What It Is
To understand what the X2VGA+ is and why it works so well you have to know a few things about standard televisions and game consoles. Standard televisions display images in a mode called 480i which is good enough for broadcast TV and that sort of thing, but it isn’t nearly as nice of a picture as is possible. Since most game consoles up till now have only been intended to be played on standard TVs, they are made to display images in 480i.PC monitors, on the other hand, are built to display images at higher resolutions and most of them can’t properly display 480i, so that is why there haven’t been many products such as the X2VGA+ up until now.
With HDTV becoming the new standard for broadcast television in a few years, though, Microsoft had the foresight to make the Xbox compatible with both 480i mode as well as much nicer looking modes such as 480p, 720p, and 1080i. The only problem is that you have to have an HDTV that costs thousands of dollars to display them. That is where the X2VGA+ comes in. It gives you the ability to hook your Xbox up to your PC monitor so you can enjoy the sharper looking graphics that the Xbox can produce without having to spend a lot of cash.
Setup
Click for big pictureThe X2VGA+ hooks directly into the back of your Xbox through the AV port just like your composite, S-Video, or component cables do now. On the X2VGA+ itself there are a set of input/output VGA connectors as well as input/output audio jacks and there is also a digital audio out if you need it. The way you set everything up is you hook the X2VGA+ to your Xbox and then a standard VGA cable from the X2VGA+ to your PC monitor through the VGA out port. You then have to hook the sound up to either your PC speakers or stereo system through the audio out or to your surround system with the digital audio port. You can also hook your PC audio and video through the X2VGA+ via the handy VGA and audio in ports so you can have both your PC and Xbox hooked up at the same time. Once you have the hardware hooked up, all you have to do is enter the Xbox dashboard and go to Settings->Video-> and then switch the 480p, 720p, and 1080i options to “Yes” and you’ll be set for some high definition Xbox gaming. Pretty easy, huh?
This will give you a good idea of how to hook it up and what the setup will look like. http://www.x2vga.com/images/x2vga_applicationexamples.jpg
