Xbox 360 modded with slot loading DVD drive, fire vision, mind control
By Joseph L. Flatley 
posted Nov 24th 2008 10:16AM
posted Nov 24th 2008 10:16AM
This Xbox 360 mod may be a little less dramatic than some we've seen, but we think that anyone who's had their nerves rattled by the incessant banging of their console's optical drive tray will really appreciate it. RDC over at the benheck.com forum has installed a slot loader into his Xbox the hard way -- by gutting the innards of his console's DVD-ROM and installing them in the case of his old iMac's slot loader. After taking everything apart, it was a simple matter of rebuilding the spindle, rigging up a tiny breadboard with a few transistors, cramming the new Frankenstein drive into the game system, and -- of course -- finishing up with some handy case mod. Sure, the whole affair seems needlessly complicated, but the end result looks pretty good to us. Catch a video of the finished business after the break.
he got it done just in time to load all his favorite games to his harddrive :)
But he still needs the disc in the drive.
I didn't see any mind control. :(
you're not looking hard enough :P
@onelove - That's what they want you to believe
Might be worth it if it's quieter.
cool! now its like the ps3!
@ryan.
YES! BUT WITH BETTER ONLINE PLAY!
Perhaps a new feature for XBox? Wow, combined with the New XBox Experience, its even more of a rip off of Wii meets iTunes cover flow. Can M$ do anything original?
They should have done this from the start... Microsoft pffft...
Why? Slot-loading drives have always been more expensive, slower, and more prone to failure, trapping discs inside when they do. It seems like a lose, lose, lose...
I agree with MIKE.
The technology isn't there yet for reliable slot loading drives.
With standard drives, even if the tray fails, you can typicaly pop it open with a needle until you can replace it. With a slot loader, you have to open up the entire system or risk scratching the disk if you attempt to remove it by force.
Agree with mike too
I like my consoles inexpensive thankyouverymuch.
i like slot loaders, guess why.
yep i have a mac mini, and its never failed on me (apart from the time i put a minidisk in... lesson learnt)
"The technology isn't there yet for reliable slot loading drives." - Flashpoint
Which is why I've had slot-loading drives in my car stereos for almost 20 YEARS NOW???
Slot-loading drives work great on my Macs. And on my Wii. I'm sorry that Microsoft isn't smart enough to figure out how to use slot-loading drives successfully...
> "The technology isn't there yet for reliable slot loading drives."
Decades of car stereos disagree...
Slot load drives are there, they wasn't reliable enough by the time the original Xbox was released but the 360 was, see the Wii, Mac Mini, countless laptop drives and more.
My 360 has a terrible time opening up the disc drive, it wont open sometimes, sometimes it will open and shut straight away, others it will open and won't shut or open half-way and shut itself, add this to the 360 disc drive scratching problems etc and the slot drive seems like the bright idea.
well there is one more 360 that will get banned on XBL for no good reason.
unless he's playing "backup" (pirate) games online, he won't get banned. read up on things before you make dumb comments next time.
yeah I was just about to say that, I wonder if it will get banned... so sad..
It really should have had this feature from the start, and ok even if you could not do it then, surely there is no reason why new 360's don't have this feature...
I guess you've not heard about the serialized hardware checks XBL does from time to time. we'll see who's dumb after that mod yields an XBL boot.
he's using the same chips and same firmware... MS will never know the difference
inteller: The article states that he actually took the innards of the existing drive and just used the existing slot loading mechanism of his old iMac. That would lead me to believe that the serial numbers and checksum would remain the same, which was probably his goal.
@inteller
Reading really is a lost art eh?
not just XBL, if he had used a 3rd party slot-loader instead of building his own from the legit disc drive the xbox wouldn't even play games locally. Every piece of hardware is digitally signed, that's why you can't replace items that cause RRODs, you have to send the whole thing back to MS. Its a brilliant solution to hardware hacking that would work better if the hardware didn't have a 25-30% failure rate in the first year. (quasi-statistic based on stories joystiq has posted from retailers)
Too bad they didn't digitally sign the DVD drive's firmware. easiest console to hack hands down.
If it's not going to effect drive noise or load times, why would you bother with this mod?
Because he can, if everyone though "why bother" wed still be on abacuses.
^^ +1
What was wrong with an abacus? I never got any spam mail on it.
oh i did, Plato was always fucking around with mine,
leaving me binary messages
(please dont correct me on my plato reference, first abacus related person i could think of.)
(and binary, i know, save the effort)
01110111 01100001 01101110 01110100 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01100010 01110101 01111001 00100000 01110110 01101001 01100001 01100111 01110010 01100001 00111111
01010010 01100101 01100110 01101001 01101110 01100001 01101110 01100011 01100101 00100000 01010100 01101111 01100100 01100001 01111001 00100001
01001110011011110010000001110100011010000110000101101110011010110010000001111001011011110111010100100001
STOP BRINGING BACK BAD MEMORIES OF COMPUTER PROGRAMING CLASS.
01010011 01010000 01000001 01001101 00100000 01010011 01010000 01000001 01001101 00100000 01010011 01010000 01000001 01001101 00100000 01010011 01010000 01000001 01001101 00100000 01010011 01010000 01000001 01001101 00100000 01010011 01010000 01000001 01001101 00100000 01010011 01010000 01000001 01001101 00100000 01010011 01010000 01000001 01001101
01101101 01100101 00100000 01100111 01110101 01110011 01110100 01100001 00100000 01100101 01101100 00100000 01110000 01101111 01101100 01101100 01101111
"it was a simple matter of rebuilding the spindle, rigging up a tiny breadboard with a few transistors, cramming the new Frankenstein drive into the game system, and -- of course -- finishing up with some handy case mod."
I am a small, small man. I rebuilt my bathroom wall and tub hardware this weekend.
I brushed my teeth this morning....
i got uh rock :-\
I can ride my bike with no handle bars...
I got uh teej.
One of the more useful mods I've seen...
I wish it was just a case of swapping the drives..
he should either reveal the way he did it or start selling these, i would love to experiment a slot loading drive for my xbox...plus this opens up the ability to start experimenting with blu ray drive implementation :)....not that i need one i have a ps3 :(...but i would definitely do it anyways :)
/\ happy sad happy...i cant make up my mind
Now if he stuck in a Blu Ray drive and was able to trick XBL into not noticing... But this may be the first step in that direction.
So then what? He could play PS3 games on his 360?
A Blu Ray drive would do nothing.
I was thinking along the lines of watching Blu Ray movies. Kind of a all in one media center device. I know the games would never play.
"we think that anyone who's had their nerves rattled by the incessant banging of their console's optical drive tray will really appreciate it"
Seriously? Incessant banging? How many times does it bang when you put one disk in, and why are you changing the disks so often?
You haven't really lived until you've incessantly banged your optical drive.
thats why he prefers slot loader, tray loaders have a tendency to close inadvertently during banging.
Only at Engadget do they bang their optical drives.. and I always wondered why all Mac devices were white...... :p
@Lowest Ranked
Indeed, but remember, the real deal are caddy loaders.
http://www.vp-webdesigns.com/Vpe/TSU/Images/CDR/Drive-Caddy-5.jpg
Damn hard to get these days. Oh well, that's today's mentality. Quick and cheap (pun intended) is what it has to be.
Can anyone explain exactly what would 'fire vision' actually be ?
Well the only logical thing I could think off, they added this new feature.. you know the circle around the button? well it now turns "firey" red and kills you....
Oh wait..
Useless but cool. I would have done more to the case though, because now there's a big hole where the silver plate used to be. But that's just cosmetics I guess. If he was able to figure out how to build that drive, I'm sure he'll be able to casemod it somehow. By putting an Apple sticker on it for instance…
He's updated it since this was featured.
http://forums.benheck.com/viewtopic.php?p=320324#320324
I best idea that MS could come up with would be interchangeable parts. Make the console so the optical drive could unplug, certain other components as well. I have been through 5 xboxes and 4 of them were disk drive problems. If all I had to do was unplug the drive, then plug in another one, that would have saved me 300 bucks. They went in the right direction with the removable HDDs, but for a different reason. Plus, if nothing was broke, you could still buy newer hardware if you wanted. It could all still be licensed by MS. For example, my newest xbox loads twice as fast as my original launch unit. Newer hardware. Same with newer HDDs, they load faster. The ability to add newer hardware would be cool. But maybe that is too much like PC gaming.
you can unplug them. Just open your xbox, buy a drive from a reliable site, unplug the old one and plug in the new. maybe slap in a mod chip while you're at it.
I'm pretty sure it's not that simple with the new BenQ drives, but I haven't looked into it very much.
suhWEET!
Won't he be banned on XBL for "Unauthorized Modifications" or what not?
Get back to me when it's got ice breath so it doesn't overheat like a bitch. And super hearing so it can tell how damn loud it is.
Man, this guy's gonna be pissed when his optical drive stops working and he has to do it all over again. I'm on my 3rd Xbox 360. The first two had bad optical drivers after less than a year.
@ MIKE
why al the commenting on this mod, saying its unreliable,
Is the same hardware as the normal drive, but the loading mechanism is different, why bother with this mod. Because is looks awesome, and it is great that you can create something like this yourself! Some people like modding, they do it because they enjoy doing it, so stop crying.
A complete registration can be found on several xbox forums, so stop hating, if your interested google around and find out how many hours of work is involved in this!.