Tonight I'm gonna party like it's 1984
I’m a happy geek.
A while ago, I bought a used Xbox advertised on Craigslist. Then I bought a modchip1, and hired a teenager (also found on Craigslist) to install it. (As a solderer, I make a good programmer.) I put a larger hard drive in it, and a better fan, and installed Linux, and spent some time struggling to make it useful. Trouble is, most of the versions of Linux tailored for the Xbox are out of date2 and, thus, hard to build current software packages on.
Finally, I stopped worrying and learned to love XBMC (Xbox Media Center.) It makes a home theater PC of your Xbox, something it’s pretty well-suited for3 — cables are available for most TV input formats, it has an Ethernet jack to put it on your home network, and there’s a remote control available.
Now, we can simply use a remote to select from a menu any video we have on our network drive, or any of our music (well, all the CDs I’ve ripped so far) and listen to it on a decent stereo. (Audiophiles would doubtless scoff at my attributing decency to it, but it sure beats anything else I’ve ever had.)
Further, I’ve installed Xbox versions of MAME, an Apple II emulator, and Stepmania (a Dance Dance Revolution clone.)
So now I’m playing Time Pilot, and Dino Eggs, and Sabotage, and otherwise reliving my misspent youth, and having a good time trying to become competent at Stepmania, while lusting after an arcade-style DDR dance pad.
The learning curve to do all this was steep in places, but once you know what to do, it’s not that hard. And I saw refurbished Xboxes going for $60 at a local game store, so it’s cheap!
1 The Xbox was designed to only run software officially signed by Microsoft. This worked out so well for them that it launched a whole industry of modification chips to get around this limitation.
2 At least the versions that facilitate reformatting the whole drive with a Linux filesystem, which were the ones I tried. This doesn’t seem to be true of GentooX or a recent update of XDSL, which co-exist with the native Xbox formatting and organization. I avoided them because I thought recreating the native formatting on a larger hard drive was harder than it is. Now that I’ve done so, I’ll definitely try one or both of them.
3 For non-cutting-edge values of well-suited. Its LAN speed is too slow to stream HD video to it, and, even if it weren’t, its computing power too weak to decode it in real-time.
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