Welcome to Part 1 of our XBOX Mod. Part 2 will be dealing with Gentoox Linux on the XBOX.

After a somewhat shaky start, Microsoft's now popular console has taken its place amongst modders throughout the community as being the console to tinker with. Actually calling the XBOX "a console" is quite a misjustice as it is basically a mini PC. Most of you reading this will know the processor is vastly more powerful than either the Gamecube or Playstation 2, that being a Custom 733mhz P3 from Intel, if you know this you will also know the graphics card is from Nvidia, a 250 MHz Custom-Designed NV2X . Im not going to rehash old ground and give an indepth specification list, if you wish to recap, head over to this page.

Today's article on Driverheaven isnt a "how to guide" it is more an insight as to just what functionality you can add to the plain machine you can buy for relatively little cost in many stores. This all started one afternoon when I went on one of my random google searches. Come on, dont tell me you haven't in a time of boredom or frustration just typed something into Google to see what you would end up with. If you dont know what im talking about, then ill save you the effort. There you have it, every mod you could ever think of and then some. Now I dont profess to being an XBOX modding guru, so then the thought came to me to create a modded xbox for a showpiece on Driverheaven - I enrolled the help of an expert. Giles Wendes is an xbox modder in the United Kingdom frequently selling machines on EBAY, when i contacted him about the project he jumped at the chance to make something special.

"Just what kind of machine are we looking for here Allan - we can do anything you want!", he said. "How about we crank in a terrabyte of storage Giles and put almost every piece of software on this we can?", was my reply. It was then he knew I was out to make something functional, not gimmicky, I mean we all know the extreme cooling mods out there, but i cant see the point of watercooling a 733mhz P3, im more interested to see just what we can get this thing to handle.

So for a month Giles worked on the "Heavenly XBOX" as it became known, the problem was when it was finished I had a hard time prising it from his hands.

The Heavenly XBOX specification is, 3x300 gig, 16 meg cache Hard drives, all configured into paritions for multibooting, one Hard drive for Gentoox Linux OS, one for gaming and the last for multimedia. The XBOX was modded to fit the hard drives so its around one third deeper than an ordinary machine, we also have quite a few mods attached to it for various functionality, game ripping, file handling and all the other goodies ill be detailing shortly. We also had a memory increase from 64 to 128 meg for a while but it caused quite a few intermittant issues which are documented on some forums so we took it out.

Before

After

The basic alterations aesthetically are an army style fusion skin with some funky LED mods to the joypad ports, enhancements made to the power and drive access button and glowing lights from the side fins. You can also see the XBOX circular logo on top is totally remade, this also pulses. There are many skin mods which you can buy and install easily, just follow my google link above to find some stores in your area. Some of you will also remember the crystal XBOX Microsoft released as a special edition, it was translucent. We had one of those for the project but I prefer the distinctive black look of the original xbox so we went with that.

Video/Audio:

Just to further enhance the experience, I decided on using a 20inch Dell 2001FP monitor for the video input, as this gives a superior picture to a television screen. For the audio, I used the breakout box of an Audigy 2 ZS Professional connected to Creative Gigaworks 7:1 THX speakers.

In the image (above middle) you can see the (increased) depth of the machine beside a logitech MX1000 laser mouse, in the picture top left you can make out a green LED - this is a switch that toggles between drives. The reason for this switch is to bypass a limitation within the xbox - the machine is only capable of handling a maximum of two drives at one time, therefore the DVD drive and a hard drive. Above right is the XBOX display on the dell 2001FP (right monitor). Its surprisingly sharp.