I just bought a 20G hard drive for my Xbox 360 for a couple of reasons:
- The space on the 256MB memory card is not enough to download Braid,
- A hard drive would enable me to play old Xbox games. The only ones I would want to play are Halo, Halo 2 & Half-Life 2.
So now that my new Xbox can play old Xbox games, there’s not much point keeping an old Xbox around. That is, it has ceased to be useful as a games console. But I wonder, should I bother to give it a rebirth as something else? I could…
- Install XBMC on it… no wait, the new Xbox does everything I would use that for. Plus I can’t be arsed installing a mod chip.
- Install Xbox Linux on it… Meh I’m kinda over screwing around with Linux. Ditto re mod chip.
- Convert it into a NAS device… and utilise it’s whopping great 8 GB of storage. Yeah baby. Plus that would be the most oversized NAS on the planet.
- Gut it and use the case for something else…but what? And can I really be arsed?
- Pull it apart just for the fun of it (so far this is winning).
- Trade it in for like $2.
- Donate it to someone who wants it (let me know).
It’s a bit sad really to see it sitting there, useless and helpless as it is.
On a related note, I preordered Fable 2 the other day. You should too. Even if you don’t have a 360. The game is going to be that frickin good.
fire or windows are good….but a little less than constructive.
How about taking it apart and then turning it into some kind of fishbowl…might take a fair bit of modding though. But you get to both pull it apart and make it into something constructive.
Open it, gut it, and then see if you can cram the innards of a bunch of other consoles inside and have them share the optical drive. It would be like one of those cheap and crappy 100-in-1 games cartridges that you see on eBay except it wouldn’t be cheap. Do it.
OK, I have already opened it up and after a few yawns I closed it up again. The most interesting thing was that the optical drive appears to be fairly customised for the system. It uses a custom power connector, rather than the 4-pin one found on most IDE drives. I suspect this is connector also allows the eject button to work.