Microsoft has a history of taking accessibility options seriously for gaming controllers, and that trend continues with downloadable thumbstick toppers for Xbox controllers. Being straight from the source, the 3D models should fit as well as can be expected with a minimum of fiddling. Just make sure you select the right controller model, because they are each subtly different.

The toppers themselves come in different styles, and there’s a design to fit a variety of needs, from a thumb cradle to ones intended for more serious adaptations —  the perforated X-shaped topper, for instance, is meant to anchor a custom shape molded overtop it.

Microsoft does offer a remarkably hackable adaptive controller that is meant to make it easy to integrate with other hardware, and we’ve seen it used in some truly awesome ways. But it’s nice to see an easy way to extend and adapt normal thumbsticks on regular controllers, giving people even more options.

We love to see companies offer useful 3D models of their products, saving consumers from having to 3D scan or model things themselves. It’s a form of hacker-friendly hardware design, which we celebrate when we see it, while at the same time wishing it were more common.

Have you benefited from hacker-friendly design and made something useful that wouldn’t exist otherwise? Let us know on the tips line!

Times are tough out there, and many are starting to feel the pressure at the grocery store checkout line or the gas pump. But whenever you start to worry about affording life’s necessities, take comfort in the knowledge that somebody is so flush with cash that on Friday they decided to treat themselves and spend $3 million for a sealed copy of Super Mario Bros for the Nintendo Entertainment System.

Although we’re not going to say it necessarily justifies the insane price — a new record for the most ever paid for a video game, incidentally — Heritage Auctions does note in their press release that this is an exceptionally rare version of what’s admittedly one of the most iconic pieces of software ever produced. This is only one of three copies of this particular variant known to exist, which Nintendo apparently distributed to test markets in the United States ahead of the game’s official 1985 release.

In slightly more modern gaming news, Asha Sharma, the new head of Microsoft’s Xbox division, has been making some big swings to try and get Microsoft’s gaming division back on track after years of declining sales. As part of that effort, she recently penned an article detailing some of the challenges the company is facing, which includes some interesting hardware details.

According to the blog post, she claims that in February, the cost of memory and storage components for the Xbox console had doubled compared to the previous year. But those numbers have jumped again, and by the time the holidays roll around, she expects they’ll be paying five times what they did in 2024. That’s bad news for anyone looking to put an Xbox under the tree come Christmas, but even worse news as the company works on the console’s successor. Considering that today’s hardware from Sony and Microsoft can already set you back $700 USD depending on which version you get, it seems like we’re approaching a point where gaming consoles could price themselves out of the market.

Those thinking of mowing some lawns this summer to save up for their $1K next-generation consoles may be interested to hear that the Food and Drug Administration has put its stamp of approval on the first new sunscreen ingredient in the US in more than two decades. Bemotrizinol is a broad-spectrum UV absorber that knocks out 310 and 340 nm, and while Uncle Sam has taken his sweet time to give it the OK, the European Union has been slathering it on since 2000. The first company authorized to sell it in the US will be marketing it under the name Parsol Shield later this year, with other manufacturers set to follow in 2027.

While it seems the world has agreed on adding bemotrizinol to their sunscreens, many people are decidedly less enthusiastic about AI code in their open-source projects. One of those people is Drew DeVault, which is why he decided to fork Vim once he found out its maintainers were merging in code written by large language models (LLMs). Rather than break off at the last version untainted by clankers, Drew decided to divert from the upstream project at version 8.2.x. This means that some newer plugins may have compatibility issues, although security fixes and other selected updates from the 9.x branch have been back-ported to the newly coined Vim Classic. If you give it a shot, let us know in the comments.

Finally, if a non-AI fork of Vim is still too mainstream to scratch that itch for you, Phoronix is reporting that ReactOS can now run Half Life. If this were any other website, we might devote the next paragraph to explaining the significance of a nearly 30-year-old PC game being run on a free and open-source operating system designed to provide binary compatibility with Microsoft Windows. But it’s Sunday evening, and you’re reading Hackaday, so just take the win.

See something interesting that you think would be a good fit for our weekly Links column? Drop us a line, we’d love to hear about it.

These days, we take it for granted that a video game console will have multiple USB ports. There’s even an expectation that basic peripherals such as storage devices will “Just Work” when plugged into the system — a far cry from the days when each system had its own proprietary memory card.

The original Xbox from 2001 actually had USB ports as well, it’s just that they were used for the controllers and had non-standard connectors that kept you from plugging in other devices. But a simple adapter gets you a standard USB-A port, and after that it’s just a matter of software. Like this homebrew project to get generic USB webcams working on Microsoft’s first foray into console gaming.

Well, “generic” may be pushing it a bit, as the project by [Darkone83] currently lists only two compatible cameras. The first is the Xbox Live Vision Camera, which was never intended to be used on the original Xbox and was instead an accessory for Microsoft’s follow-up console, the Xbox 360. Interestingly, the other supported camera happens to be Sony’s PS2 EyeToy. Claiming that you plugged a PS2 camera into your Xbox would have been fighting words back on the playground circa 2003, but now it’s a reality thanks to the power of open source.

Now there technically was a camera for the original Xbox, but it was only released in Japan and is quite rare. Perhaps unsurprisingly it used the same OV519 chipset as the EyeToy and later Vision Camera, and reverse engineering how the console communicated with it was critical to the development of this project.

As of right now, there’s not much practical application for this webcam driver. It just shows the image from the camera on your TV in glorious 320×240 resolution. But now that the code to make it work is out in the wild, hopefully other Xbox homebrew projects will add support for it.

Although things aren’t quite as active these days as they once were, the hacking scene for the original Xbox is the stuff of legend. If you ever see one of this gargantuan consoles at a flea market for cheap, there’s still plenty of fun to be had pushing the system outside of its comfort zone.

[Androxilogin] had a problem. An Xbox 360 Slim had shown up in the post, but failed to give much more than a beep when turned on. Disassembly revealed some missing components, but replacing them failed to breathe life into the beleaguered console. Deeper repair was needed, and that would require a special adapter which [Androxilogin] was able to whip up from scratch.

When it comes to the Corona models of the Xbox 360, it’s often necessary to use something called a “post-fix adapter” to do certain diagnostic and repair tasks. These adapters consist of a bracket which wraps around the CPU, and probes the solder ball for the POST_OUT signal which is otherwise difficult to access on the motherboard itself. Adapters are readily available online, and are usually manufactured as a PCB with a protruding contact to make a connection.

For [Androxilogin], though, time was short. Rather than wait for adapters to ship, it was quicker to whip up a custom piece to do the same job. This was achieved with a 3D print which was able to clamp around the CPU, while snugly holding a piece of tinned 30 AWG wire to poke the critical point beneath the chip. After a couple of attempts to get the sizing just right, [Androxilogin] was able to make the necessary connection which enabled installing Xell Loader on to the machine to bring it back to life.

If you’re eager to make your own post-fix adapter, files are available on Printables, with more details over on Reddit to boot. While the Xbox 360 is starting to suffer some awkward symptoms of age. we nevertheless still see a steady stream of hacks come in for this vintage machine. If you’re tackling your own retro console mods, be sure to notify the tipsline.

A long time ago, there was a big difference between PC and console gaming. The former often came with headaches. You’d fight with drivers, struggle with crashes, and grow ever more frustrated dealing with CD piracy checks and endless patches and updates. Meanwhile, consoles offered the exact opposite experience—just slam in a cartridge, and go!

That beautiful feature fell away when consoles joined the Internet. Suddenly there were servers to sign in to and updates to download and a whole bunch of hoops to jump through before you even got to play a game. Now, those early generations of Internet-connected consoles are becoming retro, and that’s introduced a whole new set of problems now the infrastructure is dying or dead. Boot up and play? You must be joking!

Turn 360 Degrees And Log Out

Microsoft first launched the Xbox 360 in 2005. It was the American company’s second major console, following on from the success of the Xbox that fought so valiantly against the Sony PlayStation 2 and the Nintendo GameCube. Where those sixth generation consoles had been the first to really lean in to online gaming, it was the seventh generation that would make it a core part of the console experience.

The Xbox 360 liked to sign you straight into Xbox Live the moment you switched on the console. All your friends would get hear a little bling as they were notified that you’d come online, and you’d get the same in turn. You could then boot into the game of your choice, where you’d likely sign into a specific third-party server to check for updates and handle any online matchmaking.

The Xbox 360 didn’t need to be always online, it just really wanted you to be. This was simply how gaming was to be now. Networked and now highly visible, in a semi-public way. Where Microsoft blazed a trail in the online user experience for the console market, Sony soon followed with its own feature-equivalent offering, albeit one that was never quite as elegant as that which it aimed to duplicate.

Fire up an Xbox 360 today, and you’ll see that console acting like it’s still 2008 or something. It will pleasantly reach out to Microsoft servers, and it will even get a reply—and it will then prompt you to log in with your Xbox Live or Microsoft account. You’ve probably got one—many of us do—but here lies a weird problem. When you try to log in to an Xbox 360 with your current Microsoft account, you will almost certainly fail! You might get an error like 8015D086 or 8015D000, or have it fail more quietly with a simple timeout.

It all comes down to authentication. See, the Internet was a much happier, friendly place when the Xbox 360 first hit the shelves. Back then, a simple password of 8 characters or more with maybe a numeral or two was considered pretty darn good for login purposes. Not like today, where you need to up the complexity significantly and throw in two-factor authentication to boot. And therein lies the problem, because the Xbox 360 was never expecting two-factor authentication to be a thing.

Today, your Microsoft account won’t be authorized for login without it, and thus your Xbox 360 won’t be able to log in to Xbox Live. In fairness, you wouldn’t miss much. All the online stores and marketplaces and games servers were killed ages ago, after all. However, the 360 really doesn’t like not being online. It will ask you all the time if you want to sign in! Plus, if you wanted to get your machine the very last dashboard updates or anything like that… you need to be able to sign into Xbox Live.

Thankfully, there is a workaround. Community members have found various solutions, most easily found in posts shared on Reddit. Sometimes you can get by simply by disabling two-factor authentication and changing to a low-complexity password due to the 360’s character limit in the entry field. If that doesn’t work, though, you have to go to the effort to set up a special “App Password” in your Microsoft account that will let the Xbox 360 authenticate in a simpler, more direct fashion.

Pull all this off, and you’ll hear that famous chime as your home console reaches the promised land of Xbox Live. None of your friends will be online, and nobody’s really checking your Gamerscore anymore, but now you can finally play some games!

Only, for a great many titles on the Xbox 360, there were dedicated online servers, too. Pop in FIFA 16, and the game will stall for a moment before it reports that it’s failed to connect to EA’s servers. Back in the day, those servers provided a continual stream of minor updates to the game, player rosters, and stats, making it feel like almost a living thing. Today, there’s nothing out there but a request that always times out.

This would be no issue if it happened just once, but alas… you’ll have to tangle with the game doing this time and again, every time you boot it up. It wants that server, it’s so sure it’s out there… but it never phones back from the aether.

Many games still retain most of their playability without an Internet connection, and most consoles will still boot up without one. Nevertheless, the more these machines are built to rely on an ever-present link to the cloud, the less of them will be accessible many years into the future.

Not Unique

This problem is not unique to the Xbox 360. It’s common to run into similar problems with the PlayStation 3, with Sony providing a workaround to get the old consoles online. For both consoles, you’re still relying on the servers remaining online. It’s fair to assume the little remaining support for these machines will be switched off too, in time. Meanwhile, if you’re playing Pokemon Diamond on the Nintendo DS, you’ve probably noticed the servers are completely gone. In that case, you’re left to rely on community efforts to emulate the original Nintendo WFC servers, which run with varying levels of success. For less popular games, though there’s simply nothing left—whatever online service there was is gone, and it’s not coming back.

These problems will come for each following console generation in turn. Any game and any console that relies on manufacturer-run infrastructure will eventually shut down when it becomes no longer profitable or worthwhile to run. It’s a great pity, to be sure. The best we can do is to pressure manufacturers to make sure that their hardware and games retain as much capability as possible when a connection isn’t available. That will at least leave us with something to play when the servers do finally go dark.

When Microsoft decided they wanted to get into the game console market, they were faced with a problem. Everyone knew them as a company that developed computer software, and there was a concern that consumers wouldn’t understand that their new Xbox console was a separate product from their software division. To make sure they got the message though, Microsoft decided to show off a prototype that nobody could mistake for a desktop computer.

The giant gleaming X that shared the stage with Bill Gates and Seamus Blackley at the 2000 Game Developers Conference became the stuff of legend. We now know the machine wasn’t actually a working Xbox, but at the time, it generated enormous buzz. But could it have been a functional console? That’s what [Tito] of Macho Nacho Productions wanted to find out — and the results are nothing short of spectacular.

The key to this project is the enclosure itself, but this is no simple project box we’re talking about here. Milled from a solid block of aluminum, the original prototype’s shell reportedly cost Microsoft $18,000 to have produced, which would be around $36,000 when adjusted for inflation. Luckily, the state of the art has moved forward a bit in the intervening two decades. So after working with [Wesk] to create a 3D model from reference images (including some that [Tito] took himself of one of the surviving prototypes on display in New York), the design was sent away to PCBWay for production. It still cost the better part of $6 K to be produced, but that’s a hell of a savings compared to the original. Though [Tito] still had to polish the aluminum himself to recreate the original’s mirror-like shine.

To say the rest of the project was “easy” would be something of an understatement, but it was at least more familiar territory. Unlike the original prototype, this machine would actually play Xbox games, to [Tito] focused on cramming the original era-appropriate hardware (plus a few modern homebrew tweaks, such as HDMI-out) into the hollow X using a clever system of integrated rails and 3D printed mounts.

Some of the original parts, like the power supply, were simply too large to use. That’s where [Redherring32] came in. He designed a custom USB-C power supply that could satisfy the original console’s energy needs in a much smaller footprint. There’s also a modern SSD in place of the 8 GB of spinning rust that the console shipped with back in 2001. But overall, it’s still real Xbox hardware — no emulation or other funny tricks here.

At this point, the team had already exceeded what Microsoft pulled off in 2000, but they weren’t done yet. Wanting to really set this project apart, [Tito] decided to replace the center jewel with something a bit more modern. The original was little more than a backlit piece of plastic, but on this build it’s a circular LCD driven by a Raspberry Pi Pico, capable of showing a number of custom full-motion animations thanks to the efforts of [StuckPixel].

The end result of this team effort is a machine that’s not only better looking than Microsoft’s original, but also more functional. It’s a project that’s destined for a more than just sitting on a shelf collecting dust, so we’re happy to hear that [Tito] plans on taking it on a tour of different gaming events to give the public a chance to see it in person. He’s even had a custom crate made so he can transport it around in style and safety.

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 you’re [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 parallel 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 tapping into that and adding in some power management for the batteries, the Xbox became a pile of PCBs that could maybe be taken places.

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.