Xbox Media Center

Two weeks ago our DVD died and I finally got a reason to mod my old xbox. Been thinking about it for a couple of years now and visiting a friend some months ago demoing xbmc just made me wanna do it more! So I dropped it of at psxcare and got it back a week later with a sweet SmartXX LT OPX chip (with Evox M8 bios), a 160GB drive and some programs including an old version of xbmc installed. It set me back 1600SEK (ie 200$) but so far it is totally worth it! I updated xbmc to the latest release from GasGiver and now everything works perfectly! Watching picures and listening to music stored on our pc (shared on smb), and playing backups of course ripped to the internal harddrive.

So how to update xbmc? Well, I mainly followed the online manual. I had a 1.x version installed that booted on C:\evoxdash.xbe and used the xboxmediacenter.xml (which refered to the application folder C:\xbmc).

1. So I uploaded the new xbmc to F:\Apps\xbmc2
2. Dropped the included .xbe and .cfg on C:\ and renamed them to xbmc2.xbe/.cfg
3. Changed the path in the xbmc2.cfg to F:\Apps\xbmc2\default.xbe
4. Tested them by starting the xbmc2.xbe from my old media centers file manager
5. When everything started OK I made a backup of the old evoxdash.xbe
6. And then renamed my new xbmc2.xbe/.cfg to evoxdash.xbe/.cfg
7. Now the xbox boots to my new media center (and the old installation is still there as a backup...)

Actually it boots to xbmc when pressing the eject button. When pressing the power button the original xbox dash is booted (C:\xboxdash.xbe). This is configurable on the SmartXX chip! (To boot to SmartXX OS just press first power then eject!)