OK, so i was browsing the web, and happened to navigate to Gamestop.com. I had come upon this site many times before, but this time, I had a different goal in mind; I wanted an XBOX. All I wanted the XBOX for was Halo 2, gaming heaven. After surfing around the XBOX section for a while, I calculated my total cost (using OS X Tiger's unique Dashboard system). It came out to be around $250 for a (used) XBOX, Halo 2, a headset, a controller, and an XBOX Live subscription. I was thinking, no way.

I decided to look for an alternate route... Steal my friends XBOX? What am I thinking? Then I remembered that Microsoft had also issued Halo (though not Halo 2, yet) to the world of PC's and, better, Mac's.

I chose to look further into this idea. After some research, I found that the average price of the game Halo for Mac was around $40. However, using Froogle (thank God for it,) I was able to score one for as low as $25. Sure, you say, I could have been really cheap and just downloaded it of Kazaa, but where's the support in that (when I say support I mean support for the Halo series, not Microsoft ;P).

Anyway, there was also the problem with my screen. What I'm saying is, I would rather play on a real TV than on my 12" iBook screen. A simple solution to this is buying a $30 AV-out adapter. I chose this road, rather than risk something using some DIY solution. Froogle lowered the price to $20

Anyway, with that done, I decided that I would like to leave my laptop by the TV and play with a wireless controller/headset from the couch. The controller part was easy. I just performed the simple XBOX Extension Cable to USB Plug by connecting the color coded wires. Then I bought a wireless XBOX controller and connected the receiver to the cable, then plugged the whole thing into my iBook.

Now there was the headset. Since the headset port on the XBOX wasn't supported in the whole USB process thing, I had to buy/build my own. Also, iBooks do not contain a microphone input. My solution to this was simple. I simply used a blend of the famous DIY Skype Wireless Phone, a cheap USB microphone, and a line-out headphone cable. I connected the phone's base station to my laptop, then took the actual wireless phone, and added a $1 phone headset, so that the phone itself would sit next to me, the wire for the headset going up and into my ear.

That's about it for my cheap XBOX (Halo-player) concept. Total cost was about $82, including the game ($25), AV adapter ($20), used wireless Madcatz controller ($20), controller cable ($5), phone ($5), cheap microphone ($6), and headset ($1). I'll see you guys later

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