take up space until more future things go there, figured I liked it enough to picture it :p

20170105_155701_zpsiwvn0a2l.jpg

20170105_155706_zps9jmfyiua.jpg

20170105_155712_zpsluwc783v.jpg

20170105_155641_zpsgsjdniuk.jpg


I believe something like 1000 between the 2 and about 450 for the OG Xbox, quite a beast for such a short life span.


That is mighty impressive!
 

Timu

Member
I picked up another 720p game, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4. And it runs in 60FPS as well!

znDr2b.png


I used to play these games back in the day, well, a few of them, but now I'm getting back to them.

EDIT: You even get to play as Jango Fett in this game!

h0U8Mx.png


Now I want to play Star Wars Bounty Hunter again!
 

Crynox

Neo Member
I did some rearranging today, i'm about 10 games shy of finishing my xbox 1 and maybe 40 for 360 but, I moved them all to their own wall and flipped games front/center to take up space until more future things go there, figured I liked it enough to picture it :p

20170105_155701_zpsiwvn0a2l.jpg

20170105_155706_zps9jmfyiua.jpg

20170105_155712_zpsluwc783v.jpg

20170105_155641_zpsgsjdniuk.jpg


I believe something like 1000 between the 2 and about 450 for the OG Xbox, quite a beast for such a short life span.

That is an amazing collection. Just when I thought I was beginning to get too many games, perfect timing.
 

Cday

Banned
Just replayed BLACK; it wasn't as good as I remember. Definitely influenced later games (Call of Duty, BattleField, etc.), but the story is almost non existent, and the gameplay is mediocre. Impactful game, but really not worth going back to.

It was good back in 2006 when I rented it from Blockbuster. I got it for ~$4 recently and yeah. It's mediocre. My main problems with it are the stiff aiming controls and bullet sponge enemies.
 
I know there was some discussion about component cables a few pages back, but the exact post I am looking for escapes me. Was there a favorite between the monster component cables and the Microsoft break out box?
 

Kimgaz

Neo Member
Finally I got my account validated so I can post instead of just lurking!

Got interested in the Xbox again last summer as I have been collecting quite a lot of 360 games. I whipped out my Crystal version Xbox hoping to play some PGR2 and KOTOR, for example. The disc drive didn't close at all so I had to open the thing and it turns out my long lost Halo 2 disc was jammed in there, somehow. After this the box works like a charm and I have since bought four extra consoles. Yes, four. I haven't had neither the time nor the motivation to mod any of them but I'll do it at some point.

Game collection is about 70 games for this magnificent console. Still lots of games on my list to get, but it's unfortunately quite a lot harder to find any rare games in this part of the world. I have ordered some from Ebay and I'm always vigilant on auction sites and such so I'm not worried about finding all the classics I want at some point. Fortunately almost no one here knows the value of rare and even expensive games. I have bought so many good games for about 1€ a pop.
 

Crynox

Neo Member
Over the Christmas break I have been playing my Xbox. Finally managed to complete Splinter Cell which was really enjoyable such a great game really immersive gameplay and sound. Since then I'm back onto one of my old favourites, PGR2, it still really brings a smile to my face so satisfying. I'm trying to get mostly Platinum medals.
 

EmiPrime

Member
Game collection is about 70 games for this magnificent console. Still lots of games on my list to get, but it's unfortunately quite a lot harder to find any rare games in this part of the world. I have ordered some from Ebay and I'm always vigilant on auction sites and such so I'm not worried about finding all the classics I want at some point. Fortunately almost no one here knows the value of rare and even expensive games. I have bought so many good games for about 1€ a pop.

That's the double edged sword of Xbox collecting: Nobody gives a crap about OG Xbox so you can buy a ton of games for peanuts but there is a serious poverty of online resources for the system. My old haunts Team Xbox and Xbox Scene are gone and nothing really filled the gaps they left behind.
 
That's the double edged sword of Xbox collecting: Nobody gives a crap about OG Xbox so you can buy a ton of games for peanuts but there is a serious poverty of online resources for the system. My old haunts Team Xbox and Xbox Scene are gone and nothing really filled the gaps they left behind.

I would really like to see some updated info+guides on hacking Xbox stuff.

Hard drive locking/unlocking really tripped me up a couple months ago because the only guides deal with stupidly outdated software. It's ridiculous cause most linux distros come with everything you need and a simple shell script to parse eeprom data + check hard drive info + call hdparm with the right params would be everything you need.

It's also really painful to google anything about xbox because half the results are morons on afterdawn from 2004.
 

televator

Member
I know there was some discussion about component cables a few pages back, but the exact post I am looking for escapes me. Was there a favorite between the monster component cables and the Microsoft break out box?

There's also an MS cable. I don't think you can go wrong with either Monster or MS
 
Finally I got my account validated so I can post instead of just lurking!

Got interested in the Xbox again last summer as I have been collecting quite a lot of 360 games. I whipped out my Crystal version Xbox hoping to play some PGR2 and KOTOR, for example. The disc drive didn't close at all so I had to open the thing and it turns out my long lost Halo 2 disc was jammed in there, somehow. After this the box works like a charm and I have since bought four extra consoles. Yes, four. I haven't had neither the time nor the motivation to mod any of them but I'll do it at some point.

Game collection is about 70 games for this magnificent console. Still lots of games on my list to get, but it's unfortunately quite a lot harder to find any rare games in this part of the world. I have ordered some from Ebay and I'm always vigilant on auction sites and such so I'm not worried about finding all the classics I want at some point. Fortunately almost no one here knows the value of rare and even expensive games. I have bought so many good games for about 1€ a pop.

welcome aboard :)

last week I found two games for me, finally Halo 2 Limited Edition in good condition, then I also grab Sega GT Online cause it was winking at me from the shelves



I would expand my library by US titles, I didn't remember if amazon.com ships overseas (living in Japan)
 

REDSLATE

Member
It was good back in 2006 when I rented it from Blockbuster. I got it for ~$4 recently and yeah. It's mediocre. My main problems with it are the stiff aiming controls and bullet sponge enemies.

Indeed. Love the main theme however (somber tone). Very reminiscent of the opening to The Rock.
 
So this worked:

SDXC to IDE to replace the internal hard drive. Formatted a 200GB card just fine.

I had to install a modchip first since the SD card doesn't feature drive locking (as mentioned here), which took damn near two months to arrive. Bit annoying but it means going forward I can pretty easily swap in a new drive/sdcard without having to worry about drive locking giving me an extremely heavy brick down the line. Installing it on my 1.6 revision meant I also had to rebuild the LPC header, but that was a good opportunity to try out kynar wire for the first time.

Main benefit is that I have loads of space to install discs now. Side benefit is that my Xbox is way lighter!
 

TheSeks

Blinded by the luminous glory that is David Bowie's physical manifestation.
People are still making modchips? I was thinking of hunting down an old IDE drive, but if there's mod-chips and SATA converters, I could just probably do that if there's a service/someone willing to do that legwork for me.

Also 1.6's are fine from the capacitor leak?
 
People are still making modchips? I was thinking of hunting down an old IDE drive, but if there's mod-chips and SATA converters, I could just probably do that if there's a service/someone willing to do that legwork for me.

Also 1.6's are fine from the capacitor leak?

Yeah 1.6 model don't have a time capacitor plus the capacitors inside are all higher quality nichicons.

You can get chips at eurasia.nu -- they ship from Thailand so it can be a little slow, I'm pretty sure mine just got held up at customs due to increased scrutiny on packets from east asia related to the ongoing opiod crisis.
 
Anyone replaced the fan on their Xbox?

After doing the hard drive switch out the fan noise is starting to bug me. I saw some stuff online about replacing it with an 80mm fan and cutting stuff but it'd be nice to get an easier fit and no cutting that's still way quieter. Any recommendations?
 

Vespa

Member
So this worked:


SDXC to IDE to replace the internal hard drive. Formatted a 200GB card just fine.

I had to install a modchip first since the SD card doesn't feature drive locking (as mentioned here), which took damn near two months to arrive. Bit annoying but it means going forward I can pretty easily swap in a new drive/sdcard without having to worry about drive locking giving me an extremely heavy brick down the line. Installing it on my 1.6 revision meant I also had to rebuild the LPC header, but that was a good opportunity to try out kynar wire for the first time.

Main benefit is that I have loads of space to install discs now. Side benefit is that my Xbox is way lighter!

Awesome mod! The reduced weight sounds like a great plus also. I think I'll look into doing this when I have time.
 
Awesome mod! The reduced weight sounds like a great plus also. I think I'll look into doing this when I have time.

If anyone is curious I did some research before going the SD card route. I actually looked into this when I set up a Win98 PC with an SD adapter.

One common thing to worry about with SD cards is repeated writes wrecking the storage chip, as NAND storage has a limited number of writes before it's dead. I believe this to be a valid concern but depending on your application it's not as big a deal as you'd think. All SD cards from reputable manufacturers (Sandisk/Toshiba, Lexar, Transcend, etc) come with wear leveling algorithms in the integrated controllers, which means it doesn't just write to the same cell over and over again if the same file is written more than once -- it writes to a different cell. This is effective unless your SD card is nearly stuffed full and you have data writing continuously.

For Xbox, most writes are savedata (small) and game cache (larger but not too bad). In this scenario, with a 200GB SD card at under 75% capacity (after filling with dvd2xbox game backups) you should have plenty of headroom to allow for cache partition writes without needing to worry for many, many years.

If you're very concerned about this 1) make backups and 2) there are high endurance SD cards from Sandisk, Lexar, and Transcend which are marketed towards continuous write scenarios like car dashcams and are rated for many many hours of writes, and they're not much more expensive than regular cards (just lower capacity ceilings), so buy those if you're paranoid.
 

REDSLATE

Member
Anyone replaced the fan on their Xbox?

After doing the hard drive switch out the fan noise is starting to bug me. I saw some stuff online about replacing it with an 80mm fan and cutting stuff but it'd be nice to get an easier fit and no cutting that's still way quieter. Any recommendations?

I swapped one of mine with a smaller diameter fan. Forget the sizes... is the stock fan a 90mm? If so, I think it was in fact an 80mm I put in. It had an extra input pin (for bios regulation) which I simply didn't use. Works fine. Smaller, quiter, still plenty of airflow.
 

Vespa

Member
If anyone is curious I did some research before going the SD card route. I actually looked into this when I set up a Win98 PC with an SD adapter.

One common thing to worry about with SD cards is repeated writes wrecking the storage chip, as NAND storage has a limited number of writes before it's dead. I believe this to be a valid concern but depending on your application it's not as big a deal as you'd think. All SD cards from reputable manufacturers (Sandisk/Toshiba, Lexar, Transcend, etc) come with wear leveling algorithms in the integrated controllers, which means it doesn't just write to the same cell over and over again if the same file is written more than once -- it writes to a different cell. This is effective unless your SD card is nearly stuffed full and you have data writing continuously.

For Xbox, most writes are savedata (small) and game cache (larger but not too bad). In this scenario, with a 200GB SD card at under 75% capacity (after filling with dvd2xbox game backups) you should have plenty of headroom to allow for cache partition writes without needing to worry for many, many years.

If you're very concerned about this 1) make backups and 2) there are high endurance SD cards from Sandisk, Lexar, and Transcend which are marketed towards continuous write scenarios like car dashcams and are rated for many many hours of writes, and they're not much more expensive than regular cards (just lower capacity ceilings), so buy those if you're paranoid.

Appreciate you posting this info, Sheepy! I was talking to a friend about the mod you did and he mentioned the issue of writes on an SD card, I had no clue about this issue.
 

Wounded

Member
Is there a good place to get extra controllers for OG xbox? I seem to be having trouble finding any.

My suggestion would be ebay if you don't mind it. I just grabbed a Duke controller for £10.

I think my component cables might be crap. Image seems washed out compared to RGB Scart. Sign of a bad cable?
 
My suggestion would be ebay if you don't mind it. I just grabbed a Duke controller for £10.

I think my component cables might be crap. Image seems washed out compared to RGB Scart. Sign of a bad cable?

Did you get generic or MS/Monster branded cables?

I would definitely try to go with the latter.

I got the Microsoft component cables recently and they are outstanding. Amazon had sent me generic cables by mistake previously and I tried them out out of curiosity and they were gross.
 
Generic brand ones sadly.

How were yours bad, washed out, noise etc?

Looks like I'll have to grab a better pair.

They looked washed out.

Only thing I don't like about the MS branded component cables are that the plugs are thick and round towards the bottom, so it's difficult to plug them all on my HDTV.
 
I really need to swap out my XBOX HDDs and mod them. I hate hearing the sounds of discs spinning and the load times are so painful for certain games.
 

Figments

Member
Are there any HDMI mods for the console? Don't think I'd ever attempt to add one onto my box but I'm curious if they even exist in the first place.
 

Wounded

Member
They looked washed out.

Only thing I don't like about the MS branded component cables are that the plugs are thick and round towards the bottom, so it's difficult to plug them all on my HDTV.

Interesting thanks. Definitely going to get some official ones.

I've sort of reignited my love for the big old Xbox again, it's so true that you can get a ton of games for cheap.

Picked up MGS2 Substance for 75p, and also PGR 1 and 2, Crimson Skies, Ninja Gaiden Black and Mechwarrior for £16, the bulk of the price of that coming from Ninja Gaiden which is more expensive, both Project Gotham games were 50p.
 

Wounded

Member
Duke controller arrived in the post today :), and I recently grabbed Simpsons Road Rage which was the first game I ever owned along with the Sega GT/Jet Set Radio Future disc, gonna be good to revisit them.
 

pkScary

Member
Is it just me, or did the Xbox have the best sound quality of any console, ever? I used the same audio setup for several consoles, but the Xbox playing Soul Calibur II sounded the best - by FAR. I still reminisce about how good that game sounded. Why is that?
 

televator

Member
Is it just me, or did the Xbox have the best sound quality of any console, ever? I used the same audio setup for several consoles, but the Xbox playing Soul Calibur II sounded the best - by FAR. I still reminisce about how good that game sounded. Why is that?

Probably a combination of full DVD support and standard HDD allowed for better/less audio compression. We all gotta thank the big box for pioneering in game DD 5.1 on console.
 

koopas

Member
Is it just me, or did the Xbox have the best sound quality of any console, ever? I used the same audio setup for several consoles, but the Xbox playing Soul Calibur II sounded the best - by FAR. I still reminisce about how good that game sounded. Why is that?
I remember one of the dudes from Gamesack going into quite a bit of detail as to why Original Xbox has great sound but I can't exactly remember the details.
 

TheSeks

Blinded by the luminous glory that is David Bowie's physical manifestation.
Yeah 1.6 model don't have a time capacitor plus the capacitors inside are all higher quality nichicons.

You can get chips at eurasia.nu -- they ship from Thailand so it can be a little slow, I'm pretty sure mine just got held up at customs due to increased scrutany on packets from east asia related to the ongoing opoid crisis.

Oh nice. I don't have the confidence to modchip it myself. But if there was someone around to do that work, I'd be interested in modding my box.
 
Anyone replaced the fan on their Xbox?

After doing the hard drive switch out the fan noise is starting to bug me. I saw some stuff online about replacing it with an 80mm fan and cutting stuff but it'd be nice to get an easier fit and no cutting that's still way quieter. Any recommendations?

So I ended up doing the 80mm fan job. I bought a cooler master silent fan.

It was not so nice. Kinda more cutting required than I realized.

At least my Xbox has no noise now. I was playing Halo off SD card so there's not even any DVD noise.
 

televator

Member
So I ended up doing the 80mm fan job. I bought a cooler master silent fan.

It was not so nice. Kinda more cutting required than I realized.

At least my Xbox has no noise now. I was playing Halo off SD card so there's not even any DVD noise.

What are your temps before and after a game?
 

televator

Member
It was high at the stock setting (the silent fan doesn't move as much air) so I increased the fan speed to 3x (still silent) and it's sitting around 50 degrees after an hour of playing a game.

That's actually really good. Did you replace the thermal compond? I have my stock fan @ 5x + arctic silver and I normally get to ~55C after a game on my 1.1 box.

I don't mind the fan noise as it's not quite as noisy as a modern console anyway, but your solution seems to kick ass. Is your box a later revision? I wonder if they produce less heat from the CPU and GPU? I know the video encoders are supposed to be cooler than the conexant.
 
That's actually really good. Did you replace the thermal compond? I have my stock fan @ 5x + arctic silver and I normally get to ~55C after a game on my 1.1 box.

I don't mind the fan noise as it's not quite as noisy as a modern console anyway, but your solution seems to kick ass. Is your box a later revision? I wonder if they produce less heat from the CPU and GPU? I know the video encoders are supposed to be cooler than the conexant.
Mine's a 1.6. I haven't replaced the thermal compound but I've been considering it. Is the default easy to remove? A lot of heatsinks in those days were attached with epoxy.
 
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