It’s been a long time since I did anything technical with an original XBox. I have a spare and now someone wants it so thought I had better check it out.
It’s been chipped and at one point had a large HD installed. I found it had an original 10GB HD back in it so I swapped it out for a 300G. This meant reinstalling XBMC so the hunt was on for the Auto-installer disk (AID). Remembering the original problems getting the XBox to read disks I wanted to find the one that I knew worked, but no luck. So I wrote another to a Verbatim CD-RW:700MB and it worked. BTW: this machine has a Phillips DVD drive. This allowed me to setup XBMC as the default dashboard and install a few utilities.
This is not the latest XBMC but it’s a good starting point for the new owner and is easy enough to reinstall using the AID.
oooh, I could definitely use the one with the LCD frontface if you don’t want it 😉
The main xbmc project no longer supports the xbox… but it is nicely ported and maintained at xbmc4xbox.org. Get the files via here and ftp them across to have the latest.
The install disk were called “xbox_installer” last time I looked not “auto_installer_deluxe” if you want a more up to date install CD/DVD
The gen 1 xboxes once chipped (and even with softmodding after you have done it a couple of times) are still the simplest way to get a very pretty (interface), and very functional media player cheap. The disadvantages are that they don’t play HD content or H.264 content (not enough processing power), don’t actually record live TV (player only – although there are some plugins that can do a great deal more) and can be a bit noisy as the fan gets old. Also, if you want wireless, you need to attached a bridge of some sort… and you have to actually get ‘up’ to turn them on… which is a dealbreaker for some couch surfers 😉
There are plenty of other cheap hard drive or network ‘media players’ around, but the xbmc interface is miles ahead in how it looks and works.