Hacking the Xbox

I'm not normally a huge fan of Microsoft's products - not by a long shot - but their entire foray into the world of consoles has been an interesting one. The original Xbox turned out to be a pretty decent system, with some great titles on it.

What really endears the Xbox to me, though, is it's hackability.

A whole range of modchips came out that really enchanced the abilities of what was an already impressive system. Having a hard drive and networking as standard was just too PC-like to be ignored, and the modding community rose to the challenge.

With retailers now selling off old Xboxes for under £50 (new, retail packages too) now is the time to pick one up and play with modding.

First stop is fitting an actual modchip. Doing so will allow you to load a custom BIOS, custom dashboard, and really opens up the system for you. The Xecuter 3 is my personal favourite, not least because if you can't manage the basic soldering skills to fit it, you can get a no-solder kit, giving you a mounting socket that just clips into place.

Once you've got your modchip fitted, you can throw in a much larger hard drive. You can add a custom front panel, with USB ports, an LCD status screen, and buttons to control which FLASH bank you'll be booting from.

From here you can install a custom dashboard. XBMC - the XBox Media Centre - is the single biggest reason you should be modding your 'box. With this installed as your default dashboard, your trusty Xbox suddenly has the features of a Media Centre PC.

I've configured mine to display some of my favourite RSS feeds, playing MP3s and movies from the local hard drive and streamed from my server - I've even got it talking to iTunes on my Mac.

Doing away with the pile of gear around my telly, my Xbox now also runs Playstation and DOS emulators. Huzzah for X-Wing and Wipeout!

You can find more information on the power of XBMC at http://www.xboxmediacenter.com/ and information on the Xecuter 3 modchip from Team Xecuter at http://www.team-xecuter.com/

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