Boot original Xbox directly into XBMC

I have some things left to say about installing XBMC on the original Xbox, in part because they are not done yet.

Today I finally made the Xbox boot directly into XBMC and not to EvoX.  Searching the web for instructions on how to do this may give some different answers, but the one that I decided to try and that worked perfectly came (unsurprisingly) from xbmc.org: Using the Team XBMC Shortcut.xbe.

The file names used as examples were the same as for my installation: I replaced C:evoxdash.xbe and created C:evoxdash.cfg containing E:AppsXBMCdefault.xbe. I actually made sure that the .cfg file had CRLF line ending even though I created it in Ubuntu, but it probably doesn’t matter.

I changed the XBMC network settings to use DHCP instead of “system settings” to make sure that XBMC would still get an IP address on the network after rebooting.

The reboot went smooth and took me straight into XBMC. Isn’t it nice when things just work?

7 comments

  1. XBMC is awesome indeed.

    Have you silenced your Xbox btw? That’s the main reason I’m not using mine at the moment. As a media machine it’s a bit loud.

    1. No, I have not yet made anything to make it more quiet, but definitely plan to do so. I have bought a new case fan but I have not installed it yet. IIRC there are three sources of noise in the Xbox:

      Case fan — I hope that this is the biggest source of noise, and I mean to replace it with the fan I bought
      CPU (or is it GPU?) fan — I hope to avoid messing with this one
      Hard disk — It might be possible to use Compact Flash instead but I don’t think I’ll ever get time to mess with that, with the hard disk obfuscation and stuff

  2. I plan to replace the case fan as well, so please report on any progress you make. 🙂

    As far as the HDD goes, the Xbox requires a standard password locking feature in the ATA protocol (iirc), and since not even all HDDs support it I don’t know how likely it is with CF cards.

  3. What did you end up using as a memory device btw?

    I bought a memory card and soldered a USB male lead onto it, the end result is pretty neat. One end plugs into the gamepad for transfer to the HDD, the other end plugs into my PC with the Action Replay software… though not at the same time of course.

  4. Any update on the fan replacement. I’m wondering which exact fan you used and how easy was the replacement. Thanks!

    1. @Jason

      The fan replacement has been assigned a pretty low priority so far, meaning that I have unfortunately not yet taken action.

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