The Kasumi Xbox of awesomeness! Such an incredible shade of blue, and now full of so many cool upgrades. Released back into the wild a while back, it still lives on in my memory and in this video.

This is the lovely Dead or Alive Ultimate Kasumi Blue Xbox, and I’ve been giving it a few upgrades. It’s already been softmodded, and I’ve installed a 1 TB hard drive. Quite an improvement over the original storage!

Of course, changing the hard drive means dealing with the cables. The original Xbox uses a 40-pin IDE connection, but I’ve bought a replacement 24-inch ribbon cable with 80 conductors. The extra conductors provide additional grounding between the signal wires, which is useful when dealing with faster IDE transfers.

Unfortunately, you can’t just throw a longer cable inside an Xbox and expect everything to fall neatly into place. The motherboard, DVD drive and hard drive all have their own positions, and the connectors need to reach them without leaving a great tangle of ribbon cable behind.

This particular cable also has its connectors arranged in a way that requires a little creative folding. The trick is to get the motherboard connection in place first, then route the middle connector to the DVD drive and the remaining end towards the hard-drive adapter.

There’s quite a lot of spare cable on a 24-inch ribbon, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I can fold the excess behind the DVD drive and tuck the remaining length out of the way. With a little patience, it fits remarkably well!

The hard drive is connected through an adapter, so getting everything to sit neatly involves a few more folds than the original arrangement. I’ve made a sort of V-shaped fold near the adapter and tucked the excess underneath. Look at that, almost as though somebody designed it to fit!

I wasn’t actually expecting the cable to settle into place quite this nicely, and now that it has, I don’t particularly want to pull everything apart again just to demonstrate every fold from the beginning. Typical!

The Xbox itself is a revision 1.0 machine, and fortunately its old clock capacitor doesn’t appear to have caused much damage. I’ve also managed to get the case open without making too much of a mess of the labels, which is always a bonus with these limited-edition machines.

I’ve been tinkering with this one for quite a while, trying different adapters and accessories as I go. It’s a lovely machine, and I’m rather pleased with how the latest upgrades have turned out.

So there you have it. If you’re using a longer 80-conductor IDE cable in an original Xbox, this is one way of folding and routing it without having a great wad of ribbon cable sticking out everywhere.

Not bad for a few bits of folded plastic and copper!