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Comment by cowboyscott | Hacker News Reader

24 year old hardware that is not only useful but punches above most of the set-top boxes you'll find on Amazon. I also suspect that it could run Silksong or Balatro just fine.

Sure, it's unfair to compare gray/black market use cases, but it does make stark the hardware upgrade treadmill we've all been forced on.

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You may need to remove your rose tinted glasses. No doubt it was incredible for its time but not even being able to play 1080p video puts it underneath most set top boxes you can get today.

Spec-wise, sure, but I suspect that if you ran a blind test between an Xbox running XBMC and an Amazon Fire Stick, most folks would prefer the XBMC experience (despite the 720p output).

I don't think Xbox had 1080p support? That would be somewhat annoying to be limited by.

1080i though

It could output analogue 720p and 1080i for sure, but the CPU had a hard time keeping up with HD video decoding. It was only a 733mhz Pentium 3 after all.

Although to go on a tangent, it turned out that you could swap the soldered BGA processor for a socketed 1.4ghz Pentium meant for a desktop PC, using an incredibly cursed interposer setup to redirect the CPU pins to the right BGA pads, and it somehow actually worked.

Wow, you're not kidding saying that it's cursed. I thought it would adapt a socket to the BGA pads, but it looks like the pins of the replacement CPU just sit naked on the interposer.

https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=95704

I think Pentium 3 sockets were through-hole, so to use one they would have had to fit two different footprints on the bottom side of the interposer without any overlap. It might not have been physically possible.

this is my goto for xbox gen1 HDMI - Electronxout[0]. Here's a full list of video options[1]

[0] https://electron-shepherd.com/products/electronxout

[1] https://www.xbox-scene.info/forums/topic/657-list-of-all-og-...

What problems are these widgets supposed to solve?

With such a widget: The video is still at most 720p or 1080i (because scaling, like cake, is a lie), it still originates as an analog signal (that's all the OG Xbox can provide), and the machine is still broadly incapable of playing high-definition video (it's too slow).

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