missing my xbox oh so much because of a 'damaged' dvd drive that had worn out over the years... I decided to open it up and take a look at the inside. Yes, it voided my warranty, but it had run out anyway.
It wasn't uncharted ground for me. It is, after all, just a computer. A 700mhz computer with a dvd rom drive and an 8gb hard drive...
My first challenge was met with the screws. Wouldn't you know it, the exact same problem that prevented us from fixing my car a couple weeks ago existed in my xbox. The screws were a torx (6 sided star) shape, and needed a special screwdriver to remove. After slightly modifying a pair of kitchen tongs, which worked quite well as a screwdriver, I opened it up.. Seeing as how the problem was with the dvd drive, I yanked that out first.
Opening the dvd drive and taking it apart I found out the model of the drive and did a little research. It turns out that it was a budget drive used by Microsoft when they first made the xbox (mine was a v1.0 - the first kind they ever made), and it was very popular for the laser in this drive to wear down with age, which fooled my xbox into thinking i was just putting in damaged disks (no matter how good they looked)..
The good thing? There is a potentiometer (POT) that I found right on the circuit board next to the laser. This is very rare for an optical drive to have, but this one did. What a POT is, is a variable resistor. You can use it to modify the amount of resistance in an electrical circuit by turning a little dial... I just made the laser more powerful by turning the dial! simple as that.. put everything back together, and my box worked good as new.
Ahh, once again I can stream movies from my computer to play through my networked xbox.... yep, that's right, I've modded it and turned my xbox into a media center.. w00t! (links on the left (My Digg) to see how to do this.. it's quite simple).
To celebrate, I went out and bought Star Wars Battlefront 2 for it..
My review? It is an *ok* game. the majority of the game is quite easy, with 2 or 3 levels in it that really kick your ass. Regardless, I beat the game in a matter of a couple of days..
The artwork and graphics were... middle of the road for me.
And the audio? typical realistic sound effects you'd hear in any other starwars game out there... But the voice overs were horrid! They didn't use the real actors from the movie, so this degraded the experience exponentially for me.
The maps were huge and elaborate, *but*, still very linear. There wasn't much room to explore... another disappointment for me.. It reminded me very much of Halo 2... huge maps, but they still manage to force you to take a certain direction through the map... the rest of it just boils down to making it "look pretty" and full of depth. Another disappointment.
One thing I really did like was that the story of the game pans out from episode 1 to 6 as Journal written in the perspective of the Clone Commander Cody, who was the leader of the Clones in episode 3. You take in the Star Wars story from the perspective of the evil Empire, and Cody directly.. puts a great spin on the story.. that's pretty much all I liked about this game.
anyway, just bored so I figured I'd write something and this is what came out.. I am deeply sorry =P
Until next time....... *fade to black*
:: Eldorado ::
Friday, March 03, 2006 ::
3:07:00 AM
