For a long time now I’ve wanted to construct a cheap-ish media centre device for the house and I finally took the plunge a few weeks ago when I bought an original xbox for the purpose. There are a lot of ways to modify an xbox but I eventually decided on the softmod approach which meant minimal soldering on my behalf. It was also the cheaper option as I already had many of the materials lying around the house.

The softmod approach requires the transferring of modified gamesave files to the xbox which exploited a bad coding technique that developers employed in their gamesaving mechanisms. There “legitimate” way to do this would be to buy both an xbox memory card and the commercial Action Replay kit which includes a usb adapter to read the memory card on a PC. The commercial kit can cost quite a lot so I decided that I would do it my own way and build my own cable for the xbox and use one of the many USB keys lying around the house in place of a memory card. There’s a picture of the messy soldering job that I did to create the necessary cable at the bottom of the post.

Performing the softmod requires a copy of one of the following games for the xbox

• 007 Agent Under Fire
• Mech Assault
• Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell

Fortunately enough I was able to find a copy of Splinter Cell on ebay which only cost €6 including shipping.

The softmod process itself is very easy to follow and almost impossible to get wrong. In all the softmod process took around 10 minutes max after which I was left with an xbox with a copy of the XBMC software on it. XBMC coupled with the DVD remote which I have for the xbox makes it such a nice experience browsing through all the media content in the house.

In the end it has turned out to be a very cost effective way to get a media centre running and its only made better by the amazing XBMC software which is available for other platforms such as Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Its great software and I highly recommend people take a look at it over at XBMC.org.

Here’s the cables I soldered together

and the finished product.