Smyths deal, €179 360 Arcade deal, game saves?

PogMoThoin

Folks, I'm not that well up on consoles, its for the Young fella who's a big pc gamer so beside being able to invite his friends round with their games, its main use will be for streaming media to as I'll be replacing my old Xbox with XBMC with this as it does HD and has HDMI. Not too sure about Xbox live (pc options have always been free) and I do intend chipping it straight away which would keep it away from Xbox live.

Was in Smyths earlier to pickup their €179 arcade with 2 controllers & 2 games deal, the girl at the desk said you couldn't save games at all on it, that it didn't have a hard drive and did her best to convince me buy the elite deal. I had opted for the elite deal until she said they were sold out of Forza, so I just walked away to find out more.

I've a few questions:
Can a hard drive be added later? If so how much for an official one?
Can I mod an ordinary ide or sata hd into it?
Is it true that You can't save game saves on the Arcade? Or does she mean save games themselves?
Is the Elite a better option? I'm kinda stretched and that extra may be a bridge too far

I've got several pc's, a home server with network media all on shared drives and a gigabit network so I'll not be needing storage for media. Do i need a hd at all?

FutureGuy

PogMoThoin wrote: »

I've a few questions:
Can a hard drive be added later?
If so how much for an official one?
Can I mod an ordinary ide or sata hd into it?
Is it true that You can't save games on the Arcade?
Is the Elite a better option? I'm kinda stretched and that extra may be a bridge too far

-A hard drive can be added later
-Very expensive for what you are getting
-No idea
-You cant save games on an Arcade, you need an official memory stick
-Elite is much better option tbh and there isn't a huge difference in price between Elite and Arcade if you shop around.

PogMoThoin

Why is the Elite a better option? Explain?

Evolute

PogMoThoin wrote: »

Why is the Elite a better option? Explain?

Well its black.
Has a 120gb hard drive however it is a waste if your just planning on chipping it and not using XBL.
Just buy a 20gb hdd along with the arcade and your happy out.
In all honesty I don't think buying an elite is worth the money

Y2J_MUFC

PogMoThoin wrote: »

Why is the Elite a better option? Explain?

Evolute wrote: »

Well its black.

I stopped reading there... i'm sold!

Although, where do you pick up a 20gb hard drive for cheap(ish!)

rizzla

You CAN save your games with the Arcade, it comes with 256mb of memory.

http://www.xbox.com/en-IE/hardware/x/xbox360arcadesystem/default.htm

Just saw you intend to mod the console straight away. I haven't a clue what you would need for that or which would be the better choice, perhaps ask the peeps on the console modding forum.

TouchingVirus

I don't know about modding it straight away myself, there's a new firmware around the corner that could make it possible for use on XBL so you can download Arcade games and whatnot.

1) Hard drives can be added later. The cost per gigabyte is more than you would pay if you bought the console with a hard drive. There are several sizes available - 20GB, 60GB, 120GB and now 250GB

2) Yes, you can crack the case (or buy another one off ebay) and slap in a bigger hard drive. However, the xbox will recognise this as not being an official hard drive and will not allow savegames on it (I think). I know for sure you cannot download content onto an unofficial hard drive. There could be a way around this by buying a certain model of a WD drive, but I've not read up on it. Any unofficial hard drive won't have the partition required to play old xbox games on the 360, so you can't play those on the new system. It is also possible you will not be able to have profiles on the hard drive or any signed content, rendering a bit useless if you're going to be streaming media to the xbox all the time.

3) She probably got confused. There is 256MB of internal memory, which will get you a few save games, but not a whole lot. With that pitiful amount of memory you won't be able to 'install games' to the hard drive, which drastically reduces noise from reading the game discs while playing and improves loading times because the data is loaded from the hard drive. The CD does have to be in the drive to ensure you haven't rented the game and loaded it onto the HDD for the craic. With you getting the console modded it will be able to play backups. Either way, the game disc needs to be in the drive to play

4) I think so. There are plenty of Elite offers around, but it's a bit late to order from the likes of Amazon.co.uk who had a pretty sweet deal going. Smaller die process means less heat and less chance of an RROD. I like that it's black and not white, my PC & TV are all black too.


It's a good idea to get on live and get the AVI codecs before modding the console if you're going to stream AVI files. You could always use TVersity or another transcoding media server to transcode those files into WMV9 files which the console can play natively.

PogMoThoin

Thanks for that,

What I mean by modding it straight away is in a few weeks, Feb/Mar. I presume You get an Xbox live trial, after that it'll not be seeing a route to the net.

Nemanja91

Y2J_MUFC wrote: »

I stopped reading there... i'm sold!

Although, where do you pick up a 20gb hard drive for cheap(ish!)

GAME should sell them second hand.

TouchingVirus

PogMoThoin wrote: »

Thanks for that,

What I mean by modding it straight away is in a few weeks, Feb/Mar. I presume You get an Xbox live trial, after that it'll not be seeing a route to the net.

No problems. I'd wager they'll give you a gold trial, maybe a 1 month. Xbox Live! Silver membership is free to all and allows for purchasing stuff from the arcade/marketplace for Microsoft Points but doesn't allow for online gaming - that's the Gold

PogMoThoin

Ended up buying the Elite in the end for €249 with Forza and Fifa10, only one wireless controller though, but I have 2 wired ones for the pcs, I can get a wireless one again.