LordAlexander's Journal: Xbox 360

Well, it's settled. I'm a fool.

You know the old saying about a fool and his money being soon parted?

Knowing me well, you will be unsurprised when I report that I bought an Xbox 360 the day after launch. Oh, of course, I had a perfect excuse: my Xbox went on the fritz again. But, knowing reader, you will immediately remember that my Xbox has been persnickety forever, and it always comes back with a litle bit of tinkering.

Ah well, I'm quite used to me by now. :-D

The console is pretty cool...The graphics are really nice, even on my roommate's old 36" CRT. They're truly impressive on my 27" LCD. On the technical side of things, the Xbox emulator is very impressive. When you know a very little about hardware emulation, you realize how tricky a thing it is to get a truly usable realtime emulation of one platform to work on a completely different one. Just look at Virtual PC, and it's ilk. They've been around for _years_, and they are incapable of doing any real work, even on tremendously powerful Mac hardware. The Xbox 360's Xbox emulator is doing almost the same emulation (emulate a PIII/Celery on a PowerPC 970-derived CPU), but it does it well enough that games are completely playable.

The reason that I bring all this up is that there is a lot of negative press about the bugs in the new console. People seem to greatly get their hopes up, whenever a new piece of consumer electronics is released. The new console will be the paragon of all design, and will do all things, for all people, and never a slowdown. Marketing types love to inspire this sort of hope, and people just lap it up. I tend to think that the impressive technical achievements of the equipment itself is lost in this, and I think that is too bad.

Ah, well, the geek in me speaks again. :)