delicious

My mod chip showed up today. I decided on picking up the latest and greatest Xecuter 3 from modchip.ca. Not too expensive, North American operation which made non-credit card payment easier, faster shipping and thus highly recommended. As my complete lack of luck would dictate I have THE ONLY version of the xbox comes from the factory with the modchip adapter pinholes pre-filled with solder. With a complete lack of solder-related tools aside from a soldering iron big enough to weld sheet metal I had little to no way to desolder the holes.

After not being able to find anything small enough to fit through the holes I ended up tearing apart an old 2.5″ notebook to IDE hard drive adapter for it’s pins. Three and a half hours later I had managed to desolder all 14 holes and not burn through any traces with my nearly flaming soldering iron. Everything else from there was a sinch. Pin header was soldered on, wires connected, adapter installed, moment of truth. Powered it up and the Xecuter logo glowed a bright blue indicating the mod was working perfectly. Now all I need to do is track down the docs on what I need to do to install the software required to get dvd-r games to run on it and later to install linux on it. This ought to keep me occupied for a while…