Here’s something for the modern gamers out there.

A friend dug this original Xbox out of his garage and handed it over for an assessment.

There are a few things going on here.

First surprise: a random 9 V battery sitting inside the case.

Interesting placement.

Then we have these loose wires.

They certainly look as though they were supposed to be connected to something at some point.

Previous modifications are clearly part of the mystery.

The problem we definitely cannot blame on the previous owner is the clock capacitor.

It has failed and leaked onto the motherboard.

The original Xbox uses a supercapacitor to maintain the real-time clock briefly while the console is unplugged. On most pre-1.6 boards the notorious original clock capacitor can simply be removed once any leakage and board contamination are dealt with.

Some late 1.4 boards and all 1.6 systems used a different gold-coloured capacitor that is less prone to destructive leakage. The 1.6 hardware is also different because it requires a functioning clock-capacitor circuit, or a suitable bypass, to boot.

So this repair is not quite as universal as “find capacitor, rip capacitor out”.

Hopefully this will become a three-part repair.

The eventual objective is much more important:

Burnout Revenge.

Priorities.

Sources