James Channel is known for bringing back retro tech and his latest project is a fever dream for gamers who miss the early 2000s. He’s built a portable Xbox, a handheld version of Microsoft’s massive first-gen console, using ingenuity, spare parts and a whole lot of hot glue.
Channel starts with a battered original Xbox, the console infamous for its size and weight, once called the biggest and most power hungry of its time. His goal? Turn this behemoth into something you can hold in your hands. The Xbox he chooses is already in rough shape, missing screws and has an error code written in his own handwriting. An “X” is marked on it, which means it has a mod chip, a good sign for his plan. When he powers it on, it flashes error code 07, which means hard drive timeout.
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Inside he finds the culprits: a faulty DVD drive and a dodgy IDE cable. The hard drive, despite the error, isn’t the problem. Channel swaps the DVD drive with a PC drive for testing and finds that the original drive is interfering with the hard drive’s signal. With a new IDE cable and some tinkering, the Xbox boots and shows a custom Australian-only Gametronics dashboard. This is a small victory but the real challenge is to shrink the console without losing its soul. Channel strips away everything non-essential: plastic casing, oversized cables and the big power supply. He replaces the big hard drive with a compact flash card, a clever swap that mimics the original’s function but reduces size and weight.
The DVD drive, the Xbox’s heart, is trickier. Channel disassembles it down to its bare necessities, removing the housing and eject mechanism but keeping the magnetic disc holder. He discovers a failing resistor array in the Samsung drive and replaces it with a hastily assembled quartet of resistors tied together with hot glue. When that fails, he switches to a Thompson drive, which is known to be less reliable but more compact after modification. Each step is a battle against the machine’s age and peculiarities, and Channel wields both a soldering iron and an angle grinder with equal zeal.
To power this portable dream, you need to reconsider the Xbox’s power-hungry design. The original power supply is built for 240v mains and has a standby voltage that is incompatible with battery operation. Following an online guide from Red Herring 32, Channel fixes the motherboard to eliminate the standby function and installs a single switch to power on the gadget. He obtains a 300W Pico PSU designed for PCs and couples it with batteries from a dead iPod video dock. Those 2006 batteries were thought to be dead, but after circumventing the malfunctioning management system, they re-energize and supply just enough power to run the Xbox.
The screen is another crucial component, as it is a low-resolution, fluorescent backlit display from the same iPod dock. Far from modern standards, Channel makes it work by intercepting the S-video stream from the Xbox’s AV output. Wiring is a nightmare, with broken connections, misaligned signals, and an overly short ribbon cable, but he perseveres, soldering and gluing his way to a functional display. The controller is an original Xbox gamepad that was cut in half to accommodate the handheld style. Channel preserves the analog sticks, triggers, and vibration motors and positions them around the screen in a manner comparable to modern handhelds such as the Nintendo Switch.
Channel applies hot glue as both an adhesive and an insulator, stacking it over wires and boards to avoid shorts. The batteries, power supply, and DVD drive are stuffed inside an improvised casing cut from a plastic roll, rather of a 3D-printed shell. The result is a top-heavy, slightly chaotic gadget that retains all of the original Xbox connectors, including a memory card slot and S-video output. The iPod dock labels lend a touch of realism, giving it the appearance of a retail product produced in a shed during a hailstorm.
When Channel turns it on it boots up Halo, the perfect game to test a console defined by its flagship title. The screen is dim, the audio is distorted and the battery life is unpredictable but it works. He plays a level, grenades enemies and himself in equal measure, amazed that a 2001 console is running on 2006 batteries.
