This is something I thought about before I ever had an Xbox, so I knew I wanted to do it once I got mine. The idea is to completely hide that stupid DVD dongle that you have to have plugged into a port (by convention, port 4) for the remote control to work. The procedure involves wiring the guts of the DVD dongle inside the Xbox, with a relay governing the connection to the wiring of the fourth port. When no controller is plugged into port 4, the DVD dongle is active and the remote works. When you plug a controller into port 4, the relay switches over to the controller, effectively “unplugging” the dongle. When you remove the controller, the relay switches back to the DVD dongle. It’s seamless and instantaneous–a real thing of beauty (as long as you don’t look at the wiring job inside).

Fortunately, others have attempted this as well and have even written tutorials for it. The best one is available on Wiki-scene. All it requires is a few dollar’s worth of parts from Radio Shack, a good soldering iron, and a lot of patience. Having someone around with kick-ass soldering skillz helps too (thanks Kevin!), or else I might never have gotten that PCB out of the dongle casing. That is definitely the most difficult part. I also don’t know what I would have done if I would have had to work with my cheapo Radio Shack $15 soldering iron the entire time — probably would have gouged my eyes out with it. Fortunately, Kevin has a Metcal professional soldering iron that heats up to 700 degrees or whatever in literally about 4 seconds, and maintains that heat evenly across the tip. It is particularly handy when de-soldering things, of which you have to do a lot for this project.

The only thing not really covered in the Wiki-scene tutorial is what exactly to do with the IR receiver. You can’t very well leave it inside the Xbox, and I wasn’t ready to drill holes in my front bezel yet. There isn’t a lot of room to get wires from the inside to the outside of the case–the whole thing seals up pretty tight–but if you look in the image here (click for big version) you can see how I ran the IR wires (the bundle of red, blue, and black along the front edge of the Xbox) down over the right side. Then I put the receiver itself through one of the large vent slots on the underside of the front bezel, and fixed in in place to the front edge of the base of the Xbox, hidden under the lip of the front bezel, with a dab of hot glue. It works perfectly.