RIP Xbox?
It’s been a while since I played my Xbox, but I saw on Twitter this morning a bunch of people talking about Jet Set Radio Future being 18 years old this weekend, and I thought “welp, I only really played the DreamCast one for about 10 minutes, let’s give it another go”. It took about an hour to dig out all the requisite cables (everything is still a mess from when we moved, a shameful situation in it’s own right), and figure out how to plug it in to send the game across (I don’t have any wired ethernet to the front of the house yet, it’s occupied by the WAP which lacks an ethernet port for the home VLAN).
So I got everything hooked up to the little CRT in my office, fired up Futurama for about 5 minutes while the game downloaded, then when it was done tried to load it. Failure! Qwix complained “identifier not found”, so I spent a few minutes searching for solutions - seemed using XDVDMulleter to rewrite the DVD is the go. Awesome, it reads it now, fire up the Xbox to load the game across and… nothing.
I get a brief moment of fan-spin and no other activity. No burnt smells or anything, so crack it open for a look and find all five caps on the side of the board near the PSU are all bulging at the top, and a couple of them have brown shit on the top of them. That’s… not great.
This is a 1.6 Xbox, so the primary failure (the RTC cap exploding and shitting corrosive goo all over the motherboard) isn’t a concern, luckily they have not spewed anything on the board, but still… I need to source replacements and the local electronics shop is closed on Sundays. So do I buy them locally and pay through the nose, or mail order some and probably pay a little less but wait several weeks? A decision for another day.
It’s interesting to note that this is me 2 for 2 on old Xbox consoles dying, while the PlayStation consoles (several of them, all back to the PS1 and PSOne, though the PS2 was decidedly more fragile in my experience) all still work. 🤔
Hopefully replacing the caps will fix the issue though. Still though, no enjoying JSRF’s birthday for me!
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