Or “Squeezing it where Microsoft wont put it.”
I have been running Xbox Media Centre (hereafter XBMC) on my chipped Xbox for over a year now. It’s a handy and cheap way to be able to play multimedia files and DVD’s through my TV and amplifier well away from where I keep my p.c. XBMC is a really nicely written peice of software, although it does rely on being compiled with tools that leave it in a legal grey area. For more info see http://www.xboxmediacenter.de/.
Currently much of my media is still stored on the p.c. and streamed over the network to the Xbox, but I will soon be upgrading the harddrive to turn it into the primary media store for the network and so will be streaming back to the p.c. in future. But before that happens, it’s time to make it all look a bit nicer.
The Xbox suffers from the same design choices that all gaming consoles seem to suffer from, it looks a bit pants. In fact out of the consoles the same ‘generation’ it’s probably the worst looking, the best being the Gamecube. It seems that manufacturers didn’t want their kit looking too professional lest it scare away the gamers, keeping a ‘toy’ like appearance in the designs and only recently has the good example of Apple started to become apparent in gadgets like the DS Lite and the Wii (the PS3 however seems to be a retrograde step towards brickiness).
But before I digress much further into a rant on design I’ll tell you a bit about what I’m planning. I’ve just purchased on Ebay 2 rather nice VFD screens for less than £10 including postage from the US. These devices (Crystalfontz CFAH2004A-RGB-JP) are 20×4 character displays with a parallel interface suitable for hooking up to the p.c. to display things like CPU load and motherboard temps, winamp details and an infinite assortment of other geeky minutiae. Whilst googling the part number I discovered by happenstance that you can hook these babies up to the Xbox. Some of the Xbox modification chips have a parallel or serial bus added with the purpose of attaching this type of display, but mine doesn’t (xecuter 2b lite) but with one of these I can add a parallel bus that will do the job. It will be in the post as soon as the company I ordered it from fix their paypal account and let me pay for it.
Now If I’m adding a display to my Xbox it needs to go somewhere. Shall I buy an expensive replacement front plate? Shall I hack a hole in the existing plate and install it myself? Nah, f**k it, lets put the whole damn thing in a new box and make it look nicer at the same time.
A rummage through the spare stuff shelves brings up this baby, a Pioneer MJ-L7. It’s the Minidisc playing part of Hi-Fi that belongs to a friend of mine that my brother had n loan for a while several years back. A quick call confirms my suspicion that the other 3/4’s of the system are long gone, and seeing as this unit is useless on its own we have a candidate for the new box, plus it looks like it’s “Home entertainments” and that’s where we want to go.
The box has a blanking plate surrounding the hole for the discs which appears to be the same size as the front of a CD tray, obviously they use the same case moulding for the CD player too. This is good for me as I have somewhere to mount the CD drive. The play and record buttons have leds mounted in them, so these are going to become the power and eject buttons and the power and system status lights respectively. The buttons have small plastic beads where the light shows through, hopefully they’ll turn out to be plastic “light guides” and I’ll be able to mount the dual colour xbox LEDs behind them, although I might go for that noughties classic with blue LEDs instead. I’ve also seen other xbmc case mods that have next and previous buttons on the case. I’m not sure how these have been connected in those setups, but hopefully I can re-use these buttons on my case too.
One of the first things that springs to mind is that with this box there’s now no room to mount the VFD panel which was actually what got me here, but hey the box is too cool, so I’ll have to come up with an external housing to hold the panel on a flying lead, and that can then sit anywhere around the media gear that looks good. I’m hoping that the controller ports can be mounted in the lower black recessed area at the front, along with a couple of standard USB sockets (xbox controller ports just being usb sockets ina proprietry shape).
In the next installment I’ll show you what’s currently inside the new box, and start planning how to squeeze the Xbox internals in.
April 5th, 2007 at 1:40 pm
Hi Phil,
I´m just wondering what happend to that square metal box inside
the MJ-L7;-)
April 5th, 2007 at 1:52 pm
All the internals from the box have been ripped out and dropped in the parts bin for recycling. The square metal box was the mini-disc head unit. There’s probably not a lot of use for it as itself, but hopefully some stepper motors and the like might make themselves useful at a later date.
April 7th, 2007 at 7:14 pm
Thank you! Phil, I am very happy to know that little metal box from MJ-L7 is still in your hands
MJ-L7 gave one the freedom of timer recording and later edit it without a computer. My MJ-L7 failed to record radio program a while ago, but it can still play my old minidisc recordings. After searching the Internet, I got this info from here http://forums.minidisc.org/index.php?showtopic=4712, so I opend the MJ-L7 and that metal box, to my dismay, I found the wiring were perfect. I had tried cleaning the lens/heads, fine adjusting the position of the magnetic head arm via two screws for hours (days) in vain. I googled again and luckily the google brought me to your place.
Phil, could you let me to have that square metal box?
May 24th, 2007 at 8:09 pm
I used to have one like that! Glad its being put to good use!