XBox Mod Foibles

owen

After having played with it for a while, there are a few things that bother me about this XBox mod chip and the software that is available for it.

The Xenium apparently has some kind of problem with there being a non-Microsoft controller plugged into any port when the XBox boots. I have installed XeniumOS 1.1, which is supposed to take care of this issue, but it doesn’t. The system just hangs at the boot screen if you have anything other than a real MS controller plugged in. I’m anxious to get XeniumOS 2.0, which looks very cool, and hopefully solves this issue.

The mod chip is supposed to allow region-free DVD playback. Well, ok, but the weird combinations of configurations that get this to work don’t suit me. There are three ways:

  1. Use custom software, DVD-X, to play DVDs. This works, but isn't compatible with the remote, has lousy controls, and has no function to return to the dashboard, so it really sucks.
  2. Overwrite region coding on EEPROM with Zenium and play with default XBox Dashboard. If you have the remote dongle plugged in (the thing that receives the remote signals) when you play a DVD, it resets the region encoding back to region-1.
  3. Use a hacked version of the default XBox Dashboard that doesn't overwrite the EEPROM. This would be great, but I can't get it to run. I think I have named the file incorrectly or something.

I think this last option might work best because I’ll get remote support, but it’s a pain how you have to install stuff on the XBox. Hmm… I guess it wasn’t originally designed for that.

XBox Media Center just won’t stay alive long enough to be useful. Eventually, you tell it to do something that kills it. I can never play more than one auto file without rebooting. I am hit-or-miss playing back videos over the network without rebooting. I have yet to play a DVD from it without hanging the XBox instantly. The software looks cool, but it just ain’t doing it. The only thing that works well is the image viewer. Yawn.

I did make my first game “backup” over the weekend, of issue 29 of the Official XBox Magazine disk. Worked like a charm. And regular DVD playback (with the default dashboard and the chip disabled) works just fine with the remote. So it’s not as bad as all that, just that it’s not as functional as I would have liked.