team-xaddons (addons.com) have officialy announced a generic lcd-mod (adds a parallel and a spi-bus interface to your xbox) and a lcd-con (lcd-connector board) xbox-mod add-ons. the lcd-mod has several pin-headers and sockets to ensure compatability with a wide range of console versions and mod-chips. the most popular add-on device so far being lcd-displays. the lcd-mod allows you to install a lcd into any xbox-console and can be used with applications like our very own xboxmediacenter, (code supporting x-addons lcd-mod/con is already in xbmc cvs, but note that contrast-adjustment from gui is not yet working). example; in conjunction with x-addons lcd-mod and a x.b.i.t-chip you can install a lcd completely solderless (a cable for a solderless connection with the x-b.i.t is included)! in conjunction with modchips that use pinheaders you can just put x-addons lcd-mod between the pin-header and the modchip. view x-addons manual for details. the lcd-con (lcd-connector board) is an adapter device to provide an easy way to install a lcd in your console and is designed to work perfectly with the lcd-mod. you can also use the lcd-con without the lcd-mod to ease the install of a lcd. a cable for a solderless connection between lcd-con and lcd-mod is included. note! a special cable to connect the lcd-con to a smartxx, xenium or any other modchip that requires soldering to existing parallel interface is available and sold separately.

team-xaddons official-website: www.addons.com
official reseller of lcd-mod/con: gamefreax.com
(xbmc-forum discussion: compatible lcd-mods)

we are happy to announce that we have now once again put the xboxmediacenter cvs in a feature freeze and our second official xbmc public bug bash have begun, which is the first steps in the process of getting ready for another stable point release of xbmc. the cvs feature freeze stage implies that in order to not introduce new bugs no new features/functions coded should (preferably) be introduced into the cvs until after the source code for the next point release have been set, this feature freeze will also give skinners a chance to catch up as xbmc’s skin-structure is also locked down. in the mean time the official bug bash implies that we all should do our best to find and fix most bugs before the point release can be set. this also means that we now really need the publics help with xbmc development, we need you to update/translate strings.xml to all languages (xbmc now support all foreign language characters through ttf-fonts), plus find/troubleshoot bugs and most importantly submit them as very detailed bug reports on sourceforge.net bug tracker, we of course also more than welcome other developers to help us of solve and submit fixes to those bugs. only with your help can we get a xbmc 1.1.0 point release ready in a matter of weeks, however understand that all our team-members are volunteers so we can not set a definite deadline nor release date but we will do our best to try to have a release candidate ready within three weeks.  

we also like to remind you all that the xbmc project relies on your donations for its survival!

forum discussion: “xbmc feature freeze and bug bash! (link)“
ps! please don’t post feature/support request in this thread!

microsoft has as of last week (better late news than no news) officially dropped the rrp (recommended retail price) of their xbox® video game console in europe. the price was lower by £30/€50 making the new rrp £99.99/€149.99, (a price that now match the xbox price in north america which was dropped to $149.99 u.s. in march this year). sony has already followed suit and matched the price drop for their playstation 2. analysts has not yet given their opinion but one can predict that there will now not be another price drop in europe for neither of the two companies video game console until after x-mas.

link: xbox® official website (xbox.com)