sandmountainslim Posted January 6, 2016 Share Posted January 6, 2016 A coworker gave me an original XBox with a 2005 manufacture date and a handful of games today. My fiance-in-law (ex-wife's fiance) who is a tech geek told he he can mod it for me to run all sorts of older systems. He said the stock memory of the Xbox would not be enough to take a bunch of MAME roms and every game for every console so I told him to try and fit a VCS emu and all the roms and if possible the same for NES and SNES onto it and he said he would fit all that he can onto it for me. Question is WILL it hold all the games for these systems?? What can I reasonably expect it to store with it's original memory storage? Thanks for any answers. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CatPix Posted January 6, 2016 Share Posted January 6, 2016 It's possible to put a larger HDD in a Xbox, tho it's not as easy as doing so than for a PS3. http://www.instructables.com/id/Original-XBOX-Hard-Drive-Upgrade/ However, you can put your Xbox on your LAN network and download the games you want from your computer. The original Xbox drive is a 20 Go model.I'd say that 10 Go are available to you, so that's all the VCS ROM, Intelli ROM, Coleco ROMS. Probably a good load of NES and SMs ones as well. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Flojomojo Posted January 6, 2016 Share Posted January 6, 2016 I think the original is actually an 8GB drive. It's plenty big for the teeny tiny things you want. Anything pre-N64 on a cartridge will fit with room to spare. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Osgeld Posted January 6, 2016 Share Posted January 6, 2016 (edited) I did put a larger hard drive in mine, but there for a while it wa my file server heh, I forget if its 8 or 10 gig, its not 20, but just about everything 8 and 16 bit should fit on there, so you should have no major issues fitting emu's for 3 systems and the full roms Edited January 6, 2016 by Osgeld Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sandmountainslim Posted January 6, 2016 Author Share Posted January 6, 2016 I think the original is actually an 8GB drive. It's plenty big for the teeny tiny things you want. Anything pre-N64 on a cartridge will fit with room to spare. Cool! So it should Hold VCS, NES, SNES and maybe even 5200 library also if there is an emu for it? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Flojomojo Posted January 6, 2016 Share Posted January 6, 2016 LOL, yes. All of those add up to like 200MB, they're very tiny. VCS games are 16KB at max (most are 4K or 8K), 5200 games aren't much bigger. NES games are generally under 32K. SNES games are generally 512K or less. This is why I think cartridges are silly in modern times. There's no reason for a single game to be the size of a deck of cards when a thumbnail-sized device can hold millions of them. It's been a while since I've played with emulators on the Xbox but in my memory, they were fast and faithful, and worked well with the Xbox controller. Most of them have a common interface, which makes it nice and consistent across systems. Your fiancé-in-law (nice you're on good terms with him, by the way) is incorrect, you could put plenty of early MAME ROMs in that space. Just stop short of the NeoGeo era, when stuff gets big. You could sort by size and just not use anything larger than 5MB and you'd still have all the classics. Stuff like Donkey Kong and Galaga are almost as small as home games of the time, measured in tens of kilobytes. I think those two are around 16KB. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tempest Posted January 6, 2016 Share Posted January 6, 2016 There was an arcade emulator and front end called coin op or something like that for the Xbox. I have it on mine. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NE146 Posted January 6, 2016 Share Posted January 6, 2016 You can shove in several hundred gig IDE drives into your xbox (I forget the limit.. maybe it was 500 gig?) to hold all the various xbox emulators. but you have to know how to do it. And at this point I no longer do Many years ago I did though but it's just been so long at this point.. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
R.Cade Posted January 6, 2016 Share Posted January 6, 2016 Still a great solution... Better than RetroPi even, by a long shot. You can find everything you need on emuxtras.net Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Greg2600 Posted January 6, 2016 Share Posted January 6, 2016 My softmodded Xbox rocks. I put a 500GB IDE drive in there, but SATA can work with an adapter. You have to crank the fan speed up a bit because the newer/larger HDDs get much hotter. COIN OPS is indeed the "MAME" for this system. If you can find it, it's pretty big file wise, but is a collection of a ton of classic arcade and console emulation and roms. There are quite a few console emus designed for Xbox as well. It's not gonna run the oddball emulators like Jaguar, Saturn, stuff like that. All Atari console, lynx, game gear, SMS, Genesis, NES, SNES, Amiga, 8-bit, C64, even PS1 run very well. N64 is a bit of a stretch though. Runs just about all the arcade games through early 90's. 3d stuff won't work. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Austin Posted January 6, 2016 Share Posted January 6, 2016 Setting it up is kind of a pain, but if your friend can do it for you, then go for it. The XBOX is still a solid little emulation machine. I don't use it much for that purpose these days due to having the other consoles and flash carts, but I still use it once in a while for MAME. It also enables you to copy your XBOX discs to the hard drive so you don't have to pull them out when you want to play them. A bigger hard drive is a necessity if you want to rip original discs to the system, very few original XBOX discs are under a gigabyte, so it fills up quickly. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shannon Posted January 6, 2016 Share Posted January 6, 2016 (edited) If you don't mind having yer xbox hooked up to a network you can just load it up with madmab edition emulators and stream all of yer roms of off a network shares (including CD images for CD based systems). You can find what you need over at www.emuxtras.net. All of his emulators have updated cores with improvements to sound, CD playback (for systems that use CD games), overlay support (for systems that have overlays), support for Colecovision SGM games, etc etc. If you want an all in one emulator launcher you could always try coinops and possibly dragon/vision as a dash. However coinops does run on older "console" cores so you may be missing out in that area. There is a slimmed down version of coinops that should be able to fit on yer stock xbox. For arcade games as was mentioned previously you can fit quite a few if you skip over the bigger ones (like neogeo) although the metal slug series are too good to pass up. Coinops can easily satisfy your arcade needs with improvements/fixes to many games. Or you could take a crack at mameoxtras. Edited January 6, 2016 by Shannon Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Flojomojo Posted January 6, 2016 Share Posted January 6, 2016 Still a great solution... Better than RetroPi even, by a long shot. Explain how! I'm curious ... the Pi is so much quieter and smaller than an Xbox. My modded Xbox is in a closet, not hooked up, because of the bulk. What makes it better for you? The emulator accuracy? Using the Xbox controllers? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Osgeld Posted January 6, 2016 Share Posted January 6, 2016 (edited) well for me the use of wireless xbox controllers, network on board, large storage ability (250 gig on mine) that's faster than USB2, and the horsepower of the geforce3 for games vs a SoC video decoder make it my choice for emulation (I have a PI as well) then the fact it has a power button, and the entire filesystem wont get hosed if you abruptly shut it off more than 2 times and you dont have to wait for a full blown linux distro to start up and shut down are nice as well Edited January 6, 2016 by Osgeld Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
R.Cade Posted January 6, 2016 Share Posted January 6, 2016 (edited) Explain how! I'm curious ... the Pi is so much quieter and smaller than an Xbox. My modded Xbox is in a closet, not hooked up, because of the bulk. What makes it better for you? The emulator accuracy? Using the Xbox controllers? Just ease of use, and compatibility. I've tried RetroPi a few times... most recently a couple months ago with a Pi 2. * I had trouble getting the controller working in everything the same way, or at all. (USB Logitech) * Getting in and out of emulators was clunky - it ran scripts to do this and that, and would get stuck or hung often. * Emulators were not as mature - features were all over the place or non-existent. This is just a mess. * I had to copy all my roms to an SD card- it didn't work over the LAN. With XPorts, everything is the same menu system, gets in and out fast, can access all my roms over Relax share (or SMB, but that doesn't work as well with CD media), and is generally a breeze to use. Every emulator has video plugins (if you want) and you can adjust the screen size, etc. It's just generally a great experience. Edited January 6, 2016 by R.Cade 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mckafka99 Posted January 7, 2016 Share Posted January 7, 2016 well for me the use of wireless xbox controllers I have two different types of Xbox wireless controllers that worked without any setup on my RasbPi2; just had to use an Xbox to USB adaptor obviously to connect it to the Pi which I already had hacked together a number of years ago. The above aside, it is true that there is some effort in getting controllers setup and configured the way one wishes but I love my RetroPie setup for being able to use a keyboard, a2600 joystick, Intv controllers, wireless Xbox controllers and an clone SNES controller. Apart from the A800/A5200 emulator which is a bit of a pain to navigate in/use, I have found all of the others to work remarkably well and smoothly. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sandmountainslim Posted January 7, 2016 Author Share Posted January 7, 2016 I think I am going to like a modded XBox better than any Famiclone or similar device. Really looking forward to getting it back. I had thought about buying a Retron console as a retrogaming device for the living room tv but I believe this will fit the bill better as an all in one. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Osgeld Posted January 7, 2016 Share Posted January 7, 2016 (edited) if you snag a component cable for it, you can even run emulators up to 1080i (or 720p) which looks real nice on a LCD Edited January 7, 2016 by Osgeld Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shannon Posted January 7, 2016 Share Posted January 7, 2016 I run a lot of emulators with the interface set for 720p and on certain emulated systems (like PSX) the games at 640p (same as SDTV). It is rather nice looking. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+frankodragon Posted January 7, 2016 Share Posted January 7, 2016 I did make an old blog of how I had to make an Xbox eeprom reader since every Xbox has different serial number to softmod the unit. http://atariage.com/forums/blog/474/entry-11266-my-experience-making-an-original-xbox-eeprom-reader/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nebulon Posted January 7, 2016 Share Posted January 7, 2016 Explain how! I'm curious ... the Pi is so much quieter and smaller than an Xbox. My modded Xbox is in a closet, not hooked up, because of the bulk. What makes it better for you? The emulator accuracy? Using the Xbox controllers? The emulation accuracy on the XBOX is amazing. And the controllers are great for most titles. For example, the twin analog sticks work great for Robotron and are also pretty awesome when you map them for games like Intellivision's TRON: Deadly Discs. MAME and the rest of the consoles combined shouldn't use up more than 300 GB of space. So perhaps go for either a 300 or 500 GB hard drive and you'll have plenty of room. The 500 GB XBOX that I'm using runs cool at normal fan speeds, so it's actually pretty quiet. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
edweird13 Posted January 7, 2016 Share Posted January 7, 2016 There is a lot of info in this sub forum http://atariage.com/forums/forum/109-x-port-emulation-development/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
godslabrat Posted January 7, 2016 Share Posted January 7, 2016 Since the Xbox already has an optical drive, it'd be great if someone could add emulation for CD consoles. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shannon Posted January 7, 2016 Share Posted January 7, 2016 There is a lot of info in this sub forum http://atariage.com/forums/forum/109-x-port-emulation-development/ Those are old... but there is a lot of information there. www.emuxtras.net is where the more currrent information regarding x-port/madmab emulators. Since the Xbox already has an optical drive, it'd be great if someone could add emulation for CD consoles. Actually the PC-Engine emulator, Amiga emulator (CD32) and Sega CD emulator can all read original discs. The PSX emulator cannot ready PSX emulators because of speed issues resulting from the funky format of PSX emulators. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
R.Cade Posted January 8, 2016 Share Posted January 8, 2016 I've always just streamed ISOs from Relax, but it does work with original discs in the drive if you wanted... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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