Trip to Canada

Recent trip to Canada - Pic showing the route-map

Latest add on to my Gadgets - Casio Exilim

Yet another add on to my gadget collection - a Casio 5.0 MP, Exilim camera - almost as thin as 10 credit cards stuck together. The performance of the camera is excellent, can take pictures at resolutions as high as 2568 * 1920 with movies at 640*480 MPEG. A 1 gig memory card can give storage space for movies upto 1 hour long. Good thing abt the memory cards is that it will take either SD or MMC, unlike Sony who makes good cameras, but have to rely on using Sony proprietary memory cards (Memory sticks). Check out some of the pictures below.

This camera is an excellent choice for the money you pay less than 400 $...Slim, compact and still use point and shoot with 3x optical and 4x digital zoom. Also has a built in Anti shake DSP which prevents shaky/blurry images. Bought this camera from Norman Camera in Michigan - an excellent store to buy your cameras online. Shipping was cheap and was right on time.

Finally modded my Xbox after 3 yrs of owning it

After 3 yrs of owning an Xbox 1.0 (newly released versions have reached version 1.6). The Xbox is nothing but a P3 733 Mhz processor with 64 Mb ram and 8 gb hard disk and a DVD rom drive. The GPU is from Nvidia with 32 MB of VRAM ( i think) and DRAM is also built on board. Check this link for more pictures associated with my Xbox Mods.

http://www.kodakgallery.com/BrowsePhotos.jsp?&collid=806109446205

Approximate cost of the project = 70 - 80 $.

Some caveats, if you have recently bought the Xbox, and is still under warranty from Microsoft or a retail shop, dont mod it as you will lose warranty. You have to remove two hidden screws underneath the warranty and disclaimer sticker to open the xbox. The Xbox uses a special screw called Torx bit screw, which have a Star shape on the surface of the screw. You cannot use regular screw drivers to unscrew them, so I had to get a Torx screw driver for 10 $ from a local Home Depot store. I also bought a Xenium SP ICE chip for 62 + shipping online. Got the chip 2 days after I ordered it and after 2 days of reading various documents on the Internet , on how to mod an Xbox with Xenium chip...I still couldnt figure out where the Xenium chip goes into the motherboard of my Xbox. All this was because most documents on the Internet talks about installing Xenium chip on V 1.6 Xboxes. My version was a 1.0. Microsoft obviously used different chips for each versions on the mobo and hence all this confusion...I finally realised that some of the components that shipped with the Xenium SP ICE chip is not required for my Xbox (v 1.0's). Started this project on a Friday evening, and finally by Monday evening, I successfully installed my first mod chip on my Xbox. Also ugraded the stock hard drive on the Xbox (which is a 8 gb) to a massive 200 gb Ultra ATA disk from Seagate. Note that you have to buy a Hard drive that canbe locked and unlocked. Upgraded the hard disk to the new one and copied all the old hard drive contents (my save files, game profiles etc) from Old disk to New disk. At this point my modded xbox was ready to be installed with a new dashboard so that I can load applications, rip games to hard disc, rip dvds to hard disks etc....

The next part is the hard part...trying to find a dashboard (like Evolution X or Avalaunch) which are pirated versions of Microsoft original Xbox code. So its illegal to distribute such code. You got to rely on bit torrent files to download this software. After a day of searching I was finally able to locate the software which could be burned into a CDRW or DVD (no CDRs as Xbox doesnt read from most CDRs)...and all you got to do is boot the Xbox from this disc. Rest if piece of Cake.


My Modded Xbox can,

a. Now run two dashboards - EvoX and Avalaunch as well as the original Microsoft dashboard
b. Rip games to local HDD
c. Rip DVD movies to local HDD
d. Massive 200 gb storage
e. XBMP - Xbox media player - playes mpeg video as well as audio - mp3
f. XBMC - Xbox media center - streams video from a Media center edition XP PC with a tv tuner card built in...
g. Take backup copies of games that you own to a DVD (blank disc)
h. Has built in emulators that can play old Nintendo, Sega, Mame, Atari rom based video games
i. Downloadable skins
and lots more.....


More projects on the way...

a. installing win 98 on Xbox
b. installing Linux on Xbox
c. installing Windows CE on Xbox..

Until then..i will keep this blog posted with more fun stuff that I am gonna do with my Xbox...