Xbox#

Xbox One X#

In February 2023 I upgraded to the Xbox One X because several games I was interested in were only coming out for the latest generation consoles. This became the primary Xbox in the living room.

Xbox One#

I was late to the Xbox One game, waiting until a year or so after it was released before jumping in.

When we upgraded to the Samsung UN65KS8000 I got the Xbox One Gears of War 4 Limited 2TB bundle to go along with the 4K support on the TV.

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Xbox 360#

I have two Xbox 360 units. I also have one of the HD-DVD players (yeah, I know).

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Video#

You have to hook it up in a particular way if you want to get HD video out of it, especially through HD-DVD.

  • For HD-DVD 1080p signal, you have to output from Xbox using VGA. The trouble is that most TVs don’t accept incoming VGA or DVI signals greater than 720p. (This is also relevant when talking about how we hook up Windows Media Center.) Using component cables, you can get 1080i at best.

  • Not sure if you can get HD-DVD 1080p through the HDMI output adapter, but several games support 1080p through it.

We got a second Xbox - the new one is downstairs and connects via HDMI to the Samsung TV, the old one went upstairs.

  • It looks like all of the Xbox models since July 2007 have HDMI, but you need to have a separate cable to enable the sound output when using HDMI. Only the Elite Xbox comes with that. Separately it costs ~$45. It appears that the Arcade machine has HDMI. Arcade is not backwards-compatible with Xbox legacy games, but that could be just because it doesn’t have a hard drive.

  • I ended up getting an Xbox 360 Arcade from Dell, an Xbox HDMI cable/adapter and wireless network adapter from Amazon, and a 512MB memory card from Best Buy. I put the Xbox 360 Arcade with all that downstairs. I stuck the old hard drive on the Xbox 360 Arcade and that works well. Our gamer profiles are each on memory cards - Jenn on the 64MB card I already had and me on the 512MB card I bought. The original Xbox 360 was moved upstairs to the game room.

Audio#

I got a Turtle Beach Ear Force X4 headset for Christmas and put it downstairs so I could play games without disturbing folks. Very nice headset. Rechargeable AAA batteries are a must with it.