Haus
I am Big Balls!
- 17,732
- 72,222
Wondering if anybody else has been down this path...
With the changes to Xbox live (and many other media subscriptions) as of recent my wife decided she had finally had it with this idea that companies could decide what should just randomly vanish from the library of things you had "purchased". So she started hording up physical media first (books, DVDs, Blu Rays, etc...) then she shifted into her various gaming collections. We have had a LOT of consoles and handhelds around this house over time. So we were at a Fanexpo recently in the dealer room and she was collecting various Xbox games she could get for "cheap" , around $5 a pop. And we run into this one booth with a dude who, when he heard about what we were doing, had an alternative option.
For a nominal fee he would take our old Xbox 360 and....
Mrs. Haus
kinda lit up at this Idea, so what the hell. This took him a month to do. Along the way he asked me what our favorite genres of games were (For us that's RPGs, Action, retro arcade, and puzzle at the top, and FPS/Sports at the bottom.) So he goes to work.
I picked it up Saturday and I'm just starting to get some time to play with it. He gave me some basic Docs for this front end, but it's very intuitive, so I fire it up and go. I now have a library of around 330 games on the SSD. Essentially all the heavy hitters in the history of Xbox360, plus a smattering of Xbox live titles downloaded. He told me the 1TB SSD is pretty full (only around 50GB left open for save games), but if I plug in an external drive I can add more games, and if I have the disc it has a "rip disc to drive" option, or I can play it off the disc like a traditional Xbox.
Anybody else gone down this dark path? So far it seems absolutely glorious. So for a good bit less than a refurbished current console I have a 300+ game library. He apparently also does the PS version of this, and if I want I can add MAME and Nintendo emulators.
With the changes to Xbox live (and many other media subscriptions) as of recent my wife decided she had finally had it with this idea that companies could decide what should just randomly vanish from the library of things you had "purchased". So she started hording up physical media first (books, DVDs, Blu Rays, etc...) then she shifted into her various gaming collections. We have had a LOT of consoles and handhelds around this house over time. So we were at a Fanexpo recently in the dealer room and she was collecting various Xbox games she could get for "cheap" , around $5 a pop. And we run into this one booth with a dude who, when he heard about what we were doing, had an alternative option.
For a nominal fee he would take our old Xbox 360 and....
- Replace all the caps on the motherboard
- Reflux the board
- Clean and do a top to bottom refurb on it
- Swap out the HD for a 1TB SSD
- Install this front end/launcher called Aurora on it
- Pack the HD with games.
Mrs. Haus
kinda lit up at this Idea, so what the hell. This took him a month to do. Along the way he asked me what our favorite genres of games were (For us that's RPGs, Action, retro arcade, and puzzle at the top, and FPS/Sports at the bottom.) So he goes to work. I picked it up Saturday and I'm just starting to get some time to play with it. He gave me some basic Docs for this front end, but it's very intuitive, so I fire it up and go. I now have a library of around 330 games on the SSD. Essentially all the heavy hitters in the history of Xbox360, plus a smattering of Xbox live titles downloaded. He told me the 1TB SSD is pretty full (only around 50GB left open for save games), but if I plug in an external drive I can add more games, and if I have the disc it has a "rip disc to drive" option, or I can play it off the disc like a traditional Xbox.
Anybody else gone down this dark path? So far it seems absolutely glorious. So for a good bit less than a refurbished current console I have a 300+ game library. He apparently also does the PS version of this, and if I want I can add MAME and Nintendo emulators.
- 3
