Do you know how to softmod OG Xbox? Been looking for a 2017 tard-proof method, I've got 3 of them in my closet.
Yeah, I have one kicking around somewhere with a 160gb HDD. It was ages ago but fairly simple - I used a copy of splinter cell: chaos theory and a USB adapter with a hacked save on it. Booted it up to put the console into soft boot mode, then while it was running, hot swapped the HDD with a new one and installed the custom dash on that via LAN. I don't really have a guide to hand but you can buy kits with the game and adapter on eBay, and ide hard drives are cheap as shit now
You really just need the original Splinter Cell and then a usb adapter (the controller ports are just usb ports with a different connector), and a flash drive under so many MB, unless they've found a way around that, for the hacked save. The Xbox will think it's a memory card and then you can load the save from inside the game.
The hacked save will crash the game, but stop the console from rebooting fully, instead rebooting into a special dashboard, you just need to install the softmod from there and then you can re-install dashes pretty much willy nilly in multiple ways after that. But usually there's also one on the softmod save, or you can pick one using utilities, that you can install temporarily and then install over or swap hard drives.
The default 8GB drive is fine imo at least for most emulation that the xbox can actually run. There's also ways to connect to your PC or whatever over LAN so you don't actually have to load anything but the programs onto the Xbox, I even streamed movies/tv shows to it for a while that way.
Once it's been softmodded you can boot any kind of disc, iirc you don't even need a dash installed to do it because they're on the discs which will temporarily load it, the softmod just identifies the xbox as good to go. Installing one of the common dashboards, like xmbc or whatever, I think just makes it faster because the disc doesn't have to load its version, it just checks against the dash you have loaded and all the custom ones identify themselves as everything.
I only softmodded my Xbox the one time but I'm pretty sure I've used different dashboards, when you go to install them you just tell it not to overwrite the softmod's part or whatever, or you copy them into a specific folder. I forget how it works. I don't even know what's on mine anymore, haven't let it boot into the dashboard at all as I've just been playing regular games on it. But it's probably got like the softmod I installed on it in 2006 plus some xmbc or something from 2010 or so.
