Xbox modding

As you may not know, I like to mess with consoles and hardware, I’m a member of a hackerspace. Anyway, I received an original xbox last October. It was a version 1.0, so I therefore removed the clock capacitor. This is the story of what happened and how I did it.

The Introduction to the Xbox

A family member of mine passed away in 2019, thus their partner was left with their stuff, including a second Xbox. They had 1 Xbox in a hobby space of the passed away family member, but 1 level above that was the room I once played with old computers, if you have read my older blog posts you may have heard of this before. Anyway, I was doing some chores for te family member that still owned the Xbox, then they said I could get that Xbox, I also asked them if I could get the games that weren’t really for younger children, whom would visit that family member. I received those too. Sadly Splinter Cell was not included.

The Xbox

The Xbox was just a regular old Xbox, but to be sure, I checked the serial number, by doing this via eg the site informit archived also at archive.org. This way i discovered it was a revision 1 Xbox, and that I had to remove the clock capacitor, which I knew had to be done immediately.

This was the Xbox before modding and removing the capacitor

The removal of the capacitor

Now something had to be done, so I looked for tools to remove the capacitor luckily the deceased family member left also a big set of tools. Thus I knew I could remove it safely using the following tools.

A couple of screwdrivers and I used to remove the screws

The Xbox opened

With the Xbox open, as seen above, I could start to remove the clock capacitor, thus I began to remove the upper few parts of the Xbox, which wasn’t easy. Anyway I did succeed however, this was the inside beforehand.

The insides of the Xbox before removing it

After I had it opened more it, I found the capacitor and removed it.

after removing the capacitor

Afterwards I reassembled the Xbox and had to test whether or not it could be turned on.

Xbox reassembled

Had to set the clock, which obviously would not be saved anymore

The modding

Then I had to mod it still obviously, I was at home, I didn’t own Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell (the game used to mod the Xbox), nor did I own Xbox USB cables, so I ordered those and waited a couple of days.

After it arrived, I had some struggles with it, as my USB drive was too new, luckily there were some older ones around. I used the following guide: Rocky5 Xbox softmod guide

This looked as follows (my room was a mess on that day):

Xbox USB tool

Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell

The saves for modding

During the softmod process

After I was done I was happy, but I haven’t played on it in quite a while. Still, I enjoy modding and learning how to do those things. Until the next post.