At some point I realised old — but not yet properly retro — consoles were probably cheap. I never had access to any of them when they were current, so I thought it would be fun to buy one and play the whole generation of video games I never had the chance to. Somewhere along the way, it occurred to me that it'd be more convenient if the whole mess fitted into a single, easily portable box.
Thus, an XBox 360 luggable was born.
Photo: the luggable running Halo Anniversary. Photo: the outside of the closed briefcase.The XBoxBoxBox is a stripped-down, mildly hacked-with XBox 360 wedged in a briefcase with a power supply, speakers, TV, and space to keep a pair of controllers. This very much isn't Ben Heck's slick, tidy XBox 360 laptop. I haven't the time, energy, and very likely skill for that kind of thing.
Photo: bottom half of the luggable, showing the console, power supply, and room for controllers.Everything is held in place with 3D printed brackets. I thought this would be easy to do in a nice square box, but it turns out the box isn't very square, has very inconsistent measurements, and nearly all of it bends! It took many many iterations to fine tune the fit of everything, and the brackets were an absolute pain to design to begin with. The brackets are also epoxied in just to make sure. This might be less of a problem with a more modern briefcase, I think I tracked the origin of this one down to a company that went out of business around the year 2000!
For convenience, everything is powered by one mains cable. A 3D printed box bolts into the end of the original XBox PSU and covers up the splitting of the mains supply. It also provides somewhere to mount a main on/off switch. My wiring is at least mildly suspect, and I think this whole thing could probably do with revisiting after having thought hard about mains isolation and grounding. In other words, this is a strictly personal-use, at-your-own-risk device!
Photo: the XBox's powersupply with my 3D printed expansion attached to the end. Render: the two parts of the 3D printed mains splitter box.The display was the smallest, cheapest LCD TV I could find that would do HDMI and 720p. It already had speakers which saved me the bother of adding my own. Originally, the speakers were buried in the back of the display. Ideally I'd have moved them to the front, but I couldn't find anywhere they'd fit easily so they ended up along the edge of the LCD instead. I also moved the buttons that control the TV to the front so I wouldn't need a remote, as a TV this size means you have to sit right in front of it anyway.
Photo: insides of the TV, which are mounted to the back of the LCD's steel chassis. Photo: one of the speakers hidden behind the edge of the LCD in the top of the luggable.This all just about works, and I've played quite a few hours of Halo on it. The speaker mounts could do with a redesign at some point, as they're a bit loose, but otherwise I think I'm fairly happy with how it came out.
Photo: a pretty photo of the luggable running Halo in the dark.