Zibblog

At some point, Leslie and I got seriously hooked on Naruto. So hooked that we had a weekend (Friday night to Sunday night) of watching about 35 episodes (I dare you to start watching the end of the Chunin exam and stop watching before the end of the Konoha Invasion arc). Anyway, I had downloaded a whole lot of fan subbed episodes and was just playing them on a TV using my laptop. This wasn’t a horrible solution, but it was far from optimal. After doing some reading, I realized that I could run xbox media center if I hacked my xbox. Since I assumed I was going to get an XBox 360 when Halo 3 came out, I figured I had nothing to lose.

The constraints on the project were that I didn’t want to purchase anything for the hacking (at some point, I bought an IR receiver for the xbox, but I decided that didn’t count). What I found out is that there were 2 ways to mod an xbox to run your own software: softmod or mod chip. Mod chips are fairly cheap and come in the solderable (the cheapest) and unsolderable (maybe $10-$15 more expensive), but I figured I’d try and softmod. Softmods have come a long way and are fairly easy. Most of them are buffer exploits that get installed as sounds or something else similar. The main problem is getting them onto the xbox. There are about 3 games that you can try and find that will (along with a suitable cable that you can buy or make from an xbox controller and a usb cable) allow you to use game save hacking to mod the xbox.

If you don’t want to try any of those, you can try and put the data on the hard drive yourself. The main problem is that the hard drive is locked until it receives an unlock command from the xbox and becomes locked again when it loses power. It’s possible to find the mod files and create a linux boot cd that will do the job for you if you get the hard drive unlocked. The “recommended” way to do this is to take the top off of the xbox near your computer, start the xbox, and at some point after you get to the main screen, disconnect the ATA cable from the hard drive (while it is still running) and connect the drive to an ata cable from your computer. At this point, you power up the computer and use the linux distribution to put the files on the drive.

It sounds kind of crazy and has a small chance of frying your hard drive, but I got it all to work and can now access and play all the media files off of any computer on the network. What’s nice about it is that it can understand all the IR commands if you get the xbox remote kit. It took a little while to find all of the files I needed, but it’s an easy enough project to complete in a weekend and you have a “free” media center pc without tivo functionality.