Kickstarter: Xbox 360 in Open Source Laptop Form

Started by family man, entrepreneur and computer engineer with a degree from UT Austin, Amir Husain; and all-around hacker and self-described rock star and soon-to-be ineligible bachelor, Azam Shahani, Darkmatter is a laptop made out of an Xbox 360. Or something. Here, this is how Amir and Azam describe it: “Darkmatter is the world’s first portable Open Source Xbox(TM) system that you can buy as a fully finished product, or in kit form.” It’s an Xbox 360 mod, like Ben Heck’s Xbox laptop, but it’s not a one-off.  It’s mass produced, or will be if the Kickstarter campaign gets off the ground.

With a 15.6″ 720P display and 1366×768 resolution, Darkmatter proudly demonstrates all of the standard console capabilities and more. It can play all Xbox 360 games, Xbox live, and DVDs. You can still hook up Xbox extensions, like the Kinect. It’s also got a wifi card so that, when combined with the laptop-like portability, you can connect to a LAN party easily.  And, in addition to what the traditional console offers, Darkmatter provides a headphone jack for private gaming and Arduino-powered capacitive touch sensors to control things like the machine’s volume at the slide of a finger.  They even claim that Darkmatter will function with the Xbox ONE, still to be released.

So Amir and Azam have adapted the Xbox 360 and, with laser cut panels and ABS hinges and end pieces 3D-printed with a Makerbot Replicator 2, reconfigured it to be better, something that is truly their own. And, because Amir and Azam are proud members of the OS community, it’s open source! So, the designs are online for you to try to make one from scratch. Or, by donating to the campaign, you can purchase a fully assembled unit or a kit.

I’ve been thinking about getting a 360 for a while and this Darkmatter Kickstarter has almost pushed me over the edge.  For $499, I could have everything necessary to make Darkmatter, except for that key ingredient: the Xbox 360 console.  So, for $999, I could have the console itself, fully-assembled into a Darkmatter laptop.  My only concern, besides shelling out a grand on an Xbox, is whether or not it’s legal to resell an Xbox 360 that’s been adapted in such a way.

After coming across an article describing an instance in which someone was arrested by Homeland Security for modding people’s 360 consoles for $30 a job (clearly US tax dollars are being well spent to protect the security of its citizens), I messaged the project’s founders to ask about what makes their product legal enough to be on Kickstarter.  They responded with this clarification:

Regarding your question, we are NOT modding Xbox consoles in any way to play any cracked games, non-region specific games or illegally acquired/copied games. We don’t even TOUCH the Xbox firmware at all. The entire Console, bought from Microsoft or Microsoft resellers, at full price, is installed into the Darkmatter kit without any modifications to DRM hardware or software enabled by Microsoft… The key thing is that a mod is not a mod is not a mod. Obviously, if you modify the Xbox with a view to get around Microsoft’s DRM, or crack it in a way that is designed to allow it to play copied/illegal games, that is problematic. Ben Heck, the modder covered in the Gizmodo story, other ebay based Xbox laptop sellers and we ourselves are NOT Xbox crackers. We do not modify the Xbox firmware.

Then, he told me that, “if you ever are in the market for an Xbox or other specialized laptop, please know that you have friends in the business 🙂 “ These guys were so nice in answering my naive questions about Xbox laptops, that I’d be happy to be their friends and join their online hackspace, TechJango. Here’s to new friends!