Making a Xbox fun again

‘Would you like to mod your Xbox?’

It was a question I’d heard a few times before from those with the enthusiasm of the converted. The details had always involved people I was unfamiliar with, the attachment of extra equipment to the processing equipment and the primary benefit of the mod being the piracy of games. I’d always politely begged off. None of these concepts particularly appealed to me.

This time the question came from a buddy at work that could do the work himself and it would involve hanging out at a mutual friend’s house that I hadn’t seen much of in the past few years. There would be no case cracking involved. Most importantly, the goal was to turn the Xbox into more of a media center than a game system. I was intrigued. This time I said yes.

A few Saturdays ago I visited with my Xbox and about an hour later we were done. Files had been updated, some added and an application or two added to the machine. Upon startup it defaults to a ‘media center’ screen instead of the old green dock. Most important is what the machine can do now, things like play AVI files from a DVD as well as play my Region 2 PAL disks.

I like my ‘new’ toy. The DVD drive is still a little flaky but that’s something to fix later if need be.