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> However, that $250 looks more affordable if you believe that they are not going to make the $150 console nigh on obsolete within a matter of months.
you mean sorta like releasing a version with a HD-Drive before christmas this year?
last I heard that was the plan, so anyone who knew the hype (from day one) that their would be a HDDVD drive coming soon. should pass if they want a device that would not be completly obsolete, within a year.
I would pay more for a hacked Xbox gen1 that can play HD content I recorded (I do already own) than for a Xbox 360 unhacked that can't play any HD content (movies I mean) especially when their will be Xbox 360's with HD movie playin built in soon.

then add in the knowledge, that their is no upgrading the DVD drive http://www.xbox-scene.com/ Each Xbox 360 DVD drive has a unique key, if that key doesn't match what your console is expecting your DVD drive will not work.

should make the current generation xbox360 the lowest resale value on the used market this christmas.

hey deliberately decided, that Xbox DVD can't play DVD-R/+R etc. Not just DVD media ID, but really DVD recorded discs.

There are tutorials on how to turn up the gain on the DVD laser. They claim to fix this. I can't confirm yet, but plan on trying it soon.

At the time of my posting, you had a score of 5, informative, for posting http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyZQ4k7Bi-8 but from youtube:

Sites linking to this video:
826 clicks from http://www.xbox-scene.com/
236 clicks from http://xbox-scene.com/
185 clicks from http://www.xbox-scene.com/xbox1data/sep/EEukZpklFA hk...
96 clicks from http://www.xbox-scene.com/index.php?newsview=1
53 clicks from http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?showtopic=4 98519

they haven't been slashdotted yet! Not even 53 clicks from slashdot? oh well...

At the time of my posting, you had a score of 5, informative, for posting http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyZQ4k7Bi-8 but from youtube:

Sites linking to this video:
826 clicks from http://www.xbox-scene.com/
236 clicks from http://xbox-scene.com/
185 clicks from http://www.xbox-scene.com/xbox1data/sep/EEukZpklFA hk...
96 clicks from http://www.xbox-scene.com/index.php?newsview=1
53 clicks from http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?showtopic=4 98519

they haven't been slashdotted yet! Not even 53 clicks from slashdot? oh well...

At the time of my posting, you had a score of 5, informative, for posting http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyZQ4k7Bi-8 but from youtube:

Sites linking to this video:
826 clicks from http://www.xbox-scene.com/
236 clicks from http://xbox-scene.com/
185 clicks from http://www.xbox-scene.com/xbox1data/sep/EEukZpklFA hk...
96 clicks from http://www.xbox-scene.com/index.php?newsview=1
53 clicks from http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?showtopic=4 98519

they haven't been slashdotted yet! Not even 53 clicks from slashdot? oh well...

At the time of my posting, you had a score of 5, informative, for posting http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyZQ4k7Bi-8 but from youtube:

Sites linking to this video:
826 clicks from http://www.xbox-scene.com/
236 clicks from http://xbox-scene.com/
185 clicks from http://www.xbox-scene.com/xbox1data/sep/EEukZpklFA hk...
96 clicks from http://www.xbox-scene.com/index.php?newsview=1
53 clicks from http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?showtopic=4 98519

they haven't been slashdotted yet! Not even 53 clicks from slashdot? oh well...

At the time of my posting, you had a score of 5, informative, for posting http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyZQ4k7Bi-8 but from youtube:

Sites linking to this video:
826 clicks from http://www.xbox-scene.com/
236 clicks from http://xbox-scene.com/
185 clicks from http://www.xbox-scene.com/xbox1data/sep/EEukZpklFA hk...
96 clicks from http://www.xbox-scene.com/index.php?newsview=1
53 clicks from http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?showtopic=4 98519

they haven't been slashdotted yet! Not even 53 clicks from slashdot? oh well...

It's a feature.

Actually it is. At least according to some... http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?showtopic=4 96524 or http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?showtopic=4 96524&st=30

It's a feature.

Actually it is. At least according to some... http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?showtopic=4 96524 or http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?showtopic=4 96524&st=30

Wouldn't an X3 be *complete* overkill? Why recomend the top-of-the-line, feature packed and expensive modchip when the parent only wants his games to load faster? A sofmod with a coldboot-to-live feature would work just fine in this case. http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?showtopic=2 15055

as a matter of fact there is:
http://www.xbox-scene.com/xbox1data/sep/EEFlyylEyp nyXfkSdp.php

You do need a way of transferring this to your xbox, and either the first 007 or splinter cell game disc to load it. but it works wonderfully!

"The two companies parted ways and wished each other luck. "Our ability to remain independent was unquestioned due to our financial status," Nintendo of America executive vice president stated in the book. 'And it became clear that our objectives and their objectives were not the same.' "

XPort is already being used by a programmer that ports emulators to the xbox. http://xport.xbox-scene.com/

There's a video of that here.

The Xbox 360 pulls 160 Watts of power: http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?showtopic=4 66036. The average car (or deep cycle, which would be a good idea for this use) battery fully charges at 100 amp hours, providing 12V. Which is 1200 Watt Hours.

Therefore your Xbox 360 will run for 7.5 hours just on battery charge.

Looking at an in car LCD screen, http://www.xenarc.com/product/700y.html 8 Watts seems reasonable for an LCD screen. This brings operating time down to about 7 hours.

Assuming that 200 Watt Hours would want to be left in the car as a way to start it and provide heating etc, that gives us 1000 Watt Hours to power the Xbox and about 6 hours of game play.

God help the condition of the battery if they don't use a deep cycle battery but it could work.

-
Peter

You may be correct, but the drive is still different than a PC DVD Drive. A couple years ago, I replaced the xbox dvd drive with a pc dvd drive because mine was having trouble reading disks.

The pc drive had to be flashed and the motor had to be rotated 180 degrees to get it to read originals. I remembered moving the motor, I'm sure that's where the backwards bit came from. Here are directions. It is not as simple as putting a disk into a pc dvd drive and hitting copy.

"You could even write a nice menu system to run on boot to choose between emulators and games, making the machine seem more like a remade console."

What you are describing is exactly what has been done with emulation on the Xbox. Modded Xboxes use a menu interface such as Evolution X which makes it easy to select emulators, homebrew games or media center apps while sitting on the couch.
The emulator interfaces are easy to use menus. Most of the emulators are ports of ones you have used on Windows, just with a new interface that is more suited to a TV screen. No need to select roms from a mouse driven GUI.
The other nice thing about Xbox emulation is that all the emulators will use the full controller features. So for example, dual joystick play in Robotron or Battlezone works without any controller configuration.
And although big for a console, the Xbox is small for a PC. And cheap as well.
The only REAL disadvantage is if you are interested in emulating mid to late '90s arcade games or consoles. There just isn't enough CPU power. Although some of the N64 games that do work are quite playable. And of course for systems that had keyboards or keypads, there isn't one available (i.e. Intellivision, Colecovision, 8 bit computers).
The selection of emulators is pretty much just as impressive as on the PC - Atari (from 2600 to ST), Coleco, Intellivision, Odyssey, Spectrum, NES, SNES, N64, GBA, Sega Master System, Genesis, NeoGeo, Arcade, Commodore 64, Apple 2, Amiga, Turbographix even a Playstation emulator.
This page: Xport hasn't been updated in a long time but shows a good amount of whats out there.

Re:From TFA...(Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Saturday

fSck off and die,
Why so hostile?
the only reason anyone hacks an xbox is so they can play games they didn't buy

Right, nobody uses:
http://www.xbox-linux.org/wiki/Main_Page FreeBSD,Linux and Darwin.
http://www.dynebolic.org/ Multimedia Studio XBOX Linux Live CD
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A464 28-2005Jan29.html XBOX Media Center
http://www.xboxstation.com/modules.php?name=News&f ile=article&sid=22 SoftMod
http://xport.xbox-scene.com/ Emulation of Old Systems that we OWN

Maybe all these people are just wasting their time so losers can pirate games, but then again, if you look closely you will find more than a few Developers like the Idea of a $150.00 PC with TV out and Net Access.

I know I owe them my thanks, I'm purchasing an old black box right after the next price drop around 2006 (PS3 Launch). I probably won't even pick up 1 game. I just need a media extension in another room.
Silly Trolls.

i'm sorry, but it did not take a year for xbox1 modchips to come out, the first xbox1 modchip (NEO-X) came out in late april 2002, ~6 months after the xbox came out
the NEO-X wasnt actually sold to the general public, but the Xtender came out in early may 2002, see this link

It's amazing, like any other clueless readers, the register didn't even bother to read the nfos :

source code for a utility that allows discs' files to be extracted and displayed as raw data.

The utility runs on a PC, apparently, but Xbox 360 DVDs are incompatible with PC DVD drives.

No, the utility released can't dump the content of 360 discs to HDD,
the utility can extract the *files* from the disc *dumps*.

Pi released this utility *AND* full raw dumps of 360 discs.
But the method for dumping discs was *NOT* disclosed.
They released this utility so that you can actually DO something with those dumps: you can extract the files on your pc hdd and fiddle with them...

What's funny is that they wanted to put 'RAW' somewhere, as the dumps are raw images, but i assume they put it randomly in their article..

BTW, this was previously covered on slahdot and the most dumb^H^H^H^Hcomplete thread is at xbox-scene

Copy protections on the discs themselves is just one part of the much larger puzzle. As someone pointed out earlier you have to be able to get unsigned code to run on the machine. While this was fairly easy to accomplish on the original Xbox, the Xbox 360 is supposed to be a trusted computing platform. It looks as though there's alot to overcome in getting unsigned code to run.

You can checkout Xbox Scene, or Free60.org for information.

Firstly, the Register article (and /. summary) is useless. They're just high-level summaries. The details (the meat, if you like) are here: http://www.xbox-scene.com/xbox1data/sep/EEFuplVllV IYuZHGfq.php

Now, for the problem. Team Pi have released an open-source extractor FOR THEIR ALREADY-DECODED IMAGES. They have NOT released an open-source decoder for turning DVDs into images.

Why is that? I believe they probably haven't fully reverse-engineered the encryption yet. They've just cracked the raw disk driver or some other part of the XBOX360 operating system, so that it performs the decryption for them (MS's code) and saves the result to hard disk.

Needless, it won't be long before there's a public utility to run on a hacked 360 or devkit that does the same thing, then eventually someone will do the hard part - fully reverse-engineering the encryption.

Am I the only one who thinks that the 360 is going to be easier to hack than its predecessor? After all, the 360 already gets a lot of data from network devices, such as streaming audio from media connect, or streaming video from a Media Center. Perfect opportunities for buffer overflows (if any exist). Also, the 360 has been reported to run actual streamed code such as the browser from Media Center.

Patches for higher resolution don't sound so new... if you, for instance, plug a vga box into your xbox (e.g. x2vga) you will most probably have to patch by hand some executable (usually some default.xbe files) with an Hex editor in order to make a non negligible amount of games work in progressive scan. Your console must, of course, allow you to do that (he that hath ear to hear...). Basically such patches consist in changing the way the video mode is initializated (read this post for some further informations).

I suppose that the XB->XB360 patches do nothing but alter the calls of set video mode functions and add the initialization the anti aliasing stuff (which, as xbox doesn't perform any antialiasing, simply do not exist in the original game code).

Have you seen the size of the friggin power supply. You're more likely to need a crane to suspend that bugger, than a piece of string.

The Xbox smashing is also featured in an article by The Inquirer. They also wrote that Xbox geeks take this matter too serious. I just find it amazing how people go balistic over a toy like the Xbox.

It seems like this is the machine that gets all the crashes and other issues.

XBOX overheating, Black Screen of death, etc.
Go here for details.

http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?showtopic=4 62099

Enjoy your Xbox360 & games!

Yes it is a shame that those of us, who prefer to wait a while before buying a new console, will miss out on all the fun.

Enjoy your Xbox360 & games!

Yes it is a shame that those of us, who prefer to wait a while before buying a new console, will miss out on all the fun.

It seems that at least some of the Xbox 360 consoles are faulty... No clear problem is pinpointed at the moment, but one strong cause could be overheating; http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?s=c04af2866 ed9534607ad98ce292b6a3e&showtopic=462099

Just check this story http://www.xbox-scene.com/xbox1data/sep/EEklAEVplZ YuqLANUS.php

Publicity is the soul of the game

http://www.xbox-scene.com/articles/rf-power.php

remote RF power switch for xbox. Ive been wanting to do this.

smartxx removed the images from their server. mirror is available on http://www.xbox-scene.com/xbox1data/sep/EEkVEuupVA hBWJPUsL.php

That's anti-american-talk. Support your country you bastard.

Yeah, buy a PS3! errr, wait... Sony is Japanese too.

Buy an Xbox 360! errr, wait again. The GPU is built by TSMC out of Taiwan.

Sorry, your options for video consoles are limited

"Not only is this article over 1 months old (28th June - see bottom of article - back when Bill Gates was in Japan), it's also a bad interpretation of what Bill Gates said that day."

You can get info on emulators for the 2600 and about 30 other retro systems on the xbox here.

I agree with this. There are at least three or four categories of drives included with Xbox consoles, although they've gotten significantly better in the last few years of the production run.

More specifically, if you're buying an Xbox, look for the Samsung or Philips drives (there's more stuff about that on the Xbox-Scene Forums; these two types read CD-R's and won't die like the piece-of-crap Thomsons commonly found in the 1.0 Mexican units (although the Samsung ones have problems with DVD+ media.)

Since I'm going to be an early adopter of the Xbox360... I'd rather not want to get screwed over again with my DVD drive. If they even marginally improve it it'll be good.

Nope - analysts predict a $75 loss per Xbox 360 sold at $300

Quoting another analyst doesn't give your claims any more validity, it's WAY to early to be talking about console prices in any kind of absolutes. There is no way any of these analysts know what Sony or Microsoft are going to be getting their parts for, much less what they spend on the parts they manufacturer themselves. At best these analysts' predictions are educated guesses, at worst they are outright lies.

The $494 price tag was reached when Merrill Lynch Japan estimated that the PS3's main components( Cell chip, RSX, and BD-ROM drive) would cost about 11,000 yen ($101) each and the other components would make up the rest of the 54,000 yen . That was a rough estimate, which was probably very wrong. I can't find how the analysts at the UBS investment bank determined that the 360 was going to cost $375 to manufacter, but I imagine those estimates are even more bull shit than Merrill Lynch's figures.

The UXE Installer is the soft-modding tool. You will need one of a few select games that is exploitable, but you can just rent, borrow, or buy used the game. The EEE Installer is installed ontop of UXE, and it basically lets you toggle between a modded and unmodded state, without the use of the exploitable game used to install UXE. This is useful because you need to be in an unmodded state to go on Xbox Live. You can't find the binaries at those links, but if you poke around starting with those links, you can get the binaries pretty easily.

I am using an older version of UXE called UDE. I can toggle between modded and unmodded, but to go back to modded, I need one of the exploitable games. Since I bought the game used for $15, I don't care to upgrade to a better soft-mod right now. Though eventually I will.

The UXE Installer is the soft-modding tool. You will need one of a few select games that is exploitable, but you can just rent, borrow, or buy used the game. The EEE Installer is installed ontop of UXE, and it basically lets you toggle between a modded and unmodded state, without the use of the exploitable game used to install UXE. This is useful because you need to be in an unmodded state to go on Xbox Live. You can't find the binaries at those links, but if you poke around starting with those links, you can get the binaries pretty easily.

I am using an older version of UXE called UDE. I can toggle between modded and unmodded, but to go back to modded, I need one of the exploitable games. Since I bought the game used for $15, I don't care to upgrade to a better soft-mod right now. Though eventually I will.

"People weren't big on emulators for XBox"

Really? Well someone should let the guys at Xport know they are wasting their time. Sure you can play on the PC, but the PC doesn't have consistent controller support across emulators and many emulators feature interfaces that aren't easy to use when displayed on a TV screen. Xbox emulation is much more useful for classic multiplayer sitting in the living room console playing.

"There is not great way to do emulation-on-the-go right now"

Gee, besides the GP32, you have solid emulation on the Palm and PocketPC devices. The Tapwave Zodiac has a great form factor for classic gaming.
Another great option for mobile emulation is to get a Super Card for the Gameboy Advance, SP or DS. It uses standard compact flash cards and plays GB, NES, PC Engine and Game Gear/Sega Master System games.
The PSP has the potential to become the greatest mobile emulation platform but we are still a long way from that point it seems.

The emulators are generally direct ports of the popular (open source) Windows/Linux equivalants. The only emulators I've noticed that are a bit flaky are the Playstation and N64 ones. "How it should" probably means exactly that, the ROMs play just like they would on the original consoles.

The big guys (NES, SNES, Genesis, Gameboys, Mame) are the ones I use the most, and seem flawless. I've not seen a single bug with the latest versions of the emulators.

Most of the best emulator ports are from XPort, though a few aren't. Good site to see info on them.

You can also download ports of Doom Legacy (runs Doom 1 and 2 WADs), Quake, and Quake 2, all of which need the shareware or full version data to use. There are free games too, like a couple ports of shooters from ABA Games (Google them), and some other okay games. Not to mention the Xbox Media Center, and other non gaming things.

You have to go through a very well known IRC channel to download anything that is compiled because of issues with the legality of compiling with the Xbox SDK and such, but the channel is very well known and has been up for years without Microsoft intervention of any sort.

I'd vote to go with the Xbox.

With a little work, a modded XBOX comes close to being what you describe. Check out all the emulated systems. Admittedly, you have to mod it and set up the emulators, but after that, it is very hassle free, my cousin, who is an elementary school student, is working his way through Super Metroid on a modded xbox as we speak.

I believe they are plan on offering gamplay to everyone on the weekends, though I could imagine this could change in the future.

http://pictures.xbox-scene.com/4/xbox360/xbox360or g19iz5ow_b.jpg

The original Xbox controllers were PC compatible, you just had to alter the cord. They were USB-based with a different plug on the end, which is easy to modify or you can buy a fairly-cheap adapter.

The Windows driver is a simple download, and it works really well. Apparently there's a Linux driver as well.

I went this route because I enjoyed the large, original Xbox controllers -- they were the first controllers that didn't feel puny in my large hands.

This was just posted on Xbox-Scene.com too: Xbox 360 rumors.

This thread states that Microsoft is using older motherboards in their new xboxes. People theorize that it's either because the old boards are cheaper or because they're using leftover parts or something like that.

you will, however, need to MODify the xbox in order to run Xbox Media Center on it

check out the xbox-scene forums for more info on doing this

you can either buy a modchip, or the necessary goodies to softmod

XBMC is the best 'homebrew' xbox software ever made... in fact scratch that 'homebrew', it *is* the best xbox software ever made (imnsho)