This orange top was found over 10 years ago and was posted on Assembler. It was discovered before the complete Halo one was found. I remember emailing back and forth with the guy that actually was involved in making these samples for Microsoft. There is a picture with him and about maybe 30 of these orange tops. After the project was over he stored them in his office and a few employees took them home. Most of them however got tossed out. I remember Hex1gon and Andrew Borman were the ones that helped with authenticating this sample seen in these pictures. Unfortunately, I forgot the guys name at Microsoft.

Hi all,

Pretty new to the OG Xbox, but have built PCs a bunch (hoping skills transfer lol). Always wanted an Xbox as a kid and finally picked one up, but the disc drive seems jammed. It won't open when I hit eject and sort of makes a buzzing noise like it's trying to work but can't.

Are there any great guides on replacing/fixing this? I've also seen mentioned a few places that you can just replace the band - but where do I get the right replacement band?

Thanks in advance for making my childhood dreams come true! Pretty pumped to play some Jade Empire and Knights of the Old Republic finally after all these years!

Xemu Modern GUI v2.1 is an experimental, unofficial fork of Xemu 0.8.139 for trying out interface ideas. It’s not made or supported by the Xemu project, so please don’t take problems with it to their Discord or GitHub. Report them on my repo instead.

It’s vibe coded: every change was written by Claude Code from my plain-language requests. I test the builds and publish them. Emulation is unchanged apart from a few performance and stability fixes, but the changes haven’t had the review a long-running project gets, so expect rough edges.

Main features

• Console-style dashboard: Home, Library, Insignia, Media, Drive, Homebrew, Patches and Settings tabs, with controller support and an on-screen keyboard. 11 languages.
• Game library: cover art, play time, per-game settings, save states and resume.
• One-click 60 FPS, widescreen and HD patches for your library, without touching your disc images.
• New in v2.1:
  • Keyboard, mouse and controller together as a single input choice, with the mouse captured automatically.
  • Per-game keys and mouse buttons, with presets by kind of game.
  • A controller test on the dashboard.
  • Achievements (experimental, work in progress): fan-made packs you tick off yourself, because the original Xbox had none. You can also write your own.
• Picture quality: FSR, NVIDIA RTX Video, NIS, Lanczos, CRT/scanline filters.
• Homebrew store and Xbox hard drive explorer, plus save backups.
• Guided Insignia setup for online play.
• Performance Capture to find out why a game slows down.

Windows only. Help > Check for Updates updates existing installs. You still need your own BIOS, MCPX ROM and hard disk image, and nothing like that is included.

Download and screenshots: https://github.com/Prodigy488/xemu-modern-gui

Feedback and bug reports are welcome. Achievements in particular are early.

easy pick up

Hey everyone,

I recently got my hands on a modded original Xbox with an X-Changer modchip, Xecuter2 BIOS and EvoX dashboard.

I’m using a Bitfunx HDMI adapter, but I’m having a weird issue:

The X-Changer BIOS menu displays perfectly fine.
When booting into EvoX, the dashboard briefly appears, then the screen keeps flickering and losing signal (“Unsupported video format”).
Same issue on both my Philips OLED TV and PC monitor.
The Xbox itself seems to keep running, and the controllers work in EvoX.
Controllers don’t respond in the X-Changer menu.
I’ve already reseated the IDE cables, which fixed an earlier error 07.

Any suggestions on what to check first would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Going through a large number of PS Games, Manga DVD's Anime DVD's and this gem was sitting in and amongst them. Just gone up on eBay, open to offers:

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/287686779198

This might seem like an obvious pick...because of course it's halo 2 for me! All the memories I have with this game, playing with friends, staying up all night doing the campaign, this game is just hard not to choose as the best original xbox game!

NOTE: Reposted with a photo of the game.

Hey guys, hope you are doing very well and enjoying gaming in general. I think I'll use this post to start documenting my constant battle with collecting retro games, from the perspective of someone who grew up in an NTSC region, but now lives and collects in a PAL region.

It's well known that the sixth gen started blurring the line between the dreaded 50v60hz, thanks to PAL60; but I've found so many small incompatibilities (also with 7th gen, especially the Wii), which are worth writing.

I grew up playing on my Original Xbox, but not long after I got my first Xbox 360, my OG was sold, and also the games with it. Now, I live in a different country, and instead of shipping my old consoles, I've decided to reacquire them here. A friend of a friend gave me his OG Xbox, which was already modded. Since then, I've changed the bios to Cerbios and installed XBMC4Gamers. I've switched the video mode to NTSC using Enigmah. It is very clear I have a preference of 30/60 over 25/50fps. Additionally, I love the HD resolutions not present on PAL consoles.

I can't describe my excitement when I saw a listing for Ultimate Spider-Man at a decent price. Drove for 50 minutes (almost 2 hours for the whole trip) just to get my hands on it, and I've been enjoying the gameplay, cell shaded graphics and the story in general; but something felt off with the storytelling from the beginning. Specifically, the cutscenes felt disjointed, with story scenarios that I couldn't explain (I've played this many years ago, don't remember everything). I then found out the game wasn't playing some cutscenes... Even the publisher and dev intros were missing.

Realising all the pre-rendered cutscenes/videos were being omitted, my first thought was swapping back the console to PAL mode. Everything worked, all intros played normally and the initial story cutscene was there, but gameplay was sluggish (no PAL60 unfortunately). Call me whatever, but I felt the difference immediately, and I'm not sure if this one is very optimised. I dived into the game's files, and found that inside the "movies" folder, the game contains XMV files that are named ..._PAL.xmv. There are no NTSC files. Renaming the files and deleting the _PAL suffix works, but the videos and sound will be out of sync, as they were rendered for PAL50. That was another discovery, the audio is separated from the image.

I reckon my only solution to this is to grab the NTSC video files online, as I refuse to play this game at 25fps... At least the game launches, not like Enter the Matrix, which also doesn't support any form of HD with PAL versions.

Do you guys have any similar stories?

Halo 2’s new Solo Arena playlist on Insignia features ranked 4v4 on Original Xbox, with no premade teams and BR starts every match. Jump into Halo 2 on Original Xbox, connect through Insignia, and select Solo Arena. Game nights every Sunday & Thursday!

Hey. :) So recently, they released a recomp of Ninja Gaiden Black that apparently runs REALLY well, but it requires an ISO of Ninja Gaiden Black to run (which makes sense). I Googled how to rip images from your game discs for Xbox, but its a little tricky making sense of it all (aside from knowing that you'd need a softmodded console to do so). Would anyone possibly be able to offer more of an insight?

Hi! I have a modded xbox classic with evoX and the games played from dvd freeze constantly.
When opening the dashboard I have two error messages:
Env error! 1.200.701.440 and the other Env error! 0
Is this the hdd failing?
Thank you

Is this rare? I bought it because I thought it was cool just wondering if this was rare

I have an og xbox (I think revision 1.4 or 1.5, not entirely sure but I know its not 1.6). I have removed the clock capacitor already, bit the xbox does not boot. If I turn it on, nothing happens, the lights on the front dont turn on, and it just stays with fans running (tv doesnt detect it) until I shut it off. I found the problem is the dvd drive, as if I remove the dvd drive, it red rings, and boots normally into the error screen. The dvd drive is a phillips I think, and is now in a state of complete disrepair (original owner had a LOT of issues with dvd drive specifically). I would like to try and get it to boot to menu, without modchip and without hot swapping the hdd. This console was never modded or even connected to the internet.

I am pretty tech savvy and good with anything like coding, cables, software, etc and also have an unmodded 360 if that somehow helps (slim model) and a pc running xemu.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Additional notes:

I tried tricking the dvd drive into booting by removing all mechanical parts and just plugging in pcb (I read somewhere this tricks it into booting?) But it still made a weird creaking noise.

Also if I do dvd drive only, no hdd it will begin to boot but freeze at a random point during the xbox boot screen with the animation.

Also the dvd drive is likely not being repaired as I have probably broken it beyound repair of reading discs, but I can probably generally put it back together.

Was hoping someone had an insight on what might be worth something or how to go about selling. I can’t say the quality is for all discs. for example I have 2 Kotor 2 cause I know nar shadda wouldn’t work on one of the discs. thanks.

I've been working on a solution for cooling an upgraded CPU in a socket. There are replacement heatsink brackets for a standard CPU upgrade (without socket, directly soldered), but these don't account for the extra height, and as easy as that would be to adjust, they also interfere with the extra space that the socket takes up.

I recently found some heatsinks that were originally part of server upgrade kits for HP pentium III servers as they came with some 1.4GHz P3s I got a good deal on. These things fit almost perfectly! They clear the HDD try when installed without modification, and the only issue seems to be the level for the retention tab can rub against the fan. This can be fixed by shaving a few mm of material off of the back of the tab (it's just the handle part, so it doesn't affect the actual retention, just make sure to file the new sharp edges so you don't slice your hand installing / removing it).

The other thing about these is, they only use the centered smaller retention tab on the socket. This is wonderful because it allows for the 3d printed support brackets i designed, to lock into the outer larger tabs.

The brackets lock into the unused tabs to prevent the transfer of stress to the motherboard when installing / removing the heatsink / cpu. They also extend under the edge of the socket to fill the gap between the socket and the motherboard, further eliminating stress transferred to the solder balls on the interposer and the pins on the socket. Additionally, there are some standoffs that mount on the underside of the board that keep the board from flexing down near the CPU, an m4 screw goes through the standoffs and is used to secure both the standoffs and the support brackets to the board. Everything is printed in polycarbonate and is extremely rigid.

The heatsink used is from a 237504-001 cpu upgrade kit, you can find them popping up on ebay every once in a while. Cooling performance is more than adequate with a 1.4GHz CPU installed using the stock fan.

I'm just trying to gauge the level of interest in this while I make final adjustments and continue stress testing these things to see if it's worthwhile to put final polish on these and release the models, so, just let me know!

Came across a couple modded xboxes from a storage unit. The clear one is asking for a master key on xbmc. Is there any way I could get around it? I have never modded a console before so I have none of the software on hand for modding

It's a weird thing, most lists have xbox exclusive but there were plenty of games like Knights of the old republic that released PC and Xbox. Curious what other games were like Xbox Exclusive* but just in the no ps2/gc meaning.

Halo CE Tuesdays on OG Xbox via Dedicated Servers! Join us for ChupathingyCE every Tuesday: vanilla Halo CE + CE+ X map rotation on dedicated servers.

8PM ET / 7PM CT / 5PM PT

OG Xbox & Xemu

Grab your pack in our discord server! https://haloclassichub.com

I’m not sure if this is the correct place to post this, but I wanted to share some UX suggestions for “Dashloader Customizer”, particularly for those who are new to configuring Original Xbox dashboards.

The application is incredibly powerful for setting default dashboards and controller button shortcuts, but since the interface is very streamlined, newcomers might not immediately realize how it functions or how to navigate it.

For example, when first opening the app, it isn't completely obvious that buttons need to be mapped to a specific .xbe path, or that a secondary options menu is available via D-Pad Left.

To make the app even more accessible, would it be possible to add some brief captions or button legends? Here are a few examples that I feel might work:

Main Menu:
"Hold assigned button on startup to launch Dashboard .xbe"

"D-Pad Left: Additional Options"

Secondary Menu:
"Select 'Override' to assign default Dash on boot"

Thanks for all the support on this amazing application.
I’m just hoping these minor additions can help future beginners by saving them some trial and error!

Burnout 3, and Project Gotham Racing 2 are now officially supported for crossplay original Xbox <-> XRevive on PC on XB Online.

Halo 2 is now in alpha testing for crossplay on XRevive. Please play and give us feedback! Every week we have rotating matchmaking that YOU the players can voting for on Halo 2 here: https://xb.live/halo2 . Carnage Reports are available as well. Enjoy!