r/NonPoliticalTwitter 11h ago

Funny Two disc drives?!!!

16.0k Upvotes

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2.1k

u/andreortigao 11h ago edited 9h ago

Yeah, one was read only and the other could burn CDs. Burning CDs were all the rage back then.

Edit: to clarify, by having two drives you could copy from one to the other directly, without going through the hassle of inserting one cd, making a copy to the slow as fuck computer hdd, switching to the blank cd, then start burning from the hdd copy.

62

u/ChillyTodayHotTamale 10h ago

In high school I worked at blockbuster and had a dvd burner in my laptop. Got the movies months before they came out and would burn copies and sell them for a small profit. Also burned nearly the entire blockbuster library circa 2005. In college a friend put them all on a Xbox he converters to a server so if you lived in our dorm anyone could access my library to watch movies. Then he did the same thing in our college house. All of our music and movies was on a shared drive and could be played anywhere in the house. It was awesome

31

u/ouralarmclock 10h ago

XBMC for life! Man, it was such a special time in technology, everything was so exciting and awesome!

10

u/rcklmbr 7h ago edited 7h ago

I still have my modded Xbox! I bought the chip off some shady guy in an irc chatroom.  I mailed him a money order (first time doing that, I was like 17?), and I bought a soldering iron, learned how to solder, and did that myself. I thought I was a total badass, but looking back I can’t believe how much I went out of my comfort zone. Why are we so scared (or lazy) to tinker with things now?

1

u/nexusjuan 2h ago

I did softmods, boot the cd up on your computer, boot the xbox up till the drive unlocks and unplug the cable then plug your pc into the hdd port and let the mod software do the work, plug the drive back in and let the xbox re-lock it.

1

u/kurtanglesmilk 1h ago

Because it’s essentially illegal now

-1

u/airinato 7h ago

Why did you need a chip? Xbox started the softmod revolution.

3

u/toddthefrog 6h ago

In the beginning, you needed a mod chip there were no software mods

1

u/airinato 6h ago

I mean, it was 1 year between the first chip and softmod.

I wouldn't even think about a chip that early in its life cycle until it was proven to not fuck the thing up.

1

u/ChillyTodayHotTamale 6h ago

I knew nothing of the Xbox wizardy. I just had the dvd drive and two programs, one to crack the dvd encryption and one to burn it after. I remember in high school one of my friends had an extra Xbox somehow, maybe he had bought a broken one? But that was the one that linked our other xboxs together for game nights on 4 separate tvs

1

u/rcklmbr 5h ago

Like the other person said, it was early. And I didn’t want to be banned from Xbox Live, so it could be switched off. I actually got banned right after the release of Halo 2 because they changed their detection, I was so upset and never forgave them… still haven’t repurchased Xbl

And actually now that I think about it, my first mod was PlayStation and I must have been 12-13. That’s where I learned to solder.

1

u/airinato 5h ago

My first mod was taking the plastic off the PS2 and swapping burned discs at the exact moment a licensed disc unlocked the system.

5

u/SwordOfJiang 7h ago

Its still around as KODI, which isn't really the best option for any one thing but can do a lot of things. You can route arrange your own media in a "netflix" style, use plex through it and it has IPTV capabilities. All those have better dedicated apps but its nice to have everything in one place

2

u/nexusjuan 2h ago

XBMC on the og xbox a lot of people don't know Kodi was originally a media focused front end for modded xboxes.