Exploring Original Xbox Live With Insignia

Xbox it's good to play together for the past month I've been playing OG Xbox live through real hardware and honestly it's been a blast but in case you're wondering how this is even possible or whether or not it's even worth it I'm going to tell you all about it and the results might surprise you trip in case you're new here I'm Josh AKA t on the sometimes I drink tea Channel but this time we're drinking a little Sparkling Ice it's pretty good and on this channel we talk about all kinds of different games and Hardware like the PlayStation 3 that we just covered but today we're not talking about that we're talking about an equally heavy console the OG Xbox but more importantly it's online capabilities that still work don't listen to th do not no listen to me for real put a Banshee on the map he just wants to do it for did you leave we're playing OG Xbox live in 2024 so obviously we need an OG Xbox to do that and I picked this one right here up for around 100 bucks feel like the price is starting to go up on these things and outside of some questionable packaging that it came in it seems to be in pretty good shape and I don't think it's honestly been touched in 20 years first off the disc drive on this thing works perfectly which seems to be becoming a more of a rarity on these things the console in controller that it came with was just covered and caked on Dust like it just came out of a warehouse or something and when I booted it up all the save files are from like the early 2000 so I think it's safe to say this thing hasn't been touched in a while but to test it out we had to pick up some games for it of course and luckily the console itself might be going up in price but the games are still relatively cheap for it and as well as picking up the games from my local retro store I also picked up this nice Xbox series s Xbox controller s that seems to be in mint condition it isn't really good shape looks like it was never used worked perfectly and it's probably the most comfortable way to play Xbox because if you guys don't remember this is the original controller which is so big and bulky that it basically assisted in alienating the Asian audience for this game which is why they redesigned it to this one which is pretty close to the modern controller we have now but after we had our hardware and games and everything was sorted I obviously wanted to take this thing online but there was a little bit of a problem right because Xbox Live was shut down years ago for the OG Xbox but luckily a little team that goes by Insignia said we don't want the Xbox Live experience to be shut down so they reverse engineered the servers to work just as they would like 20 30 years ago I'm not even going to get into the technical aspect of it because I don't know how they make it work I'm just going to say it's magic what they're doing is basically giving you the Xbox Live experience one to one or as close as possible as they can get it to one: one without you actually having to be Tethered to any Xbox servers whatsoever this is their own proprietary in-house system to bring these consoles online and just function as they would normally and this may sound familiar to you because this is something that recently happened with the closure of the 3DS in Wii U ehhop a little service that goes by pretendo was in the words for the while and it's basically doing the exact same thing that we're doing here on the OG Xbox emulating the official servers to give you that online experience are we going to play or what patience Grasshopper one must learn before one can dominate forget that let's play so initially getting your Xbox online was as easy as plugging your internet into this little ethernet point and you were good to go now while it isn't that simple this time around it's pretty damn close the beautiful thing is that you don't have to mod your Xbox whatsoever this Xbox is completely stock yet if I plug an ethernet cord into this wherever I'm at it'll boot up into Xbox Live just fine the whole setup process for getting this Xbox online with Insignia took me about I don't know 30 minutes to an hour so it was pretty fast and easy but you do need a couple of tools to get into it so first off you're going to need a USB adapter that plugs into your controller Port I would show you mine but I gave it to my brother so he could put Insignia on his Xbox next you're going to need a flash drive but not just any flash drive you're going to need one with a very small storage capacity say under a gigabyte what this is doing is basically being recognized as a memory card by your Xbox and in order to do that it's got to be very small the Xbox is very picky with storage sizes I tried a 128 GB flash drive it didn't work I tried a 4 GB iPod it almost worked but it didn't work I think it's safe to say that you won't be finding one of these at your local Staples but I will link these ones that I got off of Amazon as an affiliate Link in the description and these worked totally fine as long as you have a friend who has an Xbox Live rig connected to a high-speed internet connection you can impressive have to pick me up one of those while we're talking about things that you should pick up to get this working I think it's also fair to mention that you might want to pick up an HDMI cable I got this pound HDMI converter I don't remember how much it was but it was fairly inexpensive and it works great if you don't want to do that you could buy a component cable and do a component to HDMI adapter but if you want this thing to look decent on an HD tv which it surprisingly does you're going to need one of these bad boys or you're going to need to solder on an HDMI port to your uh Xbox good yeah good luck with doing that there's a couple steps when it comes to actually loading the files on your flash drive to be used with your Xbox but it's not too difficult I'm going to link the Insignia website in the description with the tutorial as well as the Mr Mario video that I followed just like I did with the PS3 I'm not going to explain the whole process here but it's really not that difficult and once you've got your files loaded and you plugged into the Xbox you're going to go ahead and get Insignia setup what you're basically doing is registering your Xbox with Insignia servers once you have everything hooked up with the ethernet connected and you register your Xbox with Insignia servers you're basically good to go this is where you'll jump into the setup process for Xbox Live just like you would on an OG Xbox and this is where it got pretty special to me Xbox Live will automatically configure your system how cool is that outside of the PS1 this this was the next console that I got that was mine and while I had a lot of fun with the Xbox one thing I never was able to do was take it on Xbox Live we just didn't have it you got to remember that back in the time of Xbox Live being launched internet was more of a novelty thing so we didn't have it so seeing my Xbox do something new that I never got to experience with it 20 years ago is really kind of cool it's really special it's also pretty cool to be able to register on Xbox LIVE with the OG name t because I've never been able to do that on a platform before but now that we have our Xbox Live registered with Insignia and we're ready to jump on Xbox Live it's time to get in some games and this is where I think Xbox Live on the OG Xbox might actually surprise you you know it is a Good Day to Die cheese maker I can smell your feet all the way out here in Wisconsin salami okay you ready to get creamed you see whenever you have this thing connected to the internet and you boot into a game and select the Xbox Live menu on whatever game you're playing it pretty much immediately logs you in within seconds and once you're logged in you're ready to start matching with other players or joining other players that are on your friends list and waiting for you toing hop in with them the first game I decided to test was areu believe the most important game to the service and it's a miracle that they got this one working it's currently the most popular game being played on Insignia of course I'm talking about Halo 2 one of the most eagerly awaited video games finally goes on sale preparing to rewrite retail history video game is expected to have bigger first day revenues than any movie has ever had an opening day at the BX and this is special for quite a few reasons but first off it's just awesome that they actually got this one working on their service apparently it took a lot of effort to get Halo 2 working on Insignia Insignia has been around for quite a while now but it's only recently that they actually got Halo 2 working online and when I first started searching for a game it was actually pretty surprising to me because it felt very familiar once you start searching for a game it pops up matchmaking and it'll match you with other players and once enough are found it'll boot you into a map in a game mode once you're in this pregame Lobby of sorts you can talk to other players you can add them send messages similar to what you would do in a modern Call of Duty except this was doing it 20 years ago another thing that it was doing was split screen multiplayer on Xbox Live this really surprised me because I thought it was a big deal and I was able to play Black Ops online through split screen with my friend I think we did it on Halo 3 but it was more impressive to me because Call of Duty was something I was interested in but I didn't realize that you were able to actually do this on Xbox Live all these years ago but you're not only able to do it on Halo 2 you can do it on a variety of different games if they support split screen you can probably take split screen online I joined this one game where we got into the lobby and I was looking at the names while I was fighting the other people and I realized that a couple of people had the same name and then it kind of clicked I was like wait a minute they're playing split screen and this just got me thinking man it must have been so cool back in the day going to your friend's house who had the Xbox with Xbox Live and you're sitting here jumping on and you guys are just playing against other people online but of course it doesn't just stop with playing with your friends that are in the same room with you this also introduced the party system where you could join up with a couple of friends and then you could all matchmake together or if you didn't want to do matchmaking you could do custom games and private lobbies and I think that that all pretty much started with Halo 2 if it didn't start it it sure as how popularized it so when it came to finding a game in Halo 2 today it wasn't too difficult like I said this is typically the most popular game being played on Insignia right now that being said let's not kid ourselves here this is obviously a niche thing thousands of people aren't going out and picking up an Xbox to do this but sometimes I was able to find a match within minutes sometimes it took me like 10 minutes to get into a game obviously the most popular thing being played as team Slayer but an interesting thing happened when I started adding friends online because I noticed that people were playing custom games so it kind of surprised me and it finally made sense as to why when I saw 30 people playing online and it took a minute to find a game I realized that half of the lobby were probably doing a big private match but I had a lot of fun in Halo 2 and it's really cool to see basically where online matchmaking and parties custom games and all this stuff kind of started you know you have the Master Chief Collection where you can play games like Halo 2 online with new and enhanced Graphics but the matchmaking system just isn't the same it just doesn't have the same feel to it but maybe you see Halo 2 as more of a novelty thing well maybe we can play something a little more unique like Project Gotham Racing 2 I didn't actually play a game on online with this yet but I have seen people playing this one One racing game that I was able to get into some lobbies with was the original Forza Motorsport and this is cool because it's like you're kind of double dipping on the experience here you're getting to see where Forza Gran turismo's biggest competitor started and you're also getting to see kind of where the roots of online multiplayer racing started at least for the series anyways the first time I jumped into a Lobby on Forza here I kind of felt like the dude out of the beginning of Tokyo Drift where he's just slamming into every wall in the parking garage but the very next day I started having some pretty decent races and it got really competitive there's only a few people online at a time on this game but that's really all you need to start a race and get it going I didn't really mention latency or the connection in Halo 2 and that's because it was generally pretty good and the same goes here there were some moments where cars would lag a little bit or there would be some weird Oddities happening but generally it ran pretty smooth but after playing these two games I felt like my Xbox Live experience was getting a little limited and I thought that this was where it was going to end but then I remembered my brother has an Xbox too that he just set up Insignia with so I figured we could add each other and jump into a different game and that's when we booted up Counter Strike for the Xbox which is a really unique experience terrorists win first off the game is just good it's got an exclusive map to it it actually plays pretty well and you know the csgo weapon wheel this basically has the csgo weapon wheel except it was doing it like what 20 years prior it's a really cool experience but it's an even cooler experience to see that you can actually experience this online we were doing these ridiculous 2v eight games with the Bots and it was genuinely hard at times sometimes you could chase the AI but it was pretty difficult but honestly it was pretty fun time we also played Mech assault which was pretty damn fun visually this is a pretty impressive game you know when you're knocking the mechs down and they're exploding they're exploding next to buildings and it's all crumbling down and it runs pretty well fight fight fight back this was definitely one of those VIs impressive games I'd really like to see Mech Assault 2 because that would be even more crazy but I don't know I don't even know if that game supported yet Insignia supports a lot of games but of course this is on a game by- game basis let's say you don't have a brother with an Xbox set up with Insignia and you want to play some of these games online or you want to make some friends in the process well you're kind of in luck when we were about to jump on Counterstrike I decided to go over to the Insignia Discord and say hey I'm booting up Counter Strike does anybody want to get on and sure enough like 10 minutes after posting that message I two guys jump on this and we were doing 2v2 as well as 4V eight Bots it was a good time and it was like literally like within 30 minutes I had messaged people about jumping on this random game that had no players and we were all playing so while some people may say that this is just kind of a novelty I think that it's more than that you can get unique online gaming experiences that you won't be able to play anywhere else literally but the original Xbox and it's fun to even go back and see the way that these games work online before they were remastered or remade and had all these new online components implemented into them I think it's important not just for a preservation aspect but it's just fun to go back and see how this stuff worked and I think it's still pretty relevant to be able to get more mileage out of a console like this I've legitimately had a fun reason to boot up this Xbox and use it and it's really cool to collect some of this online gameplay for games that I thought I would never be able to experience online the cherry on top is that Insignia even has l c support for some of these games like getting extra maps and mechs for mechaa or getting all of the map packs in Halo 2 to play those online and it just gives you an even better experience than you would have had just keeping it offline which is fantastic I'm getting to experience and play these games in ways that I never did before and that's just really cool so in conclusion Insignia is a big dub if you've been thinking about picking up an Xbox or you have an Xbox collecting dust and you've been thinking about taking it online you definitely should because it's really fun if you know of any content or xbx live exclusive experiences that I should try out on the Xbox let me know because I'm definitely interested in exploring this even further but if you want to explore something a little bit more modern we did talk about the OG PlayStation 3 and why it's one of the best consoles of all time as well as talking about how we potentially fix the overheating issue some people may say that the fix is debatable but I'm going to say I just want to give a big thank you to all of the channel members that have supported the channel and all of the super thanks that you guys have given me I just want to give a big super thanks to you I couldn't say that with a straight face but honestly guys it does mean a lot thank you guys for the support my fiance's definitely heard me rambling for like the past 6 months about making an Ikea trip to upgrade the office setup so I'm hoping to do that at some point soon with all of the support you guys have given me otherwise that's about it I hope to see you guys in the next one hope you enjoy the content and uh until then it's been tea I got to go make dinner now put [Laughter] [Music]

Channel: Sometimesidrinktea

Views: 1,073

Keywords: xbox live 1.0, xbox console, insignia, insignia xbox live, halo 2 xbox live, halo 2 xbox live 2024, xbox live in 2024, og xbox live in 2024, og xbox live, system link, xbox live insignia, xbox retrospective, xbox live 2002, online gaming, xbox live retrospective, xbox live is back online, og xbox live online, last day of xbox live, og xbox live 2024, insignia halo 2, insignia xbox live gameplay, insignia xbox live review, insignia xbox live update, insignia xbox live 2024

Id: ETN_81eLzoM

Length: 15min 35sec (935 seconds)

Published: Mon May 20 2024