A long long time ago, as I was still a student torn between the Teachers’ Institute and college, I put my hands on my very first video games console – and by that i mean not a hand-me-down from a cousin that had just gotten something much better for Christmas (we’d usually invest more in PCs than anything else when I was younger). Eventually I realized that the XBox was a PC in disguise (and since these Starcraft Ghost screenshots were so attractive), and went downtown to buy the monster from Micromania. I was already lucky that it’d work : the XBox, much like the XBox 360, had a very big hardware failure rate but mine decided to hang on and follow me all the way up to Epinay sur Seine after I became a teacher. After Christina arrived, the PS2 took the center of the stage but I always had it in my mind to take out that big brick of hardware and do something interesting with it…
I started on that with a few hours of research over the Internet, reading Instructables, downloading and borrowing tools from the school and after a few minutes…You can peer into the mighty beast’s guts ! As you can see, DVD player, IDE hard drive, good old motherboard, nothing one’s never seen before.
As I write these lines, my XBox is hardly able to start up a game – as for the dashboard that goes with it, I’ll probably have to refresh it from zero. But even then, all that reading and all that tinkering helped me understand more about this machine and the way it works than I ever did since I bought it. It also gave me time to reread the history behind the original XBox hack and the interests around the work of the first one to try and « jailbreak » this machine, Andrew « bunnie » Huang…As Apple’s iPad is making heads spins and tech hearts melt with its shiny aluminium case, I can’t help but remember this quote from the Owner’s Manifesto : « If you can’t open it, you don’t own it ».
For the first time in years, my XBox is mine and it’s a feeling well worthy of The Year of AWESOME !
