The four game-pad ports on the front are, in fact, regular USB 1.1 but with a proprietary connector. We will need to use these later, so we have two choices - create or buy an adapter cable, or cut off the existing game-pad ports and solder on some proper USB sockets. I chose the latter as it is neater.

I had an old USB header bracket that fit into a PCI socket on my PC, but if you do not have one you can pick them up on eBay, Radio Shack, your local computer store, CompUSA, etc. for a few bucks. This page of the Xbox Linux wiki contains a good overview of performing this mod, so I won't repeat those details here.

Basically, you take the plug that connects to the motherboard, and solder each wire to its corresponding color wire on the USB sockets salvaged from the USB bracket. Ignore the yellow cable, as it is not used. Figure 4 shows what my completed cable looks like.

Figure 4: My hacked USB cable
(click image to enlarge)

I also found that if you remove a couple of the Xbox' game ports, then the USB sockets can just about be squeezed into the space they occupied. You might have to cut away the USB sockets (or the Xbox case) slightly to squeeze them in. Once done, hopefully they will look something like this:

Figure 5: USB ports fitted into the Xbox front panel
(click image to enlarge)

And here's the inside view of the USB sockets cabled to the Xbox motherboard:

Figure 6: USB ports internal view
(click image to enlarge)