Soft-Modding My Xbox 360

Within the last year, a soft mod called ABadAvatar emerged for the Xbox 360, allowing the system to play ROMs of games, all while maintaining access to your Xbox account. It's pretty impressive and can run entirely from a flash drive.

Having purchased an Xbox 360 two years ago, and then replacing it with an emulation PC I put together earlier this year, I really didn't pay much attention to it. To be honest, my experiences with modding haven't been all that great. The amount of work it typically takes just isn't worth the end result.

My Xbox 360 had made its way into a Goodwill box, where it's resided for the last three months. The other day, I saw the latest release of this mod and how quickly it booted up, and I decided, "What the heck." So, I sat down to see if I could pull this off, and within a couple of hours, I was up and running.

The mod is rather simple to use, but it does require a PC. I wasted a lot of time trying to get things working on my Mac before realizing this would be so much easier with my PC. Once I made the switch, it didn't take much time at all. I'd say you could probably do this in thirty minutes if you're using Windows.

Once I got the mod working, I needed to acquire some ROMs. There is a built-in ripping system, so I was able to copy the few Xbox 360 discs I had onto the hard drive with relative ease. I also decided to install the mod on my hard drive, just for convenience.

After obtaining a few more ROMs, I realized they needed to be extracted using another piece of software which only works on PC. So, I went to work on the slow downloads, extracting the files, and moving them over to my thumb drive. It takes around three to five minutes to copy a game to the Xbox 360 hard drive, but once that's complete, the box art is downloaded and you're good to go. Surprisingly, it looks better than the normal Xbox dashboard.

The first game I booted up was one I've been wanting to replay for years, Deadpool. Released in 2013, this game captured the essence of the character perfectly, although the gameplay was rather limited and repetitive. It's the type of game I like to revisit for half an hour at a time, but like so many licensed games, it's no longer available for purchase. I had planned to play just a few minutes to make sure everything was working, but I ended up playing the entire first level and had a blast doing so.

I tried several other games I've wanted to revisit, like The Godfather and The Simpsons Game, and everything worked great with the exception of All-Pro Football 2K8. The game freezes when it attempts to begin a match. I need to replace the ROM and see if that fixes the issue.

Over the next week, I downloaded more games and set them up for play. With a little patience, I suddenly had a very respectable collection of games that aren't available on the PS5 or Xbox Series X, and they all play great.

To make things even better, I've spent hours over the last few weeks looking for an Xbox One or a PS4 because, as much as I like my little emulation PC, I need more storage, and that just isn't in the budget right now. It's cheaper for me to buy an old console and download some digital games I already own than it is to buy a hard drive. What a world we live in.

But now, I have my Xbox 360 back up and running in my bedroom. So, when my wife is gaming downstairs playing online with her friends, I have a nice, cozy place to retreat to and revisit some old favorites.

If you have an old Xbox 360 lying around and enjoy tinkering, this is by far the most rewarding mod I've ever completed.