Entries from April 2007 ↓

Well, it seems TheSpecialist has come to the communities aid!  He has released a new version of his Xbox hard drive hacking program with support for the 120gig security sector.  In order to use it, at the moment, you need to use a Western Digital Scorpio BEVS-LAT laptop hard drive - which I believe is model number WD1200BEVS (can anyone verify this?).  That is the only drive supported by the software at the moment.  Hopefully, the software see new revisions that will supports other drives in the future.

Via Joystiq::Xbox-Scene

It appears that the 120 Gig hard drive and the Elite are out in the wild. Yesterday Xbox-Scene linked to Llama.com’s tare down of the Elite. The llama’s were nice enough to gut the hard drive shell and reveal that it contained a Fujitsu MHW2120BH laptop hard drive. A quick Google search shows us that those drives are running around $100. That’s a bit cheaper then $179. Microsoft has defended their price by comparing the HDD add-on to self-powered external drives - I’m having trouble swallowing that.

Looking at a tare down AnandTech did of the original 20 Gig drive you can see the simple cable that connects the HDD (a common laptop hard drive) to the 360. Microsoft was kind enough to post the instructions for the HDD’s on their site. Looking closely we can see that the first step of installing or removing the drive is to shut down the console. Think about it this way - imagine your installing a hard drive in your laptop - you’d shut it down first - if you were using a self-powered external drive it would be at least USB so you could just plug it in. Now pretend that you ran a SATA cable out of your case and glued it to the top so you could simply plug in a drive. Starting to see the picture?

What Microsoft has created is simply a proprietary SATA to 360 connector, which is housed in a plastic shell with the hard drive. They then tried to convinced everyone that it’s the equivalent of an actual external hard drive. Which it’s not.

Maybe the extra cost is coming from the “transfer cable”…

Holding back free downloads on Live? Over priced song packs? Over charging for accessories? I’m starting to hate the way this is going…

I’ve spent the past ten days battling some form of the flu - which as it turns out is not all bad - since my contract at Vicarious Visions was up the Friday before I got sick.  During the first half of the week I spent my waking hours playing Oblivion (that’s right I broke down and bought it).  Near the end of the week my shipment from Activision came in and I become an achievement whore of sorts - beginning Call of Duty 2 on the hardest difficultly just so I could get the points.

Anyway, now that I’m starting to feel better hopefully I’ll be able to fall into my old pre-game tester schedule…

Yeah that’s right - I finally picked up an Xbox 360.  Yes, I was aware that the 360 Elite was going to be announced and I got one anyway.  My 360 game collection currently consists of Gears Of War, Crackdown (complete with Halo 3 beta access) and Saints Row.  I have three more titles on the way from Activision (Call of Duty 2, Call of Duty 3 and Marvel Ultimate Alliance) which hopefully are going to get to the office this week.   Of the games currently available in stores the only other one I want is The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.  I’m putting off picking it up because I know it’s going to try and steal my life - do I have 90+ hours?  Not to mention the extra downloadable content.

All in all the 360 is great!  The only thing that I can seem to get over is the damn Live Arcade store.  I haven’t been able to bring myself to buy anything off of it.  The whole points thing just kills it for me - not to mention that I already own many of the retro games.  I don’t get achievements from them but hey they are free.  I’m going to attempt to add some points to my account again today…