It seems like an odd thing to say, I have not been an owner of Xbox’s honestly for all that long, I decided to get back into gaming around 5 years ago after I had a small snag where I dropped my gaming PC - which I had only a month prior just put a brand new GTX1060 in… this thing was not cheap - a brief talk with my now late sister and she suggested I pick up an Xbox One.. I’m not sure the One S was out at the time but I did some looking around and found someone selling an Xbox One “with games” and 2 controllers for what would have been about 220 USD at the time.
I used this original Xbox honestly until about a month ago when I sold it for about 70 USD and picked up a used One S for about 80 USD (obviously I’m not in the US hence the ‘about’ pricing, additionally those prices may seem high, but where I live prices tend to be higher for anything console related. )
Anyway after wiping the original xbox we were left with one original game which had been left in the drive, I assume by mistake, Assassin’s Creed Syndicate - a game I was not a fan of myself, but a game that got a ton of play in this house and addicted someone to the AC franchise
Skipping forward to today, as noted at my desk/office I have an Xbox One S and in the living room I have an Xbox Series X, we also have a PS4 Pro and Switch that are mostly only used for exclusive titles - despite owning these consoles we are far from rich and worked very hard to earn them, no loans, no debt .. just saving and as we call it “the noodle diet”
For my birthday I was generously gifted an original Xbox that was modded (I wish I could say with what, I think its hard modded/chipped but I honestly don’t know enough to make a competent guess) - the original xbox wasn’t exactly cheap but was not at all expensive either and the team at Game Selections were very helpful and and despite a small delay delivered the device in great condition with controller and AV cable …
I did find myself going into the system and digging around as some stuff seemed a little off for example the F partition/disk showed 150GB ish space despite the drive being 500GB and some games were loaded up as ISOs and while I think you can work with a xiso (an iso explicitly formatted for the Xbox that’s my understanding of it) using a script in XMBC4Gamers … this one a quick test of this did not work for myself - although by this point I was already working with extract-xiso which worked great .. for a time!
I eventually ran into long name issues which took a little bit of reading on Reddit but after following some advice on where to go next I was up and running
I started the above post about a week ago and moved it into draft, so a week on I have been playing the device and have found some myself really enjoying Crimson Skies - but system wise I continue to find little nuggets of interest, I just found on the E drive a folder oddly named DELETE ME
Normally these are of course.. deleted, but like in a CMS of old where you would installed it then delete the installer but alas the installer was left in place so I ran the xbe (xbox executable) and seems this is a version of Evolution-X with bios flashing options, another version of this does exist on the Xbox but that one seems to be a simple dashboard .. no flashing.
I see a few options, it all seems to be the same the similar bios with a kilobyte option of forms, I’m entirely unfamiliar so until I know more about the system my plan is to keep it on the device and ignore it till I have a better understanding of what does what and why… from here I may consider a new bios, or reflashing to see if I can get a cleaner installer (this thing has now 4 dashboards installed, 3 of which were in visible in the default config (Evolution-X, UnleashX and MS Dashboard) I later found Avalaunch and installed XMBC4Gamers and found the bios version of Evolution-X … it honestly feels messy and incredibly random and as of yet I have not found a way to change the default dashboard - as I would ideally prefer to use XMBC4Gamers so little people (kids) can easily play games .. but it is simple enough to drop them into the dashboard I guess
The next problem is kids, LOVE to change games every 12 seconds… and so far the only quick way I have found to get out of a game and back into the dashboard is to reset the xbox via the controller (RT, LT + Start, Menu) and for some reason if the xbox boots on green light it drops into an error, if it boots on red or orange it boots normally.. it is honestly weird and I’m unsure if I mentioned it but the DVD/game disk drive is not functional …
My advice to anyone that wants modded and is perhaps like myself .. a curious techie who loves to figure out how these things work.. if you can.. buy stock.. play around and maybe consider a soft mod (I hear Rocky5’s is great) until you get brave enough or have a need for a hard mod, I suspect a lot more can be learned via vanilla than learning after the fact 🙂
Either way very happy with the device and the sellers were very polite and helpful despite me comically sending them a complete spreadsheet covering the entire original Xbox NA releases 🥴
I will likely follow this up in the future once I learn more, if anyone has experience with this stuff, how do I figure out what’s already on the device - system information has been not very forthcoming… I think if I can figure out the basic bios setup then I can take it from that point and continue from that point.
