Chips & Beans
This week I chipped my Xbox. If you’re thinking about doing it I would recommend it. I used the Xapt3r with an Xecuter 3 CE and the X3 Control Panel. I was very nervous about it because I would have felt stupid if it had all gone horribly wrong but a bit of patience, a little bit of common sense and faith got me through. There are some very good tutorials on the web but there isn’t one unified step by step guide from start to finish using the components I bought. So I’m considering writing one, a guide that shows you how to take a standard xbox, chip it, flash the Bios, network it to a Mac, install a new dashboard and then install XBMC.
The main guides I used were:
- Xapt3r Install & Xapter Install Troubleshooting
- X3CP Fitting Guide
This was quite common sense really but it was nice to have instructions to reassure me that I was doing the right thing. - Xecuter 3 Install Tutorial
The beginning of this doesn’t apply as I used the Xapt3r but the last part shows where to solder the LAN & HDD LEDs, as well as where and how all the wires connect. I didn’t bother soldering the connections for the LEDs as it looked like too much hassle to me. - FlashBIOS Tutorial (Flash via HTTP)
I didn’t really see the point in burning a DVD for the sake of a 1Mb file so I flashed the BIOS via HTTP. Strangely it wouldn’t work from my PC, I’m not sure if it’s because I was using Firefox or because it’s a wireless connection, or some other more obscure reason. It also wouldn’t work from IE on my Mac but it worked fine from Safari.
There are some pics and some more ramblings in the forum here.