Building a (Not Very) Portable XboxModern handheld game consoles are impressive feats of engineering, featuring full fledged computers in near pocket-sized packages.
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Building a (Not Very) Portable Xbox
Modern handheld game consoles are impressive feats of engineering, featuring full fledged computers in near pocket-sized packages. So what happens if you take an original Xbox and sprinkle on some modern electronics and create a handheld? Well, if your [James] of James Channel, you end up with this sandwich of PCBs held together with hot glue and duck tape.
The first order of miniaturization in this Xbox was replacing the hard drive. Because a CompactFlash card uses serial ATA, that could be a simple drop in replacement. However, the Xbox locks the hard drive to the system requiring a mod chip for the CF card to work. Fortunately, the sacrificial Xbox came with a mod chip installed. After using an arcade machine to flash the card and copy over the contents of the drive, the CF card install was a breeze.
For the screen and batteries, a portable DVD player that had remained unused since 2006 was repurposed. The battery cells were rather unhappy, but managed to get resurrected with some careful charging. As it turns out, the iPod 30 pin connector inside the portable screen contains an S-Video line. By taping into that and adding in some power management for the batteries, the Xbox became a pile of PCBs that could maybe be taken places.
Wiring up the two halves of the controller.
However, the form factor was not yet complete. With some careful angle grinder work, the controller got split in half, with jumper wires going between the two sides. By cutting slots into the housing, the Xbox mainboard could now rest between the two controller halves, along with some hot glue for good measure. By using hot glue as an insulating layer, the PCB sandwich started to resemble a handheld console.A few gremlins still lurked inside, namely, inside the optical drive. The first issue was the mainboard supplied 2.5 V where 5 V is needed, so instead of debugging the issue, [James] simply tapped directly into a 5 V line. But the drive was still uncooperative. As it turned out, the hastily refurbished unit was broken, so a fresh one replaced it. Yet that still proved unsuccessful. Eventually, after testing eight drives, it turned out seven were broken, and the IDE cable needed to be re-crimped.
But at last, the portable Xbox could be used, so the build was finished off with a bit more hot glue and a case made of duck tape. While certainly not pretty, it does, in fact, work, with nearly 10 minutes of battery life. It’s not very handheld, or very portable, but it does meet the definitions of both while maintaining a CD drive, something likely never done before. Just keep your fingers clear of the spinning disc.
Looking for something that might actually fit in your pocket? Turns out the Wii can be turned into an incredibly compact handheld with some careful cutting.
youtube.com/embed/W3OK9A_RbSI?…
Gli ultimi otto messaggi ricevuti dalla Federazione
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Giuli spende trenta milioni nostri per un Caravaggio....meloni urla anche stavolta?
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I enjoyed and appreciated reading this post.
"I realized almost immediately that GNU/Linux and FreeBSD were so similar they were completely different."
This right here.
My initial impression with #FreeBSD in 2006 was quite similar. Of course, #Linux back then was a much different beast than what it has evolved (mutated?) into today.
Had I not pursued Linux system administration as a career, I *probably* would have stuck with FreeBSD.
We can make all the technical comparisons between the two OSes all day long but what drove my interest and enthusiasm are (1) the documentation and (2) the community.
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@peacelink ma non sono riuscite ad evitare di sbavare mentre lo dicevano
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@stefano Don’t bother filing a bug report. They will act stupid. Probably they are stupid about it. They think it is a bug. Actually the author probably wrote a program he knew was not a solution to the problem but which he could do on deadline and which was good enough for his job at HP.
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@stefano Here is something new for you to be upset about, though, which affects everyone, Linux, BSD, illumos alike. I have been upset about it for over 20 years.
Read ‘man 5 fonts-conf’ or whatever your equivalent is. Read it carefully under ‘FONT MATCHING’. What it says is that a font is not chosen as you wished, but instead RANDOMLY. You are only LUCKY if you get the font you wished.
And if you experiment long enough you will find this is true.
Fontconfig is unfixable and must be scrapped.
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L'Ucraina ha sviluppato nuovi missili balistici FP-7, analoghi all'ATACMS, ma due volte meno costosi
I test si stanno muovendo verso una nuova fase, i missili saranno testati direttamente in attacchi in Russia
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E in omaggio la concessione decennale per l'uso di un pezzo di bosco demaniale.
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@quinta non solo lo fa, ma se ne vanta pure.
