I modded my Xbox 360

The Xbox 360 was my third console (first the SNES, second the Xbox classic). I purchased it in 2009 after a long period of consideration.

I was still a student and was happy when I could clear my head with video games.

Little by little, my game collection took on a large size. I bought a lot of used games on “eBay Kleinanzeigen”. That was cheap.

But little by little, the console gathered dust under my TV. I no longer paid any attention to it. However, I didn’t want to part with it either. There were still a lot of games that I had great experiences with: I still like to tell the story to a friend about how we unboxed the first “Read Dead Redemption” back then and played it with enthusiastic eyes for months. I haven’t experienced something that compelling in a long time. There are a number of games I’d like to finish or revisit to bring back old memories. There are also a few games I want to play through again.

So I decided to breathe new life into the Xbox and archive my collection on it and make it easily accessible to me. Through conversations with a friend I came across the RGH mod and decided to try it myself. I ordered the mod chip, programmer and a 1 TB hard drive. What you need depends strongly on the Xbox revision. After 1 month everything was there and I could start.

I followed the instructions of WeekendModder : His instructions are very detailed and in the videos you can pause at the prominent places.

I highly recommend buying the flux and fiberglass scraper. It saves a lot of frustration. Also, the soldering iron should always be hot enough (I recommend > 350 °C).

Doing all the wiring and soldering took a lot more time than I first thought: It took me a good 4.5 hours. Especially because the solder joints are very tiny and first I had to search and double check that they are correct. Reading the keys and installing the new firmware was easier: The GUI is quite well thought out.

I can say that this was the most complicated thing I have ever soldered.

Now I can archive all my original games on the hard drive. I can easily have a gaming session on the sofa.

But first I noticed that the DVD drive have problems to read the discs :(

After several attempts to find out the reason for this on the internet, it turned out that it was probably the laser that was broken. So I ordered a new one (~5 €). A further week later, I was able to install the new one after opening up the console again and taking the drive apart.

And wonder of wonders, there are no more problems reading the discs.