Buying the Xecuter chip turned out to be a happy accident. Normally flashing a BIOS into a modchip requires a boot CD and a fair amount of messing around. This modchip came preloaded with the handy FlashBIOS BIOS. It supports BIOS flashing from CD, Hard disk and over the network. Yes, the chip contains a complete TCP/IP implementation and mini webserver and BIOS flasher.

Flashing the BIOS was insanely simple. I just plugged the XBox into my network, browsed to it using my laptop and then uploaded the BIOS over the network. The XBox then obligingly flashed itself and turned off. Turning it back on greeted me with a giant green error message which, rather than being an error, was a giant green success message. All it was moaning about was the lack of a hard disk (not surprising since that was in another room).

So if you get this far your XBox is flashed and working. Put it back together and do something useful with it, like turning it into a media centre or mini server.