[Rinzler89]

>Just buying a simple tool to load game saves and you could have a soft-modded Xbox in minutes

Because that era Xbox was just a PC built form COTS hardware instead of custom HW. You can still tinker just as well today with a PC, or a PC based console like the Steam Deck, why bother fighting with a proprietary console designed to be locked down? What would you gain? Access to a custom X86 hardware that you can buy for cheap on the market anyway?

[MegaDeKay]

It is a stretch to call it just a PC built from COTS hardware. The NV2A GPU was a modified version on the NV20 and included the Northbridge. The MCPX Southbridge was custom. The DVD was customized for anti-piracy. The CPU is a (slightly) customized PIII. If it was all COTS, the XBox XEmu emulator would be further along than it is now.

https://classic.copetti.org/writings/consoles/xbox/

[muziq]

Didn’t the SouthBridge turn up in some Nvidia ATX boards ? I recall positively salivating on realising that one particular Nvidia motherboard gave us a hardware encoded Dolby digital signal, just like the Xbox..

[justsomehnguy]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundStorm#Video_game_consoles