Get an Xbox One X working with Kinect in several difficult steps

We don’t vouch for any of this, but for those dead set on getting a Kinect to work with an Xbox One X — the adapter was confirmed to be discontinued in January — someone has posted a DIY guide for pulling it off.

The guide-maker says it can be done for $40, which is a lot less than the crazy prices the Kinect adapter — if it can be found — fetches on the gray market. To rewind, the Xbox One S launched in 2016 without the proprietary port the Kinect requires; Microsoft offered a free adapter until March 2017, then sold it for $39.99. In January, the company confirmed to Polygon that it was done making the adapters; prices through resellers jumped to nearly $300 in the big name marketplaces, which explains why someone might desperate enough to try this kind of surgery.

To be clear, this requires stripping wires and soldering them to a circuit board. “This can be done fairly easily if you have any sense of finesse,” says the guide-writer. Yeah, that’s a big ask, my dude. I can’t bait a hook. As tweens, my brother and I went into our Commodore 1541 floppy disk drives to alter their device numbers so we could run a dual drive setup, but that involved breaking a soldered connection, not making one.

The good news is this involves work on the peripheral, not the console. It’s basically getting the Kinect to play nice with a standard USB connection while drawing power from a typical 12V A/C adapter. So if the operation isn’t successful, it’s not like you’ve opened your new console and trashed its warranty. And Kinect 2.0 replacements can still be found from resellers — and for a lot less than the adapter.

Still, “Pin 10 was incredibly difficult due to the number of pins around it that can’t be contacted,” says the guide’s writer. That should say something about the difficulty of this maneuver.

The upshot to it all is this is weekend mod porn, and again reminding folks that Microsoft has totally abandoned Kinect. But, if you have the nerves to pull it off, you too can have a state-of-the-art Xbox One S or X with a Kinect aboard. Not that any current game uses the thing.