A French YouTuber and modder has managed to miniaturise Xbox 360 into a handheld size. The resulting portable works as a regular console, yet allows you to take your games on the go.
Seeing the lack of portable machines from Microsoft’s console division, YouTuber Millomaker took it upon himself to make his own handheld Xbox. This feat took him nearly two years to achieve, during which he documented each step on his channel. The result is a true Xbox 360 – no emulation involved – in the size of a Steam Deck. Needless to say, the technical hurdles were numerous, and so were the sacrificed consoles.
Millomaker started his journey by reverse engineering any parts of the Xbox 360 he couldn’t find schematics for. This allowed him to find which parts of the console are mandatory, i.e. it can’t boot without. For example, to find out which trace goes to which chip, he manually sanded the PCB layers one by one before taking pictures using a scanner. In total, five consoles were sacrificed – all originally broken before being fixed, bringing the cost of all parts and bits to €8,576. Ouch! I’ll just stick with a Steam Deck for now.
For his mod, Millomaker went with the most efficient version of the 360 as a base, i.e. the Slim version. As you may have guessed, due to the lack of a DVD reader, the creator hacked and flashed the console to run games from a 1TB SSD. Because of this, online gaming is off-limits, at least on official servers.
In addition to building a compact cooler capable of handling the 50W of the Xbox’s APU, Millomaker also needed to build a battery pack and, most importantly, a VRM (Voltage Regulator Module) system. The latter was too big, so he built his own.
To save as much space and power as possible, all unnecessary features were removed. For example, the Bluetooth for wireless controllers wasn’t exactly needed. The remaining parts are then fed via four 5000mAh cells, delivering one hour of playtime. The modder thought about doubling that, but the weight would have skyrocketed. Instead, he just relies on fast charging via a 100W Type-C port, which works while playing.
Even though this APU was not made for portable use, the cooler seems to handle it quite well, with the exhaust measured at around 43°C. In case something fails, Millomaker installs many safety guards for temperature, battery, etc. Lastly, for the screen, the modder went with an 8in 1280×800 IPS panel to max out the capabilities of this old machine.
The final result measures 350mm (L) x 138mm (W) x 38mm (H). The latter rises to 60mm if you count the joysticks, which is slightly big but definitely portable. For reference, the Steam Deck measures 298mm × 117mm × 49mm, respectively. As for weight, this portable version tips the scale at 1.3kg in place of 2.9kg on the original. Again, for comparison, Valve’s handheld weighs 640 grams.
While this is not Millomaker’s only project given he also built a coffee-making PC, it is the longest and most complicated one. If you like this type of creation, Millomaker’s next project is transforming a Nintendo Switch into a living room console. Why? Because he can.