Recycling an old Xbox

Over Christmas I bought an original Xbox from a friend for a tenner, I'd heard you could use some software called XBMC to convert it into a media streamer for under the TV and I thought I'd give it a go........ Well it wasn't going to be as easy as I thought as getting hold of a mod chip was a non starter because of the age of the xbox no one sold them anymore. So it was the "soft mod" route then....
Apparantely there are three games out there for the Xbox that will allow a software exploit on the Xbox to unlock it; the games are: -

• Splinter cell
• Mechassault
• 007 - Agent Under Fire

How it's done
After tracking down one of the above games on Ebay you need to get two files on to the hard disk of the xbox, this is usually done using the "Action Replay" unit, which allows game saves to be saved and read from a memory card, these can be transferred from the PC to the xbox.

The Action Replay units were about £20 but I came across another way to do it without buying the Action Replay kit.

The game ports on the Xbox are apparantley USB ports with one extra cable, for a light pen, so it's possible to attach a USB socket to the Xbox, plug in a USB memorystick and use this to transfer the files from the PC to the Xbox.

Once the files are on the Xbox you just use the game to load the gamesave and this will run the exploit to unlock the Xbox, then you can connect the Xbox to your PC via the ethernet connection and ftp the files for XBMC to the Xbox and Bob just might be your uncle!

My Bit
Most of the information is in tutorials already done and I will put the links on the blog for these as I don't really want to write them again, my contribution is how to set up your Xbox with a USB port.
More Later .......