I made a flip top Xbox 360. Other than the flip top, it is completely stock. At first, this seems rather useless, because you can’t do swap tricks or anything similar like you could with older consoles (e.g. PS2, PS1). You can’t play burned games or anything with this console either. It’s good for a single thing: avoiding buying a second copy of a game to play it on a second console. It’d be great for LAN parties. I use it for achievements.

In Halo 4, there’s one where you need to beat the campaign on co-op. None of my friends had Halo 4 at the time, and there’s no matchmaking for campaign in Halo 4. So I just fired up this console with Halo 4 and had it join my game on my main console and did coop by myself, but I didn’t have to split screen.

Here’s how it works: the 360 lets you install games to the hard drive, which saves wear and tear on the laser, and makes the console much much quieter during use. When a game is installed, you still need to put the disc in the tray, so you can’t rent a game, install it, then return it and still be able to play it. If you have a scratched disc, but the console still recognizes it as the game, you can borrow a working disc and install that, then just use your scratched disc to launch the game. The cool thing is that the console only checks the disc during boot (and for a minute or two after boot). So I can install the game, then boot it, then open the flip top and pull out the game (without the console knowing the drive opened) and put the game in a different xbox. If the console knows the drive opened, it goes right back to the dashboard.

Here’s what the console looks like:



I used parts from a local hardware store, and unfortunately that know was the smallest I could find.. That’s the only thing I really dislike about this mod.

Here’s the front of the xbox:

I had to cut the plastic that goes over the front of the DVD tray because the top of the DVD drive hit that on the way out. As it is, the top of the DVD drive barely clears the faceplate.

This is the top of the xbox with the flip cover opened:

I made this as simple as possible. I cut the top of the DVD drive off the rest of the DVD drive housing. I left some tabs on the sides to help align the top when I close the cover. The black plastic circle on the top of the drive is what holds the disc in place (and it doesn’t touch the rest of the DVD drive top cover when the top is closed). A magnet holds it in place and makes sure the spindle has a good coupling with the disc. There’s (thankfully) a lot of play in the mount for it, so I didn’t need to get everything lined up exactly.

Here’s a close up of the flip top:

You can start to see some of the finer details here. The top of the 360 case has some little plastic standoffs that go over pegs ont he front of the DVD drive. When I cut out the flip top, I left those on the actual flip part because they will help align the flip top when it’s closed (this is why there are two ‘ears’ at the front of the flip top). I used some standoffs and hot glued the plastic top to the DVD drive top while everything was closed and lined up. Then I drilled 4 holes and put some screws and plastic spacers in place to really hold the pieces together. I used a screw in each of the hinges, and two screws near the front of the drive (one on each side).

I made this a while ago and it’s held up without issue. I’ve also never had any problems with a game trying to load more data from the disc when it’s no longer in the drive.