What the original Xbox should've been...

An xbox scene forum member called ghostavel made a complete overhaul of his old Xbox, and came up with what could easily be the best console design ever:


The Xbox mini







Compared to the normal Xbox





The new PSU



The motherboard




This guy replaced the standard HDD for a 80GB laptop one, the PSU, fans and got rid of the DVD drive, altought he could've use a laptop one, he decided to pass since he uses the system for emus and games backups (and as we all know those run better from the HDD than a typical DVDR).

What can I say? this thing puts every example of industrial design made by Microsoft to shame, and lets no talk about those coming from the "prestigious industrial design studios" they hired to make the X360 exterior design

I wonder what would've been better for MS: to buy the rights of the CPU and GPU from Intel/nVidia and release an Xbox mini or continue with what was his final strategy: getting rid of the Xbox and release the X360 as soon as possible.

After all the PS2 is still the market leader nowadays, so a Xbox mini for $100 in my opinion would've increased MS's market share in the game industry much more than what the X360 did, and at a lower cost.

Now MS is still carrying the huge costs of the original Xbox ($4 billions or more) plus the ones from X360's design, production and lately, design failures...


The original Xbox mini thread

 

Thats Damn Cute!!! :love2:

 

It wasn't possible to make the XBox smaller at the time. Nice mod though!

 

I'm not saying at launch, but MS could've easily made it in 2003-2004 instead of just destroying the console in 2005...

 

Wow, that's really awesome.:drool: Did he say if he would mass produce them?

 

Apparently this one is not finished yet, and mass produce? I really doubt he could, not without MS going after him...

 

Damn! That is cool.

 

Although it's very cute and a great use of making a nice smaller case then the solid lump that was the Xbox it's not an Xbox, more a Long John Silver Media centre due to the fact it lacks a DVD drive. In the original Xbox, the HDD and DVD drive took up the vast majority and yes could have been made smaller but still doesn't ignore the fact that the vast number of people that use Xboxs now use that as Media Centres, Emualators or playing 'Back Ups', so Microsoft would probably have been throwing good money after bad as a $100 Xbox Mini would still probably have cost them money to sell each machine and as it would have been unlikely to increase sales of games to make it worth while.

In Hong Kong, one of the guys that works for Microsoft told me in the last year of the Xbox being sold in HK the machine to games ratio was much less then 1. He said something like .3 which meant for every 10 machines sold, they sold a told of er 3 games. Most machines ended up being chipped and sold in China where they er were used for Media Centres, Emulators and Piracy...

 

That looks cool. It reminds me of a router. I wanted to buy an Xbox, but settled on a slim PS2 because it had better support and the games I wanted were all for PS2. Shame really as it was better hardware than a PS2.

 

Yeah, I think it sucks they dumped Xbox 1, but it was better for them money wise, even though its MS, especially now that 360 has cost them a ton. I don't think Xbox had too great of games when it was dying anyhow.

 

I'd buy one of those. For up to $350.

 

Good GOD that case is hAwT!!
I would love to stuff my extra debug mobo in that.

 

I could see the case and PSU being mass produced as replacement parts, but as a console no.

 

Most of those console mods are 'close but no sigar' but this one's very nice!

 

That looks awesome. MS could have kept reducing manufacturing costs and shrunk the xbox down to what the ps2 slim is now, but they instead decided to dump it and come out with another poorly designed piece of shit.

The xbox was a solid machine, but it was too big and didn't get the support it should have. They gave up on it too early.

 

Yep, I'd buy the kit if he did them, mines just a media centre now my 360 plays all the games I want in backwards compatibility mode in pseudo-HD.

 

It lacks a DVD drive cuz the guy doesnt needs it, but just like he replaced the HDD for a laptop one he could've done the same with the DVD.

The fact is that the Xbox had enough power left for at least 2 years, and from a business standpoint a cheaper Xbox like this one would've been more cost-effective for MS than releasing yet another console with heavy losses like the X360.

By dumping the Xbox MS destroyed a userbase that was pretty expensive to come by. Plus at the time of the X360s launch most people didnt had HDTVs becos those were expensive, and most still do, reason why PS2 still sells like bagels and the Wii already outsold the X360, since those 2 consoles work on SDTVs.

And lets no even talk about the fact that MS could've be still selling this Xbox mini alongside the X360, thus increasing their profit margins.

Dude you're talking about china and HK, the world centre for piracy and bootlegs. The chinese even pirate cars, you just cant use them as a world-wide example of what happened to the Xbox...


On another subject, do you guys think that the Xbox could've been made for less money if MS decided to use a X86 equivalent of the Celeron? like a overclocked K6? or a custom Athlon? obviously it would've been better if MS had used the Athlon from the get-go, but from a re-design point of view using a more powerful CPU on the Xbox mini wouldnt have given any problems with older Xbox units if the programmers didnt use the extra power. Games would run faster on the mini tough, like in the PSP slim when compared to the old PSP.

Plus the mobile Athlons were excellent CPUs for miniATX systems and overclocking, since their heat output was very low.

 

The Celeron is x86. And the intial Xbox design did have an Athlon. God knows why they ditched it.

 

People still play Xbox a lot, so it sort of did last. I don't think it had good enough games in its last few days to warrant another 2 years.

 

Thats why I said "X86 equivalent" instead of just equivalent, since theres more than a few processors with the same power but from different families...