A modder worked for months to create an object worthy of the wildest fantasies of teenagers of the 2000s: an original portable Xbox. Battery, screen, Wi-Fi, buttons and joysticks: everything has been thought of to create a device that you just want to have in your hands.
There are few home consoles that have not been dismantled and then reassembled in another format by MacGyver whose ingenuity is constantly put to the test. This is how we ended up with Xbox 360s or even PlayStation 4s compressed in new boxes that are easier to transport and accompanied by a screen. All this so you can easily play it anywhere, as long as there is a power outlet available.
Redherring32 has gone a step further with its latest project. Onthis carpenter having “ an unhealthy obsession with computer hardware » has set its sights on the first Xbox of the name. There is no question here of making it a device in laptop format: the machine released in 2001 has been transformed into a real portable console, with a 9-inch 480p screen, an integrated battery allowing you to play for almost an hour and a half, and all the buttons present on the base controller.
To achieve this feat, the modder reused “ a real motherboard from a real Xbox », cut and reduced to the extreme and accompanied by a dozen printed circuits created from scratch. These allow, among other things, to offer Wi-Fi 6 connectivity to the device, in order to take advantage of Xbox Live, but also to launch games from storage connected via an IDE port.
A monster of power (for the time) in the hands
On the cooling side, we also had to create a system from scratch, which must not have been an easy task. Microsoft’s first behemoth has its reputation as a living room driver, and it was necessary to fit two copper radiators and a good fan into the console to meet the beast’s needs.
In the end, we end up with a portable console capable of launching legendary Xbox titles, such asHalo, Jet Set Radio Future or even Fable. If the device does not impress much in 2024, while the Xbox 360 has already been treated to a similar mod and the Steam Deck is a game-changer for PC games, it revives the wildest fantasies of millions of teenagers who have become adults today. Wouldn’t the world have been perfect if we had been able to go to our friends’ houses with such a machine?
Above all, it echoes the recent comments of Phil Spencer, head of the gaming division at Microsoft, who evokes the possible appearance of a portable Xbox in the times to come. There is an alternative world where the American giant could have produced its first portable console in the 2000s, a project which could well become reality twenty years later.
An open-source project that you can reproduce at home
Redherring32 obviously has no intention of selling his console, or even producing it for others. For those who would like to repeat the experience on their own, open-source resources will gradually be made available to them on GitHub And BitBuilt.
To have access to absolute perfection (a completely objective statement, isn’t it?), you will have to roll up your sleeves, a quest worthy of the most reckless and legendary heroes. For the others, our hacker plans to publish a presentation video as soon as possible on YouTube.
