The XBox has now been modded. This was actually fairly simple, with a board needed to be added to the unit. This contained some significant technology on it. I was amazed at how easy the mod was to add… I am a reasonable surface mount solderer, but I am sure that people who have never soldered surface mount before would not have too many issues installing the chip. The thing that came with this mod chip was a PCB that did most of the wiring on the underside of the board without needing actual wires. A quick solder link between the side of the wire board and the XBox PCB was all that was needed. I the chip worked first go. I would like to think that it was my soldering that made it work, but I am not convinced… I think it was just a good product.

Booting a CD-ROM with Linux produced some challenges… The CD-ROM would not boot, so we found a link to a site that included details on how to improve the reliability of the internal DVD drive, and we followed these instructions… And only then did we realise that the CD-ROM and the HDD were both set as a slave when we put them back into the machine due to other tinkering. Once corrected, the CD-ROM booted without problems. We cannot say if our mod helped, but regardless, CD-Roms now do work in the device. All in all some cool hacking!