Xbox



"Life is short. Play more."

The original behemoth. The most powerful system of the 6th Generation. It lead the way in console design by basically being a PC in a box. Helped Pioneer online gaming with Xbox Live and its built-in Ethernet port. Since the system was very similar to PCs of the time, it received a bunch of direct ports to/from the platform that are missing on competing systems. It's also hueg. Due to the deal MS made with Nvidia over the system's GPU, they would never make a profit off the system. Due to this, MS unceremoniously stopped production and rushed its successor out the door after only 4 years on the market. It didn't dethrone its main competor (the PS2), but did help establish the ground for the 360's domination in the 7th Gen.

Unlike the PS2 and Gamecube, emulating the Xbox on PCs is not ready for primetime. There are a few emulators in development and can run some of the popular ones decently. But if you want the best experience, you need to get a system. There are other options for playing its games though.

IMPORTANT NOTICE: On April 15, 2010, MS ended Xbox LIVE support for all Original Xbox titles. You can't play online games or download downloadable content packs. If you're looking for an online game to play on your Original Xbox, you're out of luck. Try a tunneling program for online gaming if you're desperate, such as XBConnect or Xlink Kai to emulate a LAN game. Shitsux.

Backwards Compatibility
The Xbox 360's backwards compatibility with original Xbox games is an absolute mess. The games are emulated, so many suffer from technical hiccups. Not all games are even supported! If you're planning on playing these games on your Xbox 360 rather than the original Xbox, check this list to make sure it plays fine, if at all. In most cases, playing on an original Xbox will give you a far better experience overall.

For a time, Microsoft indicated there wasn't going to be OG Xbox support for the Xbox One. In fall of 2017, they started rolling out backward compatibility for original Xbox games. Updates seem to come every couple of months whenever MS feels like. So far, only 32 titles have been made compatible. All of them so far were also compatible with the 360 as well. Unlike the 360, all titles thus far seem to run as good as playing on original hardware. Sometimes even better. The graphics are usually slightly better than they would be on stock hardware. On the One S, they run at four times the resolution (~1080p) while on the One X sixteen times the resolution (~4k).

This icon indicates that a game is Xbox One compatible.

Hacking
If you own a system now of days, you'll probably want to hack it. It's pretty easy to hack and there's a ton of advantages to do so.
 * Upgrading your HDD
 * Backing up your games to the HDD and running them from it (or pirating games)
 * Emulators (Everything through 5th Gen (minus Saturn) runs pretty well, arcade games) and Homebrew (AvP2000, Doom, Quake I & II, Half-Life, Stepmania, Super Mario War)
 * Custom Dashboards (XBMC4XBOX, Unleashed X)

There's a wide variety of methods to mod your system. The most common (and easiest) is a softmod. Follow this video and you should be good to go.