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Games Entertainment

Official Xbox XDK Details 134

Posted by CmdrTaco from the its-vapor-for-now dept.
SpoddySpice writes "Xbox365.com has released some interesting detailed specs about the X-Box" Talks about the UI, mentions that ether and a 56k modem will be supported, what media it will play, formats supported etc etc etc. Gives ya a good idea of where this thing is actually headed. Meanwhile I'm still deciding if I want a PS2, especially since it comes out within a couple days of the next Zelda.
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Official Xbox XDK Details More

Official Xbox XDK Details

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  • Re:And this differs from a computer how? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This begs the question: who would want a computer that is simply disabled just to play games?

    For $200, and with a DVD player to boot, I do.

    Not all of us want the hassle of upgrading vidoecards, worrying about game configurations, etc.

    If I can get the best of PC gaming for $200, plus a DVD player, minus the headaches, sign me up. And before you start talking about video resolution, there are some of us who don't mind being limited to 640 x 480 on a 35" tv. The Xbox will also support SVGA resolution, so if you want to play on a monitor you can get 1024 x 768.

    I will not let my distaste for Microsoft's business practices get in the way of what I enjoy -- gaming. If they do the Xbox right, I will buy one. It's as simple as that. You can try and knock it all you want, but you'll be left behind crying.

  • Corrections (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    As a registered X-Box developer, I feel obligated to make some corrections.

    First of all, the graphics chipset in use in current X-Box prototypes is not simply a run-of-the-mill, off-the-shelf GeForce. The GeForce GPU we use has been modified to allow for what we like to call SMGP (the 'G' is for "Graphics"). The processor wil have four 600 mhz RAMDACs.

    Secondly.. similarly to the DreamCast, we will be using a proprietary storage mechanism, which will hold 3.7 GB on a disc 3/4ths the size of a cd. It will be called the XD. As for storage, expect add-on storage periphials within months of the initial release. A bundled HDD at launch is a very real possibility.

    The tech driving this thing is really flooring. It's allowed me and my colleagues to do things that we've only dreamed about, such as z-buffered photo-realistic graphic processing with FSAA.

    In layman's terms: It kicks ass.

  • PS2 architecture is much better (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    -PS2 CPU has a max. performance of 6.2GFLOPS (don't see XBox' PIII doing that). And the X-Box CPU has a 32bits architecture while the PS2 CPU is pure 128 bits and incorporates two 64-bit integer units (IU) with a 128-bit SIMD multi-media command unit, two independent floating point vector calculation units (VU0, VU1), an MPEG 2 decoder circuit (Image Processing Unit/IPU), high performance DMA controllers and the 32MB of DRAM onto one silicon chip. That's right, all that kewl shit is all implemented into the CPU. Now doesn't that sound a little bit better than that Pentium CPU on XBox? This means the PS2 is alot more powerful for physics engines, AI and accurate realistic visual effects (such as splashing water, explosions,...).

    -PS2 has a parallel rendering engine that contains
    a 2,560 bit wide data bus that is 20 times the size of leading PC-based graphics accelerators

    -PS2 has the full screen anti-aliasing feature implemented on the display hardware. This means there is absolutely NO performance hit when using it. (developers didn't find this at first, that's why the first ps2 games look jagged)

    And the 4MB of VRAM that's implemented on the Graphics Synthesizer, isn't really the VRAM. The VRAM is included in the 32MB of RAM on the EE. That 4MB on the GS is just cache with a 47GB/sec bandwidth. This means PS2 doesn't need external bandwidth for Z-buffering, rendering and framebuffer. It also means the the PS2 doesn't need videoRAM for framebuffer storage. For more info on the PS2 hardware compared to PC/XBox hardware, check out http://www.arstechnica.com/cpu/2q00/ps2/ps2vspc-1. html . XBox architecture sux compared to this, the XBox hardware will be maxed out in first generation titles and when PS2 gets through the 2nd generation games, PS2 games will look alot better than XBox games. Because the developers just have to get used to the new (and superior) architecture of the PS2 and dev kits need to be improved.

    CyBeR|CRASH

  • Re:Corrections (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Four 600Mhz RAMDACs? do you even know what a ramdac does? what good is this, 4 monitors, each running 1600x1200 with a 500Hz refresh rate? on a console? that's just daft.

    RAMDACs just take the bits in the framebuffer, convert them to an analog signal for the monitors (the DAC in RAMDAC stands for Digital to Analog Converter).

    And then fact that you think "z-buffered photo-realistic graphic processing with FSAA" is anything other than game obsessed laymans terms destroys that last little bit of credibility you had.

    The only question is if you're lying outright about your job, or if some company is either going to fire you, or go out of business.

  • Jet Set Radio is the best game I have played in a long, long time.

    I agree. Jet Set Radio is the most innovative thing I've seen come out of the game industry in a long time. Sega's always trying new stuff, and that's what makes for a good, enjoyable game [min.net]. The music, sfx, and graphics are all top notch.

    Not to mention how fun it is to knock over that dumbass cop. ;>

  • vaporware (Score:1)

    by Tom ( 822 )
    why in all hell is /. falling for the same traps as the mainstream media, and devoting so much space to something that'll most likely go the way of NT (announced 3 years before it hit the shelves) ??
  • Your argument is awesome. But, if what you say is true (and I think it is: one platform makes for stability through uniformity), then why "cripple" the computer? Why not just produce a full-fledged WinNT box (perhaps with an optional "easy cheesy" interface ala the MacOS's "easy finder" a few years back -- can't remember the name of it), but which box has the UNIFORMITY property?

    Why dumb it down by default? I totally agree that uniformity is neato (for certain folks), but why not allow people to buy it as their main machine, as well?

    Unless I am missing something, and this is the plan! Does anyone have a list of disabled features?
  • The other way of looking at it is this: They're forced (in order to make money) to accept ads that use DoubleClick. But that hasn't compromised their editorial stance on DoubleClick's behavior. Thus, instead of bitching constantly about these ads, maybe you should be applauding Slashdot's integrity.

    Or something.
  • Too late. The PS2 is already stomping the PSX's early sales figures. Sega, by their own admission, is on their way out of the gaming market (and IMHO, it's about time). Nintendo seems to have carved themselves a niche catering to younger gamers, meaning the PS2 has more or less free reign in the rest of the market.

    I'm kinda happy about *that*. :)
  • It'd be nice if slashdot's topic system could
    have multiple categories so my microsoft
    filter could filter out all this stuff on the
    X-box without filtering away neat stuff about
    Loki.
  • heh kool, so does that mean Joe A. ScriptKiddie could crack an X-Box and post pictures of nudes getting it on along with a blue screen background with IBM 8x16 VGA font lettering "wh4s up b1tch I 0wn3d j00r g4m3 5y573m mother fucker! 1llegal operation all the way to your while(1) { cli() }!" ? :)
  • No. We would think it was a pretty cool gaming system if it weren't Microsoft on it.
    --
    Niklas Nordebo | nino at sonox.com | +46-708-405095
  • And I agree that using Windows 2000 as a base doesn't give me much confidence in the stability of the XBox.
    You have less to worry about than you think. So far, I've had no problems with Windows 2000 that couldn't be attributed to my living dangerously. Things like installing pre-release video drivers with nasty "do not use if..." warnings in the readme. The core OS is solid as a rock. Take it from someone who goes between 2000 at home and the [censored] NT 4.0 SP 6.02e23 at work.

    Also, keep in mind that XBox will be a typical closed-box game console. Microsoft knows exactly what hardware will be in the system, allowing them to test the hell out of one configuration. They don't have to worry about how an outdated Sprocketech EarBomber sound card interacts with the bleeding-edge Finkelstein Nuclear Armageddon 512 DDR-DVI-GT-R-Vspec video card.

    Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel/Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
  • While it's all very fashionable to tout the PS2 and bash Microsoft (and by extension, the X-Box) on /., there is another side to the story. That of the game developer. It seems that many game developers are flocking to X-Box, sometimes dropping PS2.

    Some facts:

    1. No game consoles are open development platforms. You must be licensed by the console manufacturer to produce titles for that box.
    2. Japanese corporate business practices, for all you decry Microsoft's foul play, makes MS look like flowers and sunshine. Japanese corps, Sony no exception, can be ruthlessly anti-competitive ESPECIALLY to foreign competition.
    Now if you put #1 and #2 together, you may start to appreciate why U.S. game developers are heralding the arrival of the X-Box. They've been in an anti-competitive situation for many years now, with the U.S. console market dominated by Japanese corporations. Game developers finally have a modern U.S. console to target, without the competitive problems they've been suffering.

    What it comes down to is that Microsoft's presence in this market is out-and-out good news for U.S. game developers. Period. That fact alone will change the nature of titles available for X-Box (and possibly PS2, through competition).

  • > In all other catagories (games are yet to be seen of course) XBox blows the competition away.

    Isn't that sort of a big-ass omission for a game machine? ;)
  • But more importantly than just setting the thing up is if it will play nicely with NAT (aka IPMasq and that Win98 Internet Connection Sharing thing). I suppose it'll use directplay which is IIRC UDP, which (also IIRC) doens't work through NAT without explicit port forwarding. Among other things this means that you'd have to change your firewall if you wanted to switch between playing a DirectPlay game on your computer and one on your X-Box (or you could switch the IPs, which would be just as much of a hassle).

    I'd like to get a networked game console some day (I have an N64). I just hope that whenever they come out with these things they'll work right with NAT. I'd think that with proliferation of all the consumer-level out-of-box router-like things which accomplish what my 486 is accomplishing right now, there would be pressure for this to work. I guess we'll see; I don't have my hopes up.
  • B-U-N-G-I-E.

    As a dedicated Mac user (don't laugh) I was disgusted to learn that the much beloved and often revolutionary BUNGIE software company had beenWhich means that HALO, which promised to be as revolutionary as Myth, will come out for the XBox only, and I'll never get to play.

    Jerks.
  • What is  supposed to mean?
    --
  • > It won't crash randomly.

    Wanna bet? :)

  • How does MS plan on not supporting CD-Rs? Don't they read such that they're the same to a laser as a normal CD? I thought CD-RWs were a problem because they require a multiread laser or some such... And why the HELL do they not want to support redbook audio. That boggles my mind. To prevent folks from popping an xbox game in their cd player and listening to the soundtrack? (I assume they mean redbook formatted audio, because I don't think a dvd audio cd with standard cdda would conform to redbook standards) Boggles, Boggles Boggles. I guess if it does WMA in hardware, might be decentish, but whatever. I'm not holding my breath. *Pats his DC and his stack of CD-Rs ;)*
  • its a game console, not a computer. how are people going to find out the IP address of another X-Box? Why would people wanna do that? The only thing you'll probably be able to do with an X-Box is play some multiplayer game, run a web browser, and check some mail - just like a dreamcast. Let's not get too paranoid.
  • The Dreamcast currently runs WinCE (as it's proudly mentioned on the machine) and I've never had a crash once with my DC... in fact, a the concept of a crashing dreamcast or console in general just makes giddy. Crashes happen because of hardware configurations that the developer of the OS wasn't prepared for. 1) I bet it's not just off-the-shelf Win2k. 2) I bet the components aren't off-the-shelf parts. 3) I bet MS knows EXACTLY what is going into this machine. Hence, I think we won't have any OS issues. Most likely, the OS will be completely invisible (ala Dreamcast.) Of course, that still won't stop all the microsoft-bigots from attack anything with the words Windows in it. -Nick
  • Looking at all the details, one can see that the X-box really seems to be just a regular computer with a few things disabled.
    • Win32 API
    • Microsoft Direct3D
    • USB support
    • TCP/IP based networking
    And it is only missing such obvious things as services, hot docking, and -- multiple-procesor support. Hmmm...

    This begs the question: who would want a computer that is simply disabled just to play games?

    With a system like the PSX2, or the Dreamcast, at least the buyer is assured that this system provides something that they do not already have. The separation between game console and computer has been distinct for some time now, and most gamers already have access to computers and consoles, and more often than not will prefer the console.

    And of course this all seems to be part of a Microsoft plan to build up the rumors that the Xbox will be released 'real soon' just to scare some people from investing in a console such as the PSX2. I doubt that Microsoft will be successful in this venture, as many other companies already provide exactly what gamers want. Oh, and keep in mind that if you do decide to get the Xbox when (and if) it comes out, you'll be happily tied down in using Microsoft's multiplayer management.

    -zavyman

  • Word is that Halo will still be coming out on Mac and PC. However, I imagine it'll be an Xbox-exclusive title for a few months... :P
  • Actually I don't see how they can, or even why they would have no CDR support. Isn't it standard? Or maybe they mean that you can't write cd's on it?
  • Are they going to release hardware specs at the register level? Will I be able to write code `straight to the metal' (as MS seem to be keen on calling it.)

    If not then all XBox games are going to look very similar....
  • Does this mean scandisk will run if the XBox is not properly shut down? Well, I don't think the X-Box will need Scandisk. Since the kernel is in ROM, I don't think the box will be accessing the the hard drive actively, anyway.
  • If you read the article, you would have noticed that the WinOS is embedded in ROM and then loaded into RAM. Sure, you could switch chips, but why go through the hassle? Would it even be worth it? That's the question.

    There are several possible reasons (that I can think of):

    • ROM is slower than RAM.
    • The code can be manipulated to support the game' needs.
    • It's safer. Unexpected power breakdown could toast the ROM.
  • Since the OS will probably be in ROM, 64 MB of RAM is a lot compared to other consoles.
  • If I were a mac owner, and if Halo were to be on par with (cough cough) Myth, I sure wouldn't miss it. Besides, you could always buy an X-Box... :)
  • you are an idiot. scsi isn't dead yet... and how is USB compared to scsi? LOL gimma break. if USB were so great, why don't we have usb cards with 10k rpm drives attached? HMMmmmm?

    The benefit of scsi comes directly from removing the i/o from the system. That's why an ATA-66/100 card smokes so fast.

    why the hell am I trying to explain the difference to you? you're clueless!

  • Why, praytail, would it take longer for games to boot?

    Last I heard, the XBox is going to have only 64MB of RAM. Given that even though smart programmers will keep this in mind, the OS still has to swap a lot of data around using the hard drive. If the hard drive is full of config files and saved games, this may make loading the disk cache a bit slower.

    Of course, they'll probably cover all of the bases and have some sort of set minimum amount of free space that must be available in order to prevent this from happening ...

    ... which begs an interesting question: what do they do when the hard disk gets fragmented?? Interesting ...
  • Since the OS will probably be in ROM, 64 MB of RAM is a lot compared to other consoles.

    The OS is stored in ROM and then decompressed into RAM when the machine is turned on.

  • the presence of a hard drive will allow a game to be patched

    Games are stored on the CD in a proprietary format, and executable portions of the image have to be signed. And the article mentions that there are no DLL loads, fixups, or anything like that. So if a game wants to be patchable, it has to rewrite its image in RAM and handle all of the patch loading and storage itself. And if it isn't written with patch loading support in the first place, c'est la vie.

  • I don't think it would be necessary to screw around with the ROM chip. Since everything runs in kernel space, and the system is not multitasking, then all you'd really need to do is port LOADLIN. Just kick that fugly Win32 stuff out of RAM and move linux in.

    One potential problem is that executable images are authenticated when loaded. And I'd bet that unsigned games won't be allowed.

    As for why anyone would want to run linux on the xbox. Well, you could network it with your Dreamcast running NetBSD, of course!
  • The X Box does not yet exist.
  • Most crashes on Windows are because of faulty drivers. The XBox has ONE hardware configuration. Much harder to crash.
  • I think it's an attempt at unicode.
  • 1) Apache is under the ASL, not the BSD license. However, the ASL is a BSD-style license. Is that what you meant?

    2) "no need to respond to this," Screw you, Mr. Bigot.

    3)" any opposing view is a
    view for the squandering of freedom" If the freedom you are referring to is access to source and ability to modify it, and you are in support of this freedom, how does ensuring access to source in perpetuity (thus ensuring this freedom) squander the original freedom?

  • Some of the older (I believe -100x model) playstations would crash because they generated too much heat. I believe the fix for that was to flip your PS over for better cooling.
  • I for one will become extremely sick if advertisements of any kind is embedded into the game discs as one of those developer/publish/license/"and so on" bitmaps.

    I'd bet anything you can't skip the display sequence as well.
  • God will you shut up about the RIAA already? Not everyone wants a 1 inch device that runs everything they own. Noone is getting rid of CD's anytime soon. Think about how stupid that is. Are there 270million people online in the US? NO. Until the entire world is wired at birth, CD's will not disappear for an online counterpart.

    One other thing, you rant and rant about the RIAA. It seems to me these are the rants of a bitter musician, who found that noone wanted to listen to his crap. The RIAA isn't stopping you from distributing your music, Napster or not. Why don't you bite the bullet and spend a few grand on printing CD's. Why? BECAUSE NOONE WILL BUY THEM. You know it. Now get over it and shut the fuck up already.

  • Hey, that's not official yet ;)

    Project Dolphin will almost certainly be called StarCube (and I think the name 'StarRoad' for the network is a cool Super Mario World reference), but, I still will be amused if it's not actully called StarCube after all....

    Nintendo have surprised us before :)

    Just my rant-like thoughs...
  • "Once the system software has determined that the media contains an Xbox game, it loads the game developer bitmaps, publisher bitmaps, license bitmaps, and so on. These will be stored in a predetermined location on the DVD, will contain no executable code, and will be identified with a predefined schema. The system software will display these bitmaps sequentially, after the boot graphic and sound have appeared, while the game itself is being streamed from the DVD into RAM. As the game image is streamed into memory, the system software checks the signatures of each section of the image on the fly."

    IMNSHO, you wouldn't want this crap to be hardwired into the OS. Not everyone has the same credits scheme (i.e. what if a game gets kicked through 3 developers before publication? It happens.) Furthermore, it says "bitmaps"..... strictly read, this means no movies/animations, which seems horribly backwards.

    Looks like MS can't stop feature creep in a lil' ol' game console OS any more than it could in Win98+.


    Xman
  • Why do you always get moded up for saying such stupid things?
  • ok.. this may be something we've gone over before but with the potential breakup of microsoft into apps and os who gets the hardware? The mice and all well, flip a coin but the xbox has portions of the win2000/nt code and APIs as well as some other stuff. I'm only peripherally paying attention to the xbox now.. but who would own it? Apps or OS?
  • This is something that isn't available at the moment, simply because consoles and PCs are in seperate worlds.
    Carmack is on record as saying that the DreamCast port of Quake 3 will be network-compatible with the PC/Mac versions.
  • Now for the compulsory:

    Man! These suckers have ethernet on them! I can't wait until someone gets Linux up on one of these d00ds- can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these?!?!?!
  • Windows 2000 has never crashed for me, ever since I have been using RC2. I have never had any type of freezing or crash, and i tax my system pretty harshly. Anyway, it is not impossible to crash a console at all.

    Playstation would crash or freeze pretty nicely for me, but only in one game: Vigilante 8. I can reproduce the crashes pretty easily, go to Secret Base, play Coop with a max of opponents, then start launching nukes from the Silos, and make sure whoever is playing with you is blowing up the buildings or launching the planes. Also CD audio must be playing. I guarantee you will crash you playstation, getting a nice error message: OUT OF VRAM

  • If you read the article, you would have noticed that the WinOS is embedded in ROM and then loaded into RAM. Sure, you could switch chips, but why go through the hassle? Would it even be worth it? That's the question.

    How many regular Linux users have a dual-boot system so they can play games in Win32? I know several of the /. staff do, as well as many of my friends.

    That evidence proves to me that porting Linux to the Xbox would be rather silly. It would be just like any other computer, except with output to NTSC/PAL. Would you want to run console-mode on a TV screen? Not to mention the pain in configuring X to match up with the custom NVidia chips.

    As a games box, switching to Linux from the preexisting fully configured Windows setup would be a waste of effort. Sure, you would have novelty, but that's about it.

  • True, but- as my mother used to say- its like calling on the devil to kill off demons. If M$ obliterates Japanese video game companies, their stranglehold on the market... will be REPLACED BY ANOTHER MICROSOFT MONOPOLY!!! Just a thought.

    -Elendale (a bit scary too)

    Karma burn coming
    As i meta-troll again

  • Sigh. Go read what I wrote, stop parroting figures you don't understand. System performance is what counts.

    You haven't (can't) explain how 48 Gbytes/s is sustained over busses that can't handle that bandwidth. You said the 4 Mbyte in the GS was a cache to the 32 Mbyte main memory attached to the EE, remember?

    I still don't see why Sony couldn't help your developer friends to program the chip to deliver what you claim it can.

  • Moderator, wake up! This isn't informative, it's mindless repetition of marketing hype.

    -PS2 CPU has a max. performance of 6.2GFLOPS (don't see XBox' PIII doing that).

    An X-Box 733 MHz Pentium III does 2.9 Gflops in the same vague way that a PS2 does 6.2 Gflops, but a PS2 hasn't got hardware assist for transformation and lighting. Compare sustained system performance figures, discuss the pros and cons of the different architectures, but mindless Gflop comparisons don't cut it..

    -PS2 has the full screen anti-aliasing feature implemented on the display hardware. This means there is absolutely NO performance hit when using it. (developers didn't find this at first, that's why the first ps2 games look jagged)

    No, there's 4 Mbyte of RAM and they couldn't figure out how to page textures so they shrank the frame and depth buffers. Why didn't developers find it? Are Sony unable to tell them? Are developers stupid? No, just working against time and an architectural limitation.

    And the 4MB of VRAM that's implemented on the Graphics Synthesizer, isn't really the VRAM. The VRAM is included in the 32MB of RAM on the EE. That 4MB on the GS is just cache with a 47GB/sec bandwidth. This means PS2 doesn't need external bandwidth for Z-buffering, rendering and framebuffer.

    There's excellent middleware that can page textures, but your cache argument is wishful thinking, . How do you figure 47GB/s? Even if you're talking bits not bytes, thats 6 GBytes/s which is twice the published 3.2 Gbytes/s memory bandwidth, while the EE internal bus is 2.4 Gbytes/s.

  • In a recent article in Dobbs Programming Journal the author of an article on X-Box noted that Nvidia would supply an OpenGL API for the X-Box.
  • When the faults of a device are in external modules (e.g. badly-written games) I understand completely! However, with the exception of an actual computer (regretfully), I have vowed never to buy a device that runs on a windows kernel. Windows crashes SO often, and I have never had another device "crash", or at least what I considered to be a crash. My stereo never crashes. My telephone doesn't crash. I don't need a souped-up Microsoft Telephone running a Windows kernel to manage the input of wav files into the computerized voice mail system to ever crash. My bedside clock doesn't crash, and my digital camera doesn't crash. My PalmPilot has never crashed----although I understand that it can, although it is always due to a software issue---but not the OS. The point is, I'd stay away from anything, regardless how promising it looks, if the word Microsoft is within 10 feet of the packaging. -Adam
  • The Xbox will have Halo. [cdmag.com]
  • And apparently you will never learn that the kernel is hardly ever the problem... look to drivers and stupid users if you want to see the source of most crashes.

    --

  • 64MB is a lot more than any other console has. And the kernel will be stripped down... i.e. much smaller. I would be surprised if it takes up 16MB.

    --

  • Most PC game developers are still shooting for P2-300/TNT level users. Those of us with much more powerful systems are pretty much wasting all that extra power. On the other hand, a game that is specifically geared to the X-Box will have the potential to use every single bit of the processing power available. THAT is the advantage. (It amazes me how little thinking some people actually do...)

    --

  • A Clue for You from the Game Industry (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Time to wake up. Dreamcast has been dead for over a year now. No one is developing for it. No one. I make games, all my friends make games. EVERYONE is making games for the PS2. All the other teams in their companies are making games for the PS2.

    As a CEO who will remain nameless said a year ago:

    "Any effort spent on Dreamcast is effort lost on PS2"

    PS2 is it. The big one. If you aren't working on PS2, you're no one in the industry. My last project didn't even CONSIDER Dreamcast, just PS2,Dolphin, and maybe XBox. And it would have been trivial to port to the Dreamcast. Not worth the minimal effort for a dead platform.

    Enjoy you Dreamcast, keep it in good condition, it will be a collectors item very soon. Sell it on ebay to a console collector next year and buy some more PS2 games.
  • Put yourself in this mindset:

    You are 13 years old. You can't afford a video game system or the games. Your parents can. Christmas is coming up soon, and so is your birthday. But they're only going to buy you one video game system.

    You need to pick a system which is A) the most fun, B) will be supported for a couple years (forever to you) until you discover girls, and C) will impress your buddies and allow you to trade games with them.

    On top of that, you make a decision 1) Get a Dreamcast now for your birthday, or 2) Wait until Christmas for a PSX2, or 3) Screw it and try to upsell your parents to buying a faster computer.

    This is the most important thing in the world to you, and everything rides on making the right decision. So what do you do? You do lots of "research" and make up your mind. You then must spread all sorts of Advocacy and FUD to do your little bit to prove that you were right all along. Thanks to the Internet, you've got a big audience.

    Heck, I'm not so old to forget how important the ColecoVision versus the Atari 5200 decision was. It was "Third Generation" -- nothing like it had ever been seen before! Then I grew up and forgot about it, and eventually remembered again and bought any video game system I ever wanted at flea markets, and watched the SNES vs Genesis and Jaguar vs 3D0 flame wars from afar. Somewhere on the net, I'm sure an Atari ST vs Amiga fire is still flickering...

  • Re:Not a protected mode OS (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    all consoles operate in kernel mode. this is nothing new.

    But unlike most game consoles, the X-Box has a high-speed network connection and a hard drive. Find a buffer overflow exploit in a game, and you're into the kernel. Wait until the script kiddies get going on this one.

    first, let's suppose a game did have a buffer overflow problem. the presence of a hard drive will allow a game to be patched. also, you're assuming that the xbox devel tools don't do bounds checking.

    And every X-Box is identical. Crack one, and you've cracked them all. It's a monoculture. The
    distributed denial-of-service attack people are going to love the X-box. Millions of slaves on DSL lines, and no annoying sysadmins to interfere.

    oh, so let's supppose you do crack one. the script kiddie is going to know the ip addresses of all the Xboxes? And all the owners of said xboxes are going to be playing the same game?

    Me thinks you need to stop visiting 2600. you're starting to believe all the hype.
  • You will very likely be forced to buy another X-Box- at the price of a super fancy video card- to play with your housemate. The goal here is to monopolise the home entertainment system, a larger market than the home computer. This also means taking over from the stereo system- you'll note red book audio (CDs) are not supported on X-Box? Very likely this is collusion with RIAA labels- Microsoft helps them invent a 'secure music' format, and gets dirt cheap licensing in exchange for trying with the X-box to take over from anything else in the home entertainment system. There will be no 'line ins' on the X-Box for hooking up your CD player. There _would_ very plausibly be special digital outs just for hooking up to your new digital amplified speakers- which would sound much better than your usual speakers, except you can't hook your CD player to them, and if you got a new CD player that has the digital outs, you'll be hooking and unhooking SPEAKER wires between CD player and X-Box- which will be handling the latest 'secure music' AND games AND DVDs (no region coding cheats tho! sux to be you!). How long will your CD player last under these conditions? It'll be filed in the closet eventually, and you'll be buying your favorite music over again for the convenience of throwing them in the X-Box, and awaaay we go.

    As a content creator type person I am understandably interested in these developments, and very curious about just how locked out I will be from this situation. Clearly the _trend_ is that only the Sonys of the world will get the licensing and 'encoding keys' to distribute to such a platform, but how far will it go? Will there be token means for J.Random Musician or Programmer to get their content onto the planned Home Entertainment System For All, or will it be strictly controlled? That'd be interesting because it would be an experiment- given that the ultra-huge corporations turn out a certain _style_ of media and content, how far would this go toward satisfying all of the people all of the time? My instinct says this is a backward step- like moving back to the predictability of network television after people have a taste of The Net. Of course, the Internet-savvy computer geek is NOT the prime target here- they're after the people who only have cable TV maybe, who have never experienced media as anything other than consumers. The goal is to blow them away with posh media so intensely that they don't notice it's basically one big alliance of conglomerates (MS/RIAA/MPAA/what have you) supplying ALL of it and blocking anyone else from access.

    It only stands to reason that these big corporate conglomerates, in their frustrated attempts to fight consumer interests, would eventually notice that they can form alliances with each other to get what they want... informally, but effectively...

  • Just because it's made from computer parts doesn't mean people will see it as a dumbed-down computer and expect more from it. The great thing about consoles, as has been pointed out endlessly, is that you insert the media, press the "on" button, and it goes. There's limited hardware, so compatibility is never an issue (nor is driver support, nor is keeping your console up to snuff so it can play the most current games). You don't ever have to touch the OS or any other applications yourself. It's dirt simple.

    If MS can achieve the same thing with PC parts, nobody's going to care that they're PC parts. If it walks like a console and quacks like a console, it's a console.
  • > I recently read in a NG about a doctor whose devices used Windows, and one day crashed mid-surgery!

    You believe everything you read on usenet?
    score -1, bullshit

  • Given their cash reserves, if few people are willing to write stuff for the Xbox voluntarily, I suppose they can just keep buying game developers and "redirect their efforts". How much effort do you think a Microsoft owned company is going to invest in making PSX2 games in the future?

    Incidentally, whether the Xbox "will be the most powerful" remains to be seen. So far, it is still vaporware, and there is a lot that can happen between now and whenever it sees the light of day.

  • The PS2 however, now that thing blew me away. I spent a good majority of the convention playing all the PS2 games. It's quite impressive.
    You must have been at E3 in the mirror universe. From what I saw the Dreamcast had the best games on show, the most impressive thing about the PS2 was the Metal Gear Solid 2 video. Sony could have won the next gen race by having good software, but they didn't and Sega the underdog blew everything away. Jet Set Radio is the best game I have played in a long, long time. Forget PS2, it's a dead duck. Buy a DC, play some of the best games on consoles for a long time and wait for XBox or Dolphin. Sony will suffer by using 3rd parties almost exclusively. OK they might have Psygnosis in their pocket now, but that isn't enough. It's like Nintendo's relationship with Rare, but the big N also do their own stuff(Zelda, Mario). Both Psygnosis and Rare were formed from the ashes of Spectrum/C64 developers(Imagine/Denton Designs & Ultimate respectively), but neither produces the same amount of Software as the myriad Sega companies. There are a few Sony games that are interesting(The Bouncer, MGS2, Wipeout:Fusion), but just not enough to justify the console.
  • Think the X-Box is just a gaming platform?
    Think again.

    Whats the point of .NET? To centralize Microsoft's application software. To run the programs, you need WinNT. So MS sells NT and Office.NET to corps to deploy in their network.

    Now, since all the application processing is on the server, who needs an overpowered workstation to do MS-style work on? Bring in the X-Box! It's a semi-dumb terminal, cheap, and effective.

    This completes the vicious cycle . . . . Microsoft sells the servers, the applications, AND the terminals, making money off of EVERY step.

    Hmm, three-tired sales . . . . sounds suspiciously splittable into three companies.....
  • We're supposedly moving ever closer to convergence and internet appliances, but when oh when will these devices come with ethernet adapters? I only have one phone line, but with a 10.net subnet and DSL connection in my house, I feel it's a waste every time I attach a cable box, Tivo, or game system up to my analog line.

    Can't these companies start at least coding their boxes with this kind of expandability in mind? Why should we have group playability on these machines running at transfer and latency speeds we stopped accepting 5 years ago?

    Kevin Fox
  • Oops, I missed the bit about ethernet. Okay Mods, go easy, but the post still applies to all the *other* machines out there.

    Go go xbox.

    Kevin Fox
  • I played the next Zelda at E3 this year, and I didn't find anything special with it. It didn't grab my attention.

    The PS2 however, now that thing blew me away. I spent a good majority of the convention playing all the PS2 games. It's quite impressive.
  • Well, Sega definitly had the best booth of the show (Sony's was tame in comparison), but I actually enjoyed the PS2 games a bit more.

    I'll say that the DC had some great games on their end of the hall, but you have to admit the DC looked a bit dated compared to some of the games being presented on PS2.

    Also, I was more referring to buying a sequal to a game on the old raged N64 vs buying a PS2, not buying a DC (though I'd still wait for a PS2 over getting a DC IMHO).

    I have no doubt that PS2 will pick up steam. Every developer and their mother is writing games for it. Same can't be said for DC (where devs are jumping ship faster than you can say "Titanic").
  • Obviously, the really important thing about this brick is that MS will be selling it below cost. So when can we expect enough HW data to start cranking a Linux port?
  • > Why dumb it down by default?

    While it would be ultra-cool if they could ship a bulletproof fuzzy-happy-NT-in-a-box, it wouldn't work. Again...harsh truth time: most users are lusers, the rest are hackers and wannabes.

    If you give Joe Schmedly a full NT to play with, sooner or later he'll trash it. Somehow. Probably the result of some bogus software downloaded from a dark corner of the web ("FREE porn! Just download and run this executable!" or "Upgrade to Netscape 9.07alpha2?") or equally bogus advice from an equally dubious web site ("5 easy steps to DOUBLE your download speed! [1] Run 'regedit.exe'..."). This puts us almost right back where we started...random boxen with bogus untrusted software.

    On the other hand, there's the hackers (and h4x0rZ). Our job is to scam MS for a cheap PC a-la iOpener etc. How long before someone patches the real UI back on top of the fuzzy happy one? How long before slashdot has a link to detailed Linux installation instructions?

    What it really comes down to, though, is money. MS can only afford to "give away" consoles (and you can be sure that the price tag will be a good imitation of "free") if they can be assured of making money on the games (and possibly internet access deals). With a real box you can't make as much money on dev tools, and your piracy losses are much higher. Some customers won't even buy ANY games. Consider: you're a big business with thousands of drones. You can either buy machines from Dell, Gateway, or Compaq to run Office (>$1500 each), or shell out for Xboxen which also run Office (<$500 each). What do you choose? (Ok, so I pulled those numbers out of my ass. Whatever. You get the picture.)

    Microsoft is willing to take a cash hit to win market share (IE anyone?), but not that kind of hit. MS isn't known for *stupid* business practices.
  • This is quite an interesting position for NVIDIA to be in. Observations
    1) NVIDIA bases all its chips on the same driver model. This means that all its chips have similar registers/control sets.
    2) NVIDIA doesn't release register-level specs.
    3) Console developer's are almost required to give out register-level specs. The game developers love the ability to program directly to the metal (as shown by the fact that this Win2K runs apps in Ring0) and they do a much better job of finding uses for the hardware than the console developers do.

    Point: If NVIDIA gives out the specs to this thing, then people can get to work writing driveres for non-Linux/Windows OSs. If NVIDIA doesn't give away specs, then they will get trounced by PS2 developers who find clever tricks to make the hardware do stuff it wasn't designed to. (For example, Crash3 on PSX uses transparency. Technically, PSX doesn't DO transparency.) Maybe they'll release the SDK under NDA?
  • Huh? What exactly does your post have to do with what he said?
  • That's a little unfair. If I go to the post about KDE 1.92's release, and ask for a filter to get rid of KDE/Linux stuff, then I'm a -1. Asking to filter out Microsoft stuff, and it's untouched.

    The hipocracy's so thick you can cut it with a knife.
  • How 'bout this? Stop being so petty! I know programmers are jaded, but hey, even we appreciate a nifty sounding product. Plus, it helps you remember. X-Box SDK, Java SDK, SDL-SDK. How are you going to stand out in the crowd?
  • Ah, but here is the beauty of it. At least you know that /. isn't being influenced by it's advertisers. I mean you see this on MaximumPC all the time. People post and advertisement for some product, and on the very next page is a review that spanks the product to all hell. It's a show of journalistic integrity, not hipocracy. A site's advertisements doesn't (and SHOULDN'T) having anything to do with the site's content.
  • I didn't consider it a troll spam. This guy had a reasonable point on the surface. Why does /. say one thing about a company, but through it's advertisements (which imply a sponsering of the product) say something else?
  • Nintendo can crash too. I've crashed supermario several times. Also in N64 I've frozen the system by jumping through certain places I shouldn't have been able to.. and it gets stuck in an infinite loop... All system are vulernable..windows just seems to be especially so... but from my expeirence 2000 is A LOT better... although moving around the network configuration settings and such has annoyed me greatly. Even though windows 2000 crashes less, I can still get way more done given a couple days on any *nix box. But I find vi blah.conf easier than wading through all kinds of gui.
  • I saw a demo of the xbox 3 weeks ago, and I was quite impressed. Especially since they were running on a fraction of what their final graphics capability will be. The chip they're currently using in the demo models, is two generations behind what they'll be releasing.

    A lot of people assume that the XBox is just a pc in a different case, but it's not really. There have been several fundamental changes. Most have already been listed here, but one that I really like, is that the memory is shared with everything. The CPU, graphics processor, HD, and everything else share the same memory.

    The article also mentions the Direct Music API which they've developed, which is another cool feature. Instead of looping over pre-recorded tracks, Direct Music will score music on the fly. So instead of having music fade out and in for the transition between scenes, it simply flows from one to the other. The demo showed this off as well. They went from rock to jazz to country to disco with impressive results.

    The only thing the PS2 has on the XBox is that it's hitting the market first. In all other catagories (games are yet to be seen of course) XBox blows the competition away. Boy would it be cool to get one of the demo models though. The case is machined from one block of aluminum. At a $30k/each price tag though, I'll have to wait.
  • I don't know, man. If I were designing this box, I would only mount the HD when I had to. After I had finished writing my save game or whatever to the HD, i would hope that the machine would umount.

    God forbid this would crash during a save. Who know what havoc that would cause (besides the obvious fact that I would go ballistic on the machine for losing 5 hours of my life..).

    The thing that worries me is this: I can still play my sega genesis even after owning it for 8-9 years. My nintendo is kind of flaky, but it was pretty flaky when I bought it.. we all remember having to blow into the cartridges to get them to work, right? Now, the X-Box is using a hard disk. How many people here would like to bet that the HD of the XBox will still be working 8-9 years from when I buy it. Please raise your hands..

    I didn't think so.

    Rami
    --
  • The reason is that most lasers used in DVD players can only read DVDs, CD-RWs, and DVD-Rs. CD-Rs require a different wavelength laser (if you recall, the 1st-gen DVD-ROM drives could not read CD-R discs), and cannot be read unless the drive has another laser to read CD-Rs. They probably thought that the expense of another laser assembly did not outweigh the benefits of being able to read CD-Rs.

    Most new-gen console DVD players can't read CD-Rs, but read CD-RWs just fine.
  • The big problem for crackers would be finding a way to make any changes persistent.

    The X-box has a hard drive; depending on exactly how the boot process works, it might be possible to make something happen persistently.

    But there's another approach. Each cracked box watches over a few other cracked boxes, and if a target goes down and then comes back up, it gets re-cracked immediately. Distributed persistence!

    The obvious application is to use cracked X-boxes as Gnutella servers, each holding some fraction of the available content. This will spread pirated audio and video around the net in a viral way that the RIAA and MPAA will never be able to stop.

    Remember, all you have to do is find a buffer overflow in a popular game, and you're in business. Non-protected OS, remember. Dumb.

  • The ConScript Registry [google.com] is defining meanings for character codes in Unicode's private use area. Tengwar, Klingon, and several other scripts are represented.
    <O
    ( \
    XGNOME vs. KDE: the game! [8m.com]
  • With inexpensive ($2 ea) CDRW media, you can erase and rewrite the media. Good for development (it's like the EPROMs used in cartridge game development) but also good for piracy. Rent a game, burn it, play it for a month without paying late fees. Rent another game, burn it, play it for half a year. Also replace "rent" with "borrow from a friend".
    <O
    ( \
    XGNOME vs. KDE: the game! [8m.com]
  • You now have an IP address with which to do what you will: spamming, DDoS/SlashDoS, etc.
    <O
    ( \
    XGNOME vs. KDE: the game! [8m.com]

  • FAT32 file system

    Does this mean scandisk will run if the XBox is not properly shut down?

    The system will probably shut down correctly if the power button is pressed, I(?) just hope that the XBox doesn't hang on shutdown like Windows 98.

  • The big problem for crackers would be finding a way to make any changes persistant. They could go to all the trouble of cracking a machine, but when the Xbox gets shut down a half-hour later, all is lost. When someone decides they're sick of Q3A and switches to Halo, all is lost.

    You won't be able to install a root-kit or anything else that perpetuates when the machine is turned back on.
  • Seeing as the X-Box is listed as being fitted with an etherenet port, I'm wondering if this will mean that multiplayer games will be playable across many platforms, eg if a Quake deathmatch betwen myself on my PC and my housemate on the X-Box. This is something that isn't available at the moment, simply because consoles and PCs are in seperate worlds.

    This then means that LAN gamesplaying becomes much easier as there is no faffing about with configurations on each others' PCs and all that is needed is to cart around the console (and maybe a TV) - far easier than your average PC.

    We're about to see an explosion in multiplayer gamesplaying- this in combination with the high-speed access which is now becoming available means that soon most if not all games will be multiplayer... The trend is already visible.

    --

  • Looking at all the details, one can see that the X-box really seems to be just a regular computer with a few things disabled.


    Win32 API
    Microsoft Direct3D
    USB support
    TCP/IP based networking

    Actually, these aren't disabled, so much as modified. For example, the Win32 API is there but fairly heavily modified.

    And it is only missing such obvious things as services, hot docking, and -- multiple-procesor support. Hmmm...

    No, read the article more carefully. What is missing is multi-processing not multiple processors (though presumably the latter is also gone). This is an even more serious restriction for a computer, but makes sense for a games machine. So it looks like Microsoft are doing more than just putting out a regular computer...

  • Microsoft will never learn that any product based on a Windows kernel will at one time or another crash. PS has never crashed, Nintendo has never crashed, but XBox most likely will at one point or another. Heart and anethesia monitors never crashed, but I recently read in a NG about a doctor whose devices used Windows, and one day crashed mid-surgery!

    My Playstation used to crash. Now, admittedly this was much less common than on my Windows box, but it happened. Probably the fault of badly written games, but it used to hang solid occasionally.

    The point being that there is no such thing as a computer that cannot crash - or at least not a computer that does anything useful or complex. Some combinations of hardware, software and application are certainly more stable than others, though. And I agree that using Windows 2000 as a base doesn't give me much confidence in the stability of the XBox. But until we can test the shipping hardware and software, its difficult to be sure.

  • It's great and all if you can hook your cable modem up to your XBox and play away, but will it support home networks? If this thing can't be hooked up to a hub and used through a firewall/ipmasq box then it's going to be useless in a lot of homes. If it does, then good for Microsoft, because I believe that home network appliances are the future of computing/embedded devices/smart devices/whatever.

    -Antipop
  • Fred Moody says that Windows 2000 is safer than Linux so I think there's nothing to worry about.

  • Re:Unsupported Tidbits (Score:3)

    by Chris Johnson ( 580 ) on Saturday August 05, 2000 @11:42AM (#877631) Homepage Journal
    At a guess, they are going to try to enlist the support of the RIAA by refusing to support MP3s, user-burned CDRs, _or_ traditional CDs, intentionally supporting only whatever the labels come up with as 'secure music' and trying very hard to leverage X-Box to make the traditional CD obsolete? With lots of support from the RIAA labels, I'm sure.

    I see no other sensible reason for scrapping red book audio. People, people, remember: this company, when you look at its corporate actions, is _evil_, it's hostile to consumers. Stop creaming over the words 'nVidia custom chips' for a minute and _think_. Of course they're going to f**k you over and make all your CDs obsolete in collusion with the RIAA labels. They're probably being paid to do just that and you know they want to monopolize the 'home entertainment system' which is certainly due to take over from the 'stereo system'. Do you really want to support these people?

    At any rate, I would strongly suggest that this means the traditional CD is being 'deprecated'. It's time to buy ALL YOUR CDs over again! Beat the rush! Run out to the store just as soon as somebody figures out a secure digital music format that degrades after ten plays so you can be put on a _rental_ basis!

  • Running Windows 2000? SP1? (Score:3)

    by sowalsky ( 142308 ) on Saturday August 05, 2000 @09:55AM (#877632) Homepage
    Microsoft will never learn that any product based on a Windows kernel will at one time or another crash. PS has never crashed, Nintendo has never crashed, but XBox most likely will at one point or another. Heart and anethesia monitors never crashed, but I recently read in a NG about a doctor whose devices used Windows, and one day crashed mid-surgery!

    Surgery is one thing, but I don't think I can survive if an intense game of kill the space-ships is interrupted by a BSOD. And what's worse--the more games you install, the longer it will take to boot!

  • Re:And this differs from a computer how? (Score:4)

    by spiral ( 42436 ) on Saturday August 05, 2000 @10:39AM (#877633)
    > one can see that the X-box really seems to be just a regular computer with a few things disabled

    This is exactly the point. Their strategy is obvious: make a machine that games developers can port to easily. Most game shops target Win32/DirectX. (Sorry, Linux dudes but that's the harsh truth). That makes for a huge base of games that can probably be made to run on Xbox with little or no modification, and a huge base of developers with valuable experience long before the hardware even ships.

    The second half of the equation is consistency. The major cause of NT crashes is bogus drivers. With a fixed platform like this they can smoke (most) all of the bugs out of the drivers, not to mention optimizing the snot out of them. They don't have to worry about whether or not the latest driver patch works with last month's firmware upgrade for some bogus 3d card that nobody cares about this week. Each game can be intensively tested since the target hardware/OS is perfectly known.

    > who would want a computer that is simply disabled just to play games?

    Sure it's just a crippled computer, but I'll work right out of the box. It won't need configuration or tweaking. It won't crash randomly. Plug in your cable modem and it'll surf the web. Kids will be able to use it -- Hell, even parents will be able to use it. It'll be cheap, and games will be everywhere. Most people don't want the hassle of a "computer", they just want lots of cool games and their daily pr0n. Give the users what *they* want, not what *you* want.

    Microsoft has come up with a great story (from their point of view). However, it may fail -- they may blow it, or nobody may care when it ships. It wouldn't be the first time, and won't be the last.

  • Not a protected mode OS (Score:5)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Saturday August 05, 2000 @11:06AM (#877634) Homepage
    Note that the X-Box runs everything in Ring 0. No protection, just like Windows 3.1/DOS, even though the kernel is supposedly based on parts of NT/Win2000. Patch out any OS code you want to.

    But unlike most game consoles, the X-Box has a high-speed network connection and a hard drive. Find a buffer overflow exploit in a game, and you're into the kernel. Wait until the script kiddies get going on this one.

    And every X-Box is identical. Crack one, and you've cracked them all. It's a monoculture. The distributed denial-of-service attack people are going to love the X-box. Millions of slaves on DSL lines, and no annoying sysadmins to interfere.

  • Re:Running Windows 2000? SP1? (Score:5)

    by Nakoruru ( 199332 ) on Saturday August 05, 2000 @10:51AM (#877635)
    PS and Nintendo games written resently DO crash. A friend of mine who worked on X-Treme G for N64 says that he can sit down with a retail copy of that game and make it crash easily (it helps that he was a programmer on the project ^_^). I have several playstation games that have bugs in them as well as old SNES games. Game console software is not bulletproof.

    I have run Win2k for 6 months without a crash. If anything XBox Win2k will be much more stable because it has been vastly simplified. There is only one hardware configuration.

    Why, praytail, would it take longer for games to boot? The HDD is only used as a cache to store frequently accessed data and saved games. Games will still be mostly kept on the DVD (its only an 8 GB HD). Also, considering that I can load a saved game onto another X-Box, it can't store anything permanently on the HDD or I could not play my game anywhere else.

    I have probably been successfully trolled, but many people do actually believe what you said, what a shame.

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