Hackosis

Geeks love getting the most out of their gaming consoles. I hope you would agree that the Xbox 360 is the best gaming console on the market. I recently purchased an Xbox 360 so I have been looking into what I can do (I know, kinda late). With that being said, I would like to share my top 10 hack finds so far.

1. Turn your Xbox 360 into a Laptop – Like soldering? Engadget takes us through the steps of turning your Xbox 360 into a portable laptop. How. Cool. Is. That.
2. Flashing the DVD firmware to play game backups – If you have owned your Xbox 360 for some time it is possible to flash the firmware on the DVD drive to play game backups (your own backups of course ;)). WARNING – This could ban you from Xbox Live!
3. Play online without Xbox Live for Free – By using Xlink Kai you can play multiplayer LAN games online for free! MS has put a 30ms ping limit on the Xbox 360, so be sure to close all other internet apps before playing. Check out the wiki for more details.
4. Use Your Laptop as a free Xbox Wi-Fi Adapter and save $80 – Use internet connection sharing to wire your Xbox 360 to the internet instead of buying the $80 adapter.
5. DIY Xbox 360 Wifi Adapter – If you don’t want a cord from your Xbox 360 hanging out of your laptop all the time you can always follow Geeks Are Sexy’s guide to a DIY Xbox 360 Wifi adapter.
6. Stream Netflix Movies – By using vmcNetFlix you can watch all your favorite movies from your Netflix subscription.
7. Use your own HDMI cable and save $40 – Chad shows us how to fit the A/V adapter into the Xbox 360 while using your own HDMI cable instead of buying the $40 official Microsoft cable.
8. Turn your Xbox A/V cable into a VGA Cable for $7 – Once again, Engadget to the rescue with DIY instructions on how to turn your standard Xbox 360 A/V cable into a VGA cable on the cheap.
9. Mod your Case – There are limitless ways you can customize your Xbox 360 case. To start you off you can paint the face plate and the controller.
10. Surf the web – If you have Windows Media Center Editon you can surf the web from the comfort of your Xbox 360. Note that this is limited functionality only – no typing, no sound, etc. Basically just a screen shot from your PC (Good enough for pr0n).

Hopefully you ran into something new and there is still more to discover with your Xbox 360. With such an interesting machine to tweak, no wonder everyone has out-done themselves on hacking/modding the Xbox 360.

Have a hack or mod that we didn’t cover? Let us know in the comments.

If you just can’t get enough out of your graphics card playing any of the newest Valve Source games there is a hidden ‘Ultra High’ setting that you can activate through the console.

The console is normally where you would enter other commands and cheats. You have to active this under the advanced keyboard settings in the options menu.

How to Activate the ‘Ultra High’ setting in Valve Source Games (Portal, HL2, TF2, etc):

1. Active the console under the advanced keyboard settings in the options menu.
2. Hit ‘~’ (tilde) to activate the console and enter ‘mat_picmip -3′ to activate the ‘Ultra High’ setting. Feel to free to go lower if you think your hardware can handle it.

NOTE: If this slows your PC to a crawl then you obviously do not have the hardware to run the ‘Ultra High’ settings.

Comparison between Very high and Ultra high:

A couple more comparisons to look at.

The setting ranges from 4 to (-10) with the higher number being more compressed.

How low can you go?

[via steam forums]