One of the worst kept secrets. Arcade will be $199, 60GB Pro system $299, and Elite 120GB system $399 on September 7. This makes the arcade that was $279 now cheaper than that damn Wii.

It's a monster, made by a blacksmith. Brutal Legend.

Not only is this guy’s employee hittin’ his girl, he pisses in the coffee pot.

In the conclusion to chronicling of unplayable disc error and a terrible hair clipper noise, I fixed my 360 at last. Take that MS! and thanks to the guy that did this video.

These boards inside the Hitachi drive are tied through firmware to your unique 360’s board. If you were to put in a different drive, the 360 would not recognize it and flash angry red lights at you. You could fix this by flashing the firmware from the old drive to the new drive (eg Samsung or BenQ drive) or even using hacked firmware to play backup copies. I decide to transfer the old card to the new drive.

There are lots of straight up loony fixes for this (towel trick? cmon internet) and some helpful ones as well. The only solid fix for this is to get a new drive. Turns out Hitachi DVD drives for Xbox 360s on ebay are somewhat cheap. for a repair from Micro$oft it would have cost me $99 and several weeks of non-gaming, I instead paid 28 bucks plus shipping for a repair that took me less than an hour.

Once you get the casing off the drive, you will see the board is connected by 4 thin ribbon cables (3 blue, one small green). Disconnect and unclip card from hardware. It’s as easy as popping the card in the new DVD drive, reconnecting the ribbon cables and putting everything back together. Since you’re reusing the old card but with new hardware, there is no need for flashing and your 360 will recognize the new drive as the correct device tied to it.

Here it is, quiet with replaced Hitachi drive.

a lot better than what it looked and sounded like here (it made that noise when Microsoft sent it to me. it’s my 3rd 360!):

The new drive, incidentally, was manufactured in Sept. 05 (a launch 360’s drive). The old one manufactured in 06 while the manufacture date on the 360 MS sent me last fall is 2007. full circle i suppose.

Execution: 10. Follow-through: 10. Style: 9. (point deducted for killing an Xbox)

A user named Kingfry posted these pics on iReport accompanied by this message:

My husband had repeatedly warned our 3 boys about their behavior while playing the XBOX. Tuesday, after I arrived home from work, our oldest son told me to look in the backyard at "Dad's artwork". Well, I wasn't surprised to see the XBOX proudly displayed on the nearest tree... way to go Honey!!!!!

Apparently this story appeared on CNN, then it made the gaming internet rounds. I love this. As a father of 4 with an Xbox, a GameCube, two Xbox 360s and two PCs in the house, this pic made me laugh HARD. My children are constantly arguing over the games and what better punishment than to destroy the Xbox and then proudly display it for the wilderness (and eventually the internet) to see?

I will have to present this to my children as an educational tool.

This video is Luke Smith of Bungie’s acceptance speech (using Halo 3) for an EDGE award that they won for interactive innovation this week. Apparently some angry internet people thought the innovation referred to the campaign (space marines has been done before, yes) when the award was actually for the work they did in the multiplayer section in the game, most notably the forge map editor and the saved films/screenshots (I've used the screenshots feature quite extensively on this blog).

What’s even better about the video is that Luke seems to be dropping some not-so-subtle hints about what’s next for Halo 3. After the big hub-bub surrounding Microsoft’s cancellation of Bungie’s announcement during E3 this year, it would seem Bungie is salvaging the situation and returning to what they do best, being vague as hell about their upcoming projects.

There are a few key things that jump out. The map Luke is walking around in is Rat’s Nest, a multiplayer map, but wait – there are characters from campaign in there! Namely - flood pure forms, hunters, brutes, jackals, Sgt. Johnson, Miranda Keys, the Master Chief and Cortana. It is not currently possible to import campaign characters (or even use the models) into multiplayer, but its also not beyond belief that Bungie can mod their own game for the sake of comedy. Or, could it be this is hinting at something else entirely? The only real solid hint comes at the end of the video, where Luke says something to the effect of “Even though in Halo 3 you finished the fight, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the ride’s over”. His spartan is shown in a small structure against a blue grid and he says “wait a second, there’s no way that we’re showing this yet!”

There has been lots of speculation on the Halo 3 forums but I personally think they might be doing a full-fledged map editor (the current map editor only lets you place and delete objects in existing geometry) and *maybe* a create-your-own-campaign level feature with the ability to add AI campaign characters into existing multiplayer maps. Who knows? I guess we'll know soon enough, if Bungie's warning from a while back about "major changes to the Halo 3 online experience" is any indication.

Here is another video of Marty O'Donnell (using Halo 3) of Bungie accepting G4's Gphoria award for Game of the Year last week. Doesn't really seem like any hints are here (other than the suspicious addition of more characters on screen than what is currently possible in Halo 3 behind some of the multiplayer characters and some of the characters dying instantly from no gunfire at the end of the video), but it's still entertaining.

As a bonus to this Halo 3 news post, I leave you with this screenshot of Adam Jones, guitarist/visual artist from Tool. According to Fourtheye.net, Adam is a big fan of Halo 3 and Bungie saw fit to hook him up with Recon Armor. Recon Armor is only available to Bungie employees, though they can unlock it for those that do something cool, make them laugh or win a contest. Looks like someone from Bungie is a fan of Adam's and/or Tool's work. Congrats Adam!

Found this video that demonstrates a way to swap out the circuit board inside your old DVD drive for your Xbox 360 into the new DVD drive without having to flash the firmware.

Just a few short thoughts about Bernie Mac & Isaac Hayes.

Bernie Mac, age 50, died from pneumonia complications related to sarcoidosis over the weekend. Bernie Mac was a great comedian, in my opinion. I really loved the Bernie Mac show for the first couple of seasons and always found his deliveries of the way he disciplined (and turned into a softy) the children he cared for to be downright genius. I think the first thing I ever saw him in was the movie The Player’s Club where he played a character named Dollar Bill. He will be missed.

Isaac Hayes, age 65, also died over the weekend. Being of a much younger generation, I never really knew of him or his music until he did the voice of Chef on South Park. After that I learned that he was a prominent soul singer, and even won an Oscar for his theme song from Shaft. I leave you with a song he performed as Chef called “Chocolate Salty Balls”, one of the funniest joke songs I’ve ever heard and probably the best delivery of a cookie recipe this side of Tool’s “Die Eier Von Satan”.

When I bought my Dell Inspiron 531s in late January, I was so excited about getting a new computer that I completely missed a few things when making my purchase. You see, I'd previously been using a Hewlett Packard computer that my dad bought me in 1999. It had a 500Mhz processor, 256MB of RAM and no graphics card at the time I bought the Dell, so I missed some things due to my overwhelming excitement at finally getting a new PC.

I got such a good deal on the price of the PC (in combination with a monitor and printer) that I didn't do the research. It's a slimline PC. I found out after the fact that slimline PCs are no good for gaming (or upgrading), as they can only support half-height (or low-profile) cards. No biggie, I'm a casual PC gamer and a hardcore console gamer so against my better judgment, I decided to not to return it. I only wanted to play Halo 2. So I bought a low-profile PNY GeForce 8400 GS the day after I got the 531s at the suggestion of a helpful Dell forum member and it seemed to improve my new PC's graphics capabilities. But obviously, I still wasn't satisfied. I could only run the game at 800 x 600 and low detail when playing online multiplayer matches if I wanted smooth performance. Then there's the other problem, my power supply. It's 250W. Most graphic cards require at least 350W (the 8400 requires 300W) but I found out through quite a lot of research that 250W can actually handle more than that. Still an annoying limitation, and because (again) my PC is a slimline, I can't just go get any PSU from Best Buy and slap it in there due to the size.

So here I am, a few months down the road, and I decided to get a Chaintech 8600 GT (pictured above) from NewEgg. It's roughly a little more than twice as good as the 8400 GS, and it improved my Halo 2 experience immensely. I can run it at a much higher resolution and medium detail with pretty smooth performance now. It's pretty much the best low-profile graphics card (out of a very small selection) you can get at the moment. But, the card gets HOT. REALLY HOT.

I'd read that the thing gets hot, but not as hot as mine is (most likely due to poor ventilation in the case design, and to be fair Dell probably didn't think the average dummy would ever end up installing a graphics card in this thing anyway). My initial tests using the nVidia control panel showed the card's temp at 80 C when idle, and 117 C when at full load (running a 3D application, in this case Halo 2)!! It was scary, to say the least. So I immediately started researching cooling solutions and found that there were a couple of options. You can install another fan or get a PCI card designed to cool the graphics card....except, the limitations came back into the picture. I have no available connectors for fans on the motherboard, and no available connectors from the power supply. Oh and apparently they don't make the special GPU-cooling PCI cards in low-profile - DOH! There had to be some sort of workaround to this problem.

So after a LOT of searching yesterday, I found the Thermaltake MobileFan II (pictured) at Radio Shack for 10 bucks. It is USB powered and relatively cheap. I figured that with a little bit of third world engineering, I could mount the fan to the back of the case and decrease the temps by a few degrees, maybe enough to quiet the danger alarm in my head.

After a some short tests that involved just holding the fan to the back of the case with the PCI slot covers removed, I found that the temp at idle was around 65 C and at full load 97 C. Definitely a huge improvement, but 97 C is still pretty scary. I'd like to be able to have the card for more than a few months, regardless of my PC gaming status.

So when it came time to think of a solution, I thought of my dad (in left pic, he's the guy on the right with the hat), the King of Shadetree Mechanics, the Sultan of Third World Engineering:

The car you see pictured on the right is his 1972 Vega, a car he has owned for 29 years (a little older than I am). This is his ongoing project, his baby, and it would take another blog post to accurately describe the work he has put into this thing. Needless to say, he has done a lot of professional-level third world engineering in his quest to improve and mod it. On top of that, he's also found several ingenious ways to fix other things - like the head of the guitar I broke once (he used stainless steel to hold the pieces together, and its still solid to this day). If anyone could sort this out, he could.

When I brought over the PC and the fan this morning, he immediately devised a plan to mount the fan using zip-ties. Drilling holes in the case was not feasible due to the size of the fan, its planned location and the placement of the motherboard inside the case. We removed the grill from the fan (it was pretty, but it had to go), and remounted the fan speed control to the other side of the fan so that the control would be accessible with the fan blowing air at the card. The placement of the other fans (PSU fan, CPU fan and second fan located near the CPU) and airflow inside the case necessitated blowing as opposed to sucking. Insert crude joke here _______________. Once we completed our plan, it was zip-tie time.

In the end, it certainly isn't the most eye-pleasing case mod (it's mounted to the left because of a lever to the right of it that couldn't be obstructed if I ever wanted to open the case again), but it's not terrible ugly and is definitely functional. My dad is a genius sometimes.

I'm happy to report that when I got the thing home the idle temp on the card had dropped to 60 C with full load temp (running Halo 2) never hitting more than 87 C. I let my son play Halo 2 for a bit and checked the temp several times and it usually read 85 C.

Thanks, Dad, for helping me with this annoying problem.

Note to self - Do more homework when purchasing a computer. Now if I could only get that 3 Ghz processor I want....

Current PC specs:

• AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+, 2.3GHz
• 4GB RAM
• Chaintech GeForce 8600 GT, 540 Mhz / 512MB RAM
• 250W Power Supply
• 19" Widescreen LCD monitor
• Windows Vista Home Premium

Here’s my first attempt at case modding an Xbox 360. Like no one’s done black before. I copied the look of the Xbox 360 Elite….lol but i still had the embarrassing white disc tray so i painted the eject button flat black and the disc tray silver. I left the side pieces gray. The controller is store bought. I do have the 120GB HDD though, so the only difference between this and an Elite is I don’t have HDMI.

Oh yeah and I’m getting the unplayable disc error again….it was working fine with the case off.

UPDATE:

Seems to be running a bit more consistently reading discs when upright now. Here are more pics.

next project? blue led’s for the ring of light.

(...continued from previous post)

This is what my Xbox 360 will look like when I’m playing Bully: Scholarship Edition tonight (yes, that’s my 360 in the video):

Tomorrow, it may look a bit different.

BEFORE

AFTER

I'll post some more pictures tomorrow after it is put back together.

UPDATE: Here’s the face plate:

The DVD drive in my Xbox 360 stopped working yesterday. Must be revenge for having posted about a couple of fire-damaged 360s and having a laugh about it.

This is actually my third 360. I bought my first (a Pro console) in February of 06, a couple of months after the 360’s launch. The DVD drive on that thing ended up crapping out and saying my discs were unreadable in October 06. And since the warranties were only 90 days at that point (they would extend warranties up to 1 year retroactively 2 months later), I sold it to GameStop sans hard drive and bought a Core console. The Core console ended up overheating enough to the point that it would overheat 5 minutes after powering on. This happened exactly 7 days before Halo 3’s release (the game I'd been waiting for since I got the 360) in September of 07. So after I sent it in, they sent me a replacement. This replacement made this hair clipper buzzing noise (the exact same sound as in this video) but after having to fight for time on my wife’s 360 (hers RROD'd on Christmas Eve 07) following Halo 3’s release I decided not to worry about it at the time. Then yesterday it just started telling me all of my discs were unplayable.

I thought, for some stupid reason, that if you send in a 360 under warranty and they replace it that the warranty is valid for another year. According to the Xbox Support guy I talked to yesterday – No, only if you paid to have your console repaired. If I had RROD and had it replaced it would be under warranty for 3 years only for RROD. What a fucking joke. I had strong words for mr. outsourced console tech support guy, telling him "I'm not stupid" and "you're a fucking liar" to eventually telling him "thanks for nothing" and hanging up. Why shouldn't my console be replaced or repaired for free? If you google or look at all of the YouTube videos out there, the failing DVD drive problem is just as rampant as RROD. I decided not to pay $99 to have it fixed just as I refused to have my first 360 repaired for $139.

So what to do? Should I write some whiney letter to Major Nelson? Go sign a petition at Xbox.com? Fuck it. I opened it up.

As it turns out, the Hitachi-LG drive I have is prone to a veritable cornucopia (hi dad!) of problems. I found several good tips on YouTube relating to the spindle magnet in the DVD drive and other things, but ultimately I didn't have the same problems. So I plugged the thing in with the case open (see above picture) to see if I could identify anything abnormal, and magically it started reading discs again (though it still makes the hair clipper noise). I was going to try transplanting one of Bob's fire-damaged 360s' DVD drives, but it looks like I won't have to at the moment. That would be a pain in the ass anyway as it involves flashing the firmware from the old drive to the new drive.

Sorta happy that the thing is working again, though I'm quite pissed I was forced to open it. Really makes one want to consider modding the firmware to play backup copies.

This is also strange. I never win anything, though I've entered a LOT of gaming sweepstakes. Yesterday I won a MS Points code for entering a Grand Theft Auto IV promotional thing back in April. Yes, I was one of 5000 third prize winners. How much? 500 Microsoft Points (roughly like $6.50). The day my 360 takes a dump I win some free money. I bought Geometry Wars 2 with it.

Here's hoping they release the fall dashboard update for the 360 a month or so early so I can just install my disc-based games to the HDD and not have to worry about Microsoft's shitty choice in DVD manufacturers anymore.

Oh well, now I can paint the case like I'd wanted.