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Friday, January 20th, 2006 at 3:01 AM

A small follow-up to my earlier post about the Xbox peripheral adapter… Here you’ll find a pinout of the Xbox controller expansion port, as well as a diagram of the headset unit itself. I found them to be quite helpful when wiring up the adapter.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 20th, 2006 at 3:01 am and is filed under Hacks, Xbox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Monday, December 12th, 2005 at 1:37 AM

I finally finished playing Half-Life 2 on the Xbox (as evidenced by the lack of updates around here), and it is outstanding. I’m not a gamer by any means, but I do enjoy a well-crafted piece of work when I find it. Though Half-Life 2 has been out in the Windows world for quite some time, the Xbox release is rather new and it’s obvious why the port took so long: Valve put a tremendous amount of work into making this one of the best Xbox titles to date. The level of detail is one that I’ve never seen before on the Xbox, with accurate physics, impressive lip-syncing, clever map design, and some of the best textures anywhere. Eye candy aside, the gameplay varies between charging through enemies, avoiding their AI, and solving puzzles — all of which help create an enjoyable gameplay experience. If you haven’t yet played Half-Life 2 on the Xbox, check it out. Even for a non-gamer like myself, it was a real treat to play.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 12th, 2005 at 1:37 am and is filed under Xbox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Friday, November 18th, 2005 at 1:24 AM

For those working on a Mac doing Xbox modifications, here’s a tip for handling BIOS files. Some Xboxes, such as the “version 1.0,” require a 1 MB sized file, but not all are distributed this way. On the Windows side of things, there are a number of tools available for dealing with Xbox BIOSes, however there’s nothing specifically made for Mac. With a little bit of command-line work, you can combine files without any special tools except the operating system. To join files, the general syntax is:

cat bios512.bin bios512.bin > bios1MB.bin, where bios512.bin is a 512 KB size BIOS.

You’re simply doubling over the file to obtain the 1 MB sized one the Xbox needs. It can be repeated four times for a 256 KB BIOS. Or, if your Xbox is wired with a switch into multiple banks, you could combine two separate files using ‘cat’ and the redirection operator ‘>’ to build a custom BIOS, and switch between them as needed.

While I haven’t tried, I’m sure the Unix ’split’ utlity can slice a file and do the reverse of the above (something along the lines of split -b 512k bios1MB.bin). Just be careful, as not all BIOSes are designed to be sliced into smaller pieces. Hopefully these two built-in tools should get you through any Xbox BIOS issues on the Mac.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 18th, 2005 at 1:24 am and is filed under Mac, Tips, Xbox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Thursday, November 17th, 2005 at 2:54 AM

This is how it all starts. AnandTech has done a great job disassembling an Xbox 360 and documenting it along the way. It actually looks like it may be easier to disassemble than the original Xbox, provided you have the right tools.

I’m impressed with the change in Xbox controller styles. While I was not one of the many who complained about the sheer size of the original Xbox controllers, I find the new style to be a delight to use. Wireless capabilities are a nice touch, too.

I read elsewhere that the Xbox 360 also has a battery to retain the date and time settings, which caused some problems with previous Xbox softmods. It can also be configured to use a network time server, such as time.microsoft.com (or time.apple.com, if you prefer “Apple time”).

The launch is less than a week away, and I’m hoping I’ll be able to pick up one of these new machines with minimal hassle. We’ll see about that.

11/18/05 Update
AnandTech posted another article, this time covering the Xbox 360 motherboard’s layout, ICs, and buses.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 17th, 2005 at 2:54 am and is filed under Xbox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.