Some original xbox queries

[Constipated Rat]

No probs deadlegion, I will check out those games also and emu compilation you mentioned... cheers

@Zorlon

I actually forgot about all the mods and stuff the xbox is capable of.... this is really sweet, and getting better by the day, finding out all these possibilities. hehe. I'll have to figure out how to do implement all that stuff.

You're right. the draw and view distances aren't bad but are a little disappointing, atleast on the PS2. It was the pic on the back of the cover or maybe a screenshot I'd seen previously that showed a view from flying a plane and you could see the "spaghetti junction" roads very clearly from a good height and all the cars driving along, and it looked pretty impressive. But this isn't the case on the Ps2, as when flying even a few hundred feet up the ground is fazed out, sand storm, fog, whatever it is.... I know it is a graphical limitation since the game had no load times and what not and rockstar still did a fine job for the games time, but my expectations after seeing the screenshot were high(literally lol).. it also gives you a bad sense of direction when trying to home in on things... still a great game none the less. Also I heard textures and stuff are better on xbox versions of games also, even in vice city and GTA3. It'll be good seeing the difference since I have the Ps2's variations embedded into me.

[Zorlon]

lol I'm the only one that I know of that has done any exclusive gta-sa mods, most that have other mods are just PC ones that kinda screw up the game on xbox

there is a GTA-SA real car names mod not done by me though that works ok but misses alot of content so old car names are still in parts of the game

I can do very high stills but the load time is crippled for distant objects, if they load at all so not practicle in game

As far as mods do go I know of a few

Phantasy Star Online Episodes 1 & 2:-

• Play Offline modes without Live Account
• Play Online Quests in Offline mode v1.0 (Mine)

Grand Theft Auto - San Andreas:-

• Hot Coffee (Mine)
• Real Car Names

Fable the lost chapter:-

• The King's Bounty - Side Quest that might be ok
• Fable: Afterlife - TC mod WIP including the above - Not keen on this one it removes stuff rather than adding

Dead or Alive Beach Volley Ball:-

• Nude mod

Soul Calibur II:-

• Skins

Morrowind I have yet to look at so not sure what has been done with that one

Alot of mods around are badly implimented PC mods, i.e. alot of the time it messes the game up more than adding content

There are also official add ons that originally you got from Live but now available to DL via PC and ftp to your brick

There are some nice GTA/Fable tools & some work with the xbox files so there are some things you can play with, as for the Distance thing I edited that by hand

http://www.gtamodding.com/index.php?title=Main_Page comes in handy but most of it is directed to the PC version that is not the same in alot of parts

I have in the past done a few gta 3 mods but never kept those, mostly was to get to the intro island via a tunnel and drive on it, another was a police cars back to the beta police cars, asides from those I never realy bothered that much

[Constipated Rat]

Sweet mate!!..

Will definitely try out those mods.. Gotta love nude mods, especially in games like Dead or Alive lol.

I'm not much of a Phantasy Star person to be honest, but I have it here and will give it a go. Also have Fable(always wanted to play that)... and of course your Hot Coffee lol.. love any GTA mods anyway they come.

As far as the GTA distance thing goes, must be a tight limitation to stop slowdown when flying around the place. I just finished Mercenaries on Ps2 and that had pretty shitty draw/view distance also. And that game uses alot of the same textures over and over on the hills and valleys so you'd think it would be good when in an aircraft, but it really is 10 times worse than GTA SA, you literally can't see 100 feet around or beneath you, as everything is just mist, then you get took out with a SAM lol. Very hard to enjoy games like this, even though you get use to it after a while. I know they probably inplemented it into the game like this to give a better wartorn atmosphere, but damn!, it's hard to see where you are going most of the time.

I've also heard about that memory upgrade, soldering on an extra 64mb of ram... do you know if this is worth doing?.. would it have any profound effect on game performance or other things?

[deadlegion]

Sweet mate!!..

Will definitely try out those mods.. Gotta love nude mods, especially in games like Dead or Alive lol.

I'm not much of a Phantasy Star person to be honest, but I have it here and will give it a go. Also have Fable(always wanted to play that)... and of course your Hot Coffee lol.. love any GTA mods anyway they come.

As far as the GTA distance thing goes, must be a tight limitation to stop slowdown when flying around the place. I just finished Mercenaries on Ps2 and that had pretty shitty draw/view distance also. And that game uses alot of the same textures over and over on the hills and valleys so you'd think it would be good when in an aircraft, but it really is 10 times worse than GTA SA, you literally can't see 100 feet around or beneath you, as everything is just mist, then you get took out with a SAM lol. Very hard to enjoy games like this, even though you get use to it after a while. I know they probably inplemented it into the game like this to give a better wartorn atmosphere, but damn!, it's hard to see where you are going most of the time.

I've also heard about that memory upgrade, soldering on an extra 64mb of ram... do you know if this is worth doing?.. would it have any profound effect on game performance or other things?

The memory upgrade mod (like the CPU upgrade mod) isn't worth the effort if you're only using the console for games from what I remember........it's been mostly used by modders who set up the console as a PC running linux or what have you.

I could be wrong about that though

[Zorlon]

there is one emu that can utilise it, one of the Mame ports but no not worth bothering with

the draw distance perhaps isn't as bad as PS2 it can be a pain when the weather aint so good though anyway, judge for yourself when you get round to playing the thing

the game itself does not slow down with a greater distance view but some things take a while to show or just don't load in quick enough, there migt be a limit set in another part of GTASA that limits the number of models/skins that are loaded in each view

[Virii]

If you haven't tried a method yet. Try this.

You'll need a PC with an USB port, an 'IDE' port, and a 'Molex' power supply plug for the Xbox HDD. You may be able to use IDE to SATA, and Molex to SATA adapters if your PC doesn't have the requirements. Follow this post for the USB boot method.
http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.p...&#entry4780448

Once you have the softmod in place, simply use the 'Heimdall's Xbox Engineering Disc' to upgrade the dash, backup the EEPROM, or prepare a replacement hard-drive.

Google for the latest version of the boot disc as it is occasionally updated.

[Constipated Rat]

Thanls fo the info guys...

I probably wouldnt try the memory upgrade anyhow.. unless I REALLY knew it would make a huge difference.

@Virii

Thanks for the alt guide, I'll have a look at it and see what is worth a try. Still in the process of working out what hard drive to get to replace this old 10gig one. I want to get a brand new one for peace of mind.

[Zorlon]

Reminds me you can also get the olde XBox live downloads via your PC we might even have some of those here at EP it's been a while since I looked at that stuff, most of it wasn't of much interest to me to be honest but it's not to say you won't be asides from the odd Xbox live arcade games there are a few add on packs like extra tracks costumes ect..

Mine 120GB was from an old Desktop lol I did check it first though

Even a brand new one though can pack in easy enough, make sure you check any reviews ect or even check out various xbox hdd guides on the best type/brand of HDD to get, you might even want to check out dedicated HDD test sites/charts online aswell.

I said the above because I have repaired lots of desktops in the past and the majority of issues specially with the Dell desktops I looked at was the HDD packing in and the machines had not been that old at the time.

On a side note though although xbox discs are dual layer most games are a max of 4gig alot are less, so even with a 10GB you can atleast play one large xbox game or a few small ones via HDD or a large number of 16bit emulators plus select roms.

I would be looking at a few guides aswell and make sure you understand what is needed to do this in the first place, it's not realy hard to do but it is worth reading through a few times though to make sure you do know what to expect and to get a beter understanding to what you are doing, mistakes can still be made that will just brickout your xbox, also even after modding a new hdd it might be worth keeping the old one just incase something screws up, even if this is months down the line.

[Constipated Rat]

No probs Zorlon.. thanks for filling me in

I think I read about the xbox live thing, or seen a tut on youtube when searching for guides. good to know, I will get round to it...cheers

About a hard drive- I do have a spare 120gig Seagate Barracuda, but there is a pin missing off it, even though it still works in a pc, it is 7yrs old and that missing pin freaks me out a bit as it may cause a screw up I'm thinking....also it is 7200rpm, I'm guessing this is ok since most 3.5inch hard drives are 7200rpm. But since 120 or 250gig are so cheap nowaday I may just buy a new one.

I will probably want the games I play most loaded to the hard drive, and some few thousand emu games lol.. not into media stuff, music,films etc on it, but never know down the line, so I will be going 120gb or more. It is good to see the iso's so small, it freaked me a bit when I was checking for how badly scraped the disks were and noticed the burn areas on most games were very small. I now know its normal.

I'm gonna go through the guides and check out what is best, Was thinking for a while about the memory card exploit in games and was gonna mod a control pad to usb and buy a memory card and get those action replay drivers for it, but then you need the original game and stuff, and also since I want the bigger newer hard disk anyway I am just going the hotswap root. There surprisingly isn't many doing the hot swap softmod hack on youtube using this method, I can only find vids of people doing it for a bigger hard drive not mentioning the softmod potential within it.. as all the other xbox softmod vids seem to be the "save" exploits. I thought youtube would have been littered with the hotswap softmod exploit since you don't need anything.

[Jackhammer]

These videos are for fixing an error 16, but it's the same process for modding with the rescue cd I've already posted. Just remember to backup your EEPROM once the mod is complete.

[Gypsy]

After looking at the specs of this thing I've noticed it is WAY more powerful than the PS2 lol. I cant believe I was so loyal to Sony when this monster should have been the console I was using during the PS2/xbox era... It's also just dawned on me how much games suffered slowdown and glitching on the PS2. Games like GTA San Andreas had bad draw distance when flying around, although on the back of the cover it showed really good clear views from the air lol... or when the car spawning AI use to mess up and cause pile ups right before your eyes on the highways lol!, and cars use to jutter when crusing beside them even on empty roads. Seemed the game was too much for it.... so I'm guessing games like this on the more powerful xbox wont suffer these, Right?...

To be fair the PS2 had the better side of the exclusives.

Also, no reason to play Morrowind on Xbox when you can play it on PC.

Morrowind I have yet to look at so not sure what has been done with that one

Probably lots but not as much as what is available for PC.

This thread reminds me that I still need to pick up an original xbox again and turn it into an emulating machine for rare PS1 and SNES I've been meaning to play.

Are there any ways to use alternate controllers on the Xbox? The main reason I never got into Xbox that much was the controller.

[Zorlon]

Get used to the controller it's not all that bad but yeah I have a PSX/PS2 pad to Xbox converter that I use for a rapid fire PSX/2 pad so I'm not killing off my xbox pads (usually in mini games) my conveter has PSX/2 to USB (doesn't work in Win7 shrug I also have a 360 wired pad ) xbox and gamecube

Most different console controllers take a little getting used to the only one I never could hack was the N64 pad

The Xbox 1 controllers are nice not a hell of alot of differnce to the 360 pads, has black + white buttons on face of pad instead of 2nd trigger on back right and left of pad

The mods for PC I believe are the ones available for xbox maybe with some converting though same goes for Fable, personly not realy interested in installing games on my laptop, only games I install from time to time are the Baldurs Gate games plus the others with the same engine, plus my laptop is not a games rig or anything

[Gypsy]

Definitely something I'll buy then because I really never want to touch an xbox controller again. Now to find a console dirt cheap.

[Constipated Rat]

To be fair the PS2 had the better side of the exclusives.

Yeah, no doubt about it mate. Was still a great console and Sony and game developers knew it would fly off the shelf.

MS also had LIVE to help spin money for them in the after sales, so they needed it to be equipped and nifty to make an impact. So you can see how and why both consoles had their perks.

I would rather play emu's also on a console if the emulation is good, Sitting at a pc is annoying sometimes, also makes you want to use save states to beat levels or bosses when you get frustrated lol. I did have some emu's on Ps2, like snes station, but music in games was too slow, and some later gen games had some frame issues. I hate wasting my time playing unless its almost perfect. The xbox should be good, and as you say PS1.. looking forward to seeing how it goes.

And yeah, dont fancy the feel of the xbox controller myself, playstation controllers are what I've used for the last 15 or so years, good to see there is adapters. I'm also looking forward to the 720p as I actually played a good deal of my games on a 20inch 4:3 TV, so going flat panel 32 inch at 720p should be good to relive some memories. I just wish I wasn't so "johnny come lately" to it. lol

[Gypsy]

Definitely. I think the ps2 may have the best exclusive library of all consoles. Hard to say. Ps1 is up there and while I'm not huge on SNES many more titles were exclusive in the past. Well, more of the good ones from what I can tell.

I would rather play emu's also on a console if the emulation is good, Sitting at a pc is annoying sometimes, also makes you want to use save states to beat levels or bosses when you get frustrated lol. I did have some emu's on Ps2, like snes station, but music in games was too slow, and some later gen games had some frame issues. I hate wasting my time playing unless its almost perfect. The xbox should be good, and as you say PS1.. looking forward to seeing how it goes.

Yeah it's been something I've been meaning to do for a bit now.

As far as playing on PC vs Console. For me it boils down to sitting in a chair or laying on my futon. Futon wins.

I like the feel of the Sony controllers. Grew up on N64 so obviously a HORRIFIC controller won't stop me but I'd definitely use a dualshock 2 over an xbox controller.