Project: Crystal Xbox

After many months of using a boring, black original Xbox I decided to check Facebook for special edition Xboxes. Lo and behold: a crystal Xbox in perfect condition that came with 2x crystal S controllers and 4 (irrelevant) games for just 60€!

It wasn’t the dirtiest thing in the world but due to its clear plastic exterior I had to tear it down completely and wash it with soap and water.

As it was already completely torn down I decided to not reinstall its RF shielding when putting it back together because it’d look cooler and surely, it wouldn’t affect the Xbox’s video quality in any way, right? (foreshadowing)

Since I was short on time to get the Xbox’s guts off my floor I thought it a great idea to transplant my 1.0 Xbox’s internals but keep the crystal 1.6’s GPU heatsink for extra quiet operation. Little did I know, 1.6 motherboards have fewer screws and grounding pads underneath so the spare, unmodded 1.6 motherboard would be left without a shell after this. Nevertheless I pressed on with putting it back together and here it is: a special edition crystal Xbox, 1.0 motherboard TSOP-flashed with Cerbios and a 1TB SATA hard drive to boot!

Update: After a month of fuzzy S-Video output on my TV I decided to reinstall the bottom RF shielding…