YouTuber makes a ‘portable monstrosity’ Xbox using a handsaw, hot glue, and eight disk drives: ‘It’s working. It’s actually working!’
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It’s not often I find myself chuckling at DIY projects, but YouTuber James Channel got a hearty one from me the second he announced the portable Xbox he created by sawing one in half, slapping controllers on the side and hot-glueing a screen on top is capable of a whopping 9 minutes and forty seconds of battery life.
As spotted by Hackaday, the half-hour-long video of the YouTuber making a ‘portable’ Xbox Original is sort of like the lovechild of a mad scientist, a teacher, and a stream of consciousness. After grabbing an Xbox that isn’t working, James figures out that the DVD drive is flagging a hard drive issue, and fixes the DVD drive by replacing a tiny failing resistor with four separate, much bigger resistors, then hot-glueing them down.
This is subsequently followed by smacking the top of the Xbox until the disk tray comes out. Then, after fixing the original Xbox, James takes it apart again and starts throwing the bits of plastic he doesn’t need on the floor.
Taking apart this plastic is important to get the central motherboard and necessary components as small as possible, and he replaces the big unwieldy hard drive with a CompactFlash drive, saving a little more space. James tears apart an old iPod portable video dock to slap the speakers and screen onto his new handheld Xbox, and saws Xbox controllers in half to attach them to the side.
That’s the kind of video this is: one that demonstrates a depth of highly technical knowledge about engineering, thrown together with a handsaw, new transistors, and a glue gun. It’s all very chaotic in a way that sort of makes me want to try it myself.
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After a three-week hiatus in the middle of the video, “because it was very mean to me and wouldn’t work properly”, James takes one last swing at finishing off the portable, and discovers that seven of the eight Xbox drives he bought to fix the device weren’t working, and that the IDE connector he had fitted didn’t work. “Other than the disk drive, it was almost all my fault.”
The final product is a “portable monstrosity” (according to the video’s description), with an open disk drive, sawed-off controllers glued to a motherboard, and it’s all held down with duct tape. The Xbox logo snapped off in the build, but it’s happily glued onto the final product with no downsides except perhaps a deep sigh from Phil Spencer.
So, if you want to play just under 10 minutes of Halo on the train while strangers stare at you (presumably admiring the glorious handheld you’re rocking), all you need is a hot glue gun, a handsaw, an old Xbox, an iPod video player, electronic tools, and seven or eight Xbox disk drives. Or you could just boot up the Steam Deck.
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