I modded my Xbox a long time ago, and over the years forgot about it, leaving the Xbox to sit on the bottom shelf. It waited patiently for years until I stumbled across a post on AtariAge about using the Xbox with emulators that piqued my interest.
Upon firing up the Xbox, I was surprised that it was still functional. Well, sort of. It usually took a few tries to fire up. I installed a larger hard drive in it and grabbed AtariXLBox from Xport along with a bunch of A8 games in various formats. It was able to play all of them without a hitch. In fact, with the Xbox plugged into a CRT TV, it was pretty much indistinguishable from the real thing.
I’m not a big emulation person, I’d rather be playing on the real thing, but using an Xbox has it’s advantages. For one, I can easily take it places and play several systems on it (there are emulators for all of the major consoles and arcade). It doesn’t support the multi-joy adapter from what I’ve seen, but I should be able to set up the 3rd joypad to work as the third player in Dynakillers. Lastly, it does support saving the settings on a game-by-game basis which makes it easier to start games up without worrying about what hardware the game requires.
It should be relatively inexpensive to try out this route. An original Xbox usually goes for under $50 on eBay, but if you look at garage sales or Craigslist you can probably find it cheaper. You’ll need to do some research on how to mod the Xbox so you can run the emulators. This usually involves using certain games with certain save files that trick the Xbox into running unsigned code.