[stordoff]

> the external HDD for the Xbox 360 has the "secret sauce" / binary blobs that allows this to work and emulates certain Xbox games

IIRC, that's _partly_ because it requires Microsoft to pay a licensing fee to Nvidia for the original Xbox GPU, so baked that cost into the cost of the hard drive rather than the console itself.

[MBCook]

The original Xbox always had a hard drive and games expected it. The 360 had no-drive models.

I assume that’s why the drive was required.