[Note: I wrote about this last night, but it disappeared into the bit bucket somewhere and *poof!* ;-)]
Son&Heir and I took a day off and headed north. Ended up barely avoiding re-enacting a minor subset of The Gift of the Magi by buying each others’ Christmas presents together. *heh*
Soooo… I bought him his “original” XBox (all $60 of it) and he bought me mine. We knew he had his eye on a $75 deal on one to go along with his Wii and XBox 360 and PS3 for whatever reason and thought that would be a reasonable addition to his Xmas list from us. What we didn’t know was that he had planned on buying two, modding them to be used as media servers and giving us one of them.
(Oh, you noticed the disparity between the $75 and the $60? Yep. Price wars. NOTE: not exactly “price wars”–see comments.)
So, I’m modding “his” and he’s modding “ours”.
Works. (He gets the six games that came with the two ‘Boxes.)
As it stands, I’m just getting up to speed on the modding process. Deciding between a strictly softmod or an all-out hard mod. The difference? About $100. For the hard mod, about $40 for a mod chip plus $40 for some peripheral hardware, plus $60 for a new hard drive.
For a softmod, just about $40 for some interface hardware to easily transfer some setup files from my PC to the XBox–the rest of the stuff is either free (all free software) or already in Son&Heir’s possession (lil hardware stuff). Heck, maybe another $10 for a USB-to-PS/2 “Y” adapter for using a nice lil wireless keyboard/mouse combo I semi-retired a while back (the mouse felt a tad klunky in my hand).
Then, yeh, I’d probably change out the hard drive for a larger one. The reason I’d consider chipping the thing is that I could add a MUCH larger hard drive were I to do that. So, I may softmod it and then chip it later. That’d work. Heck, once I figure the best streaming solution from my computer with the TV card, I’d certainly want a larger hard drive to store DVR stuff, but not over 200GiB. If I needed more storage than that, I’d just burn a DVD or three.
Speaking of… Ripped the Jackie Chan/Jet Li “The Forbidden Kingdom” DVD the other day, cos the rental was up and Son&Heir wanted a look at it (yeh, the copy’s destroyed now–I think; that was the plan, at least). I’d just have kept it over and paid the late fee, but… small town, small video rental place, and apparently the vid’s really pouplar, so I took it back on time. Anywho, it’s a DVD I may well buy. The wire-fu scenes with the Monkey King, and the scene with Let Li and Jackie Chan going at each other are really, really good “choreography”. Fun. Heck, the stuff that’s not fly-by-wire-fu in those scenes is even better than the wire fu. The plot’s nothing. Characterization’s so-so (Jackie’s always fun, and Jet Li gets to play some fun parts in this one, but character development? In a Jackie Chan movie? Fuggetaboutit! *heh*). Nah. This is all about the “choreography” and the camera work. Fun movie.
Bad part? No out takes normally found in Jackie Chan movies. Bummer. Oh, well. Can’t have everything. This at least had Jackie Chan and Jet Li in the same flick.