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Interesting, I hadn't seen this before.

I've read more than once that the XboxOS was based on Win 2000. I'm sure I can find some examples -

http://www.windowsfordevices.com/c/a/News/The-scoop-on-the-Xbox-360s-embedded-OS/
"The original Xbox ran an OS that had its roots in Windows 2000. Granted, by the time you strip out everything that is not needed in a console like the Xbox and replace some of the parts with stuff specific to that device (like the file system), and add a few pieces, it hardly resembles anything remotely like Windows 2000 at all. But you could say that's where its original roots lie, even if 95 percent of it has been cut or heavily altered."

http://www.xbox365.com/stories/xdkcomplete.shtml
"The kernel is based on Microsoft® Windows® 2000."

Granted, neither of those sources are remotely "official", but this one is interesting -
http://www.caustik.com/cxbx/progress.htm
"The Xbox uses a stripped down and partially modified Windows 2000 Kernel."

That's from a developer of cxbx, an Xbox emulator. Surely he of all people would have figured if the kernel was completely different? Then again, who knows how relevant that is to emulation itself. With people like that making the same claim, it's no wonder the misconception is so common.

Yeah, I buy everything on eBay now too.

i believe your looking for this...

http://www.xbox365.com/news.cgi?id=EpZuEEkypkjZtmG qZd2602

http://www.gamesradar.com/us/xbox360/game/news/art icle.jsp?articleId=2006081195220737049&sectionId=1 006

Pics:
http://www.xbox365.com/news.cgi?id=GGrirdrLru05112 035

The PS3 may or may not be quiet, but going by EVERYTHING I've read and seen about it, no one can use the size of the PS3 as an advantage over the 360.

I have misgivings about Microsoft as much as the next Slashdotter but given the Xbox 360 has already seen price breaks in some of its games and it has a price that I more typically associate with something that I "play" with. I think I am going with Microsoft this time. I might get a Wii as well, because I find it offers much better multiplayer games for parties.

Actually by the time the PS3 is released it will no doubt cost less than $400 for the premium.

Microsoft has committed (yes,i know that means little) to dropping the price every year. November is right around the corner :)

http://www.xbox365.com/news.cgi?id=GGuiGNiLiN09191 226
http://www.news4gamers.com/xbox360/News-2492.aspx

MS themselves have said before that they're no longer going to make any new software for the console. And it's been said they're soon going to halt production of the original XBox. It's no surprise that other 3rd parties are following suit as they prepare for the very pricy next-gen change.

I imagine MS is much more eager than other console makers to jump to the next-gen because they know the original XBox has hacked wide open. They've done their research with the 360 and they know it's going to long while before someone really cracks the 360 open.

As for me, I'm quite content with the original XBox. It isn't a great game box, but it's a fantastic media player/emulation box.

You know what, after seeing the PS3, I think this is one myth that will be debunked. The PS3 is bigger than the original Xbox and weights more!! It's a pity I can't find the original link where I read this, because this is an xbox fan site, so some might argue it's biased, but I've seen this on other websites which are more neutral like Gamespot or 1up.

I bet japanese will buy it nonetheless.

Some information about where this rumour comes from:

http://www.xbox365.com/news.cgi?id=GGrNNNLiPG04201 202

If you want to take your system over to a friend's house, it's a pain. If you want to take it on a trip with you, it takes up a bunch of space.

I heard a rumor that the Gamecube was originally designed for that reason, hence the "handle". Most people thought it was butt ugly, myself included. :)

Also, the original Xbox was received very poorly in Japan partly because of the butt-ugliness of the machine and the huge space it took up, keeping in mind the size of housing there.

The 360 was actually designed by a Japanese team, so I guess MS learned their lesson. Personally, I'm not a big fan of the design (it just looks "cluttered"), but having the custom faceplates are nice feature.

Come on now, you're just making stuff up here. Which experts consider 480p closer to HD than NTSC? 480p is roughly 300,000 pixels. 480i is obviously half that (no "order of magnitude" here). 720p is more than 900,000 pixels (and a lot of consumers are going to use 1080i, which is even higher).

And the difference in resolutions on a smaller HDTV (like say, even less than 30") is readily apparent with reasonable source material to most people that don't severely need new glasses. You think MS hasn't done the research on this? Their standard kiosk HDTV size is only 23".

There are good arguments to be made in favor of Nintendo skipping HD resolutions, especially if it lets them release the console at $150 or less. But pretending HD isn't a significant upgrade over SDTV and EDTV is not one of these reasons.

Who is seriously stupid enough to believe, much less report, that Nintendo would be selling out to an American company? Microsoft already tried this, and Ballmer got quite a response from Hiroshi Yamauchi, the 77 year old ex-Nintendo president. To make his feelings blatantly obvious, he stood on a chair, cupped his hands over his mouth, and suggested the following:

"Hey, Ballmer, why don't you suck my tiny yellow balls?"

He even said it in plain English, after having an interpreter for the rest of the conversation, for added clarity. He also likened the acceptance of such a deal to "a defeat comparable to World War 2" despite the fact that M$ offered what Yamauchi-san described as the largest sum of money he'd ever heard of. I highly doubt that Cisco's chances would be any better.

Reference link

This is what I'm talkin' about.

I won't be getting a 360 til the end of it's lifecycle. It's clearly been rushed out for release to get a perceived edge over Sony (and to a lesser extent, Ninendo).

Not to mention, if you buy one later, it will come with an HD-DVD drive (so you don't have to buy that extra, or as an external unit, or whatever-other-bullshit-bandaid-way they'd offer to the launch purchasers). Also, you'll be able to get one in black, like god intended.

i guess i'm in the minority here. i'm looking forward to the 360 and planned on buying one at launch (fortunately i won one through the mountain dew contest). games like call of duty 2 are going to look sweet on the wide screen HD. plus the fact that it's a media extender just makes the microsoft whore inside me all giddy.

Well then their is the possibility of SquareEnix porting Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy to both MS and Sony platforms... See here:

http://www.xbox365.com/news.cgi?id=GGuPGddLiP08031 329/

the guys over at Xbox365 have got an image or two showing the new, fugly xbox 360 debug kit...

An AC posted the article text here already, but I found the text plus some graphics copied to here: http://forum.xbox365.com/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=ge t_topic;f=66;t=000578;p=1#000009

Enjoy.

http://forum.xbox365.com/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=ge t_topic;f=66;t=000578;p=1#000009

mirror for article from cache
http://forum.xbox365.com/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=ge t_topic;f=66;t=000578;p=1#000009

http://forum.xbox365.com/ubb-data/ultimatebb.php?/ ubb/get_topic/f/66/t/000578/p/1#000009

Learning from Generation X

The original Xbox console marked a very important step in the evolution of gaming consoles - it was the first console that was little more than a Windows PC.

It featured a 733MHz Pentium III processor with a 128KB L2 cache, paired up with a modified version of NVIDIA's nForce chipset (modified to support Intel's Pentium III bus instead of the Athlon XP it was designed for). The nForce chipset featured an integrated GPU, codenamed the NV2A, offering performance very similar to that of a GeForce3. The system had a 5X PC DVD drive and an 8GB IDE hard drive, and all of the controllers interfaced to the console using USB cables with a proprietary connector.

For the most part, game developers were quite pleased with the original Xbox. It offered them a much more powerful CPU, GPU and overall platform than anything had before. But as time went on, there were definitely limitations that developers ran into with the first Xbox.

One of the biggest limitations ended up being the meager 64MB of memory that the system shipped with. Developers had asked for 128MB and the motherboard even had positions silk screened for an additional 64MB, but in an attempt to control costs the final console only shipped with 64MB of memory.

The next problem is that the NV2A GPU ended up not having the fill rate and memory bandwidth necessary to drive high resolutions, which kept the Xbox from being used as a HD console.

Although Intel outfitted the original Xbox with a Pentium III/Celeron hybrid in order to improve performance yet maintain its low cost, at 733MHz that quickly became a performance bottleneck for more complex games after the console's introduction.

The combination of GPU and CPU limitations made 30 fps a frame rate target for many games, while simpler titles were able to run at 60 fps. Split screen play on Halo would even stutter below 30 fps depending on what was happening on screen, and that was just a first-generation title. More experience with the Xbox brought creative solutions to the limitations of the console, but clearly most game developers had a wish list of things they would have liked to have seen in the Xbox successor. Similar complaints were levied against the PlayStation 2, but in some cases they were more extreme (e.g. its 4MB frame buffer).

Given that consoles are generally evolutionary, taking lessons learned in previous generations and delivering what the game developers want in order to create the next-generation of titles, it isn't a surprise to see that a number of these problems are fixed in the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

One of the most important changes with the new consoles is that system memory has been bumped from 64MB on the original Xbox to a whopping 512MB on both the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3. For the Xbox, that's a factor of 8 increase, and over 12x the total memory present on the PlayStation 2.

The other important improvement with the next-generation of consoles is that the GPUs have been improved tremendously. With 6 - 12 month product cycles, it's no surprise that in the past 4 years GPUs have become much more powerful. By far the biggest upgrade these new consoles will offer, from a graphics standpoint, is the ability to support HD resolutions.

There are obviously other, less-performance oriented improvements such as wireless controllers and more ubiquitous multi-channel sound support. And with Sony's PlayStation 3, disc capacity goes up thanks to their embracing the Blu-ray standard.

But then we come to the issue of the CPUs in these next-generation consoles, and the level of improvement they offer. Both the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 offer multi-core CPUs to supposedly usher in a new era of improved game physics and reality. Unfortunately, as we have

Anything that can run Unreal Engine 3.0 games and more has my respect at least.
I'm pretty sure it'll rally a lot of gamers and fulfill its purpose.

It was supposed to be xbox 365 but that domain name is already taken. XBOX 365

A couple of links from a Google search for "microsoft powerpc chip ibm"

Microsoft to use IBM chips in next Xbox

Microsoft Partners with IBM for Xbox2

But I find this quote funny:

Our customer satisfaction levels with Xbox Live are through the roof - they love it.

I wonder, then, why it is that many of my friends and myself get quite bored of Xbox Live games rather quickly? Hell, an Xbox fansite editor mentioned in one of his own pieces on the site (article here) that his entire Xbox Live usage to date of the article was around 40 hours over 8 months.

My usage is slightly more than that, but not by much by my esitmates. Probably less than 80 hours since November for me. My Xbox isn't even at my house right now.

And Moore also seemed to not mention the flatlining of Xbox Live sales since before May....

Thursdae

here

Actually, the OS isn't totally proprietary http://www.xbox365.com/stories/xdkcomplete.shtml.

But if you want to start a conspiracy - Ethernet, MAC address, globally uniqueq ... Serial number, globally unique ... They know what shop you bought it in ... Shops have CCTV ... THEY HAVE PICTURES OF YOU! A

Right here way better than tech tv

2) The bios is held encrypted in the nv2a

So why is there one of these on the motherboard? (possible datasheet )

Here's a slightly better picture than the one in the article. The chip to the right and a little up from [4] appears to be an Intel Strataflash of a pretty small size -- a 32 or 40 pin TSOP, good for only 2megabytes. The fact that it might be only 8 bits wide shouldn't matter because the ROM copies itself to RAM on bootup (Flash is slooooow).

Also, this claims the ROM contains FAT32 and UDFS filesytem code. Not that it matters 'cause I plan to set the xbox's hard drive aside & put in one with a real filesystem (yes, ext3fs) anyway.

I do believe that the ROM will only boot code from a signed DVD, but I also believe that ROM is replaceable.

LEGAL - DMCA

There have been a few comments here that seem to seriously misconstrue what the DMCA is capable of, so let's review that then take a look at reverse-engineering case history.

"Ella the Cat" fished for ideas on what the Microsoft team might have done to keep unauthorized software off their box, then worried about DMCA implications. "Chakat" suggested that circumventing MS's only-signed-discs-may-apply code could be a DMCA violation.

I won't quote it all, but here's chapter 12 of the US Code. 1201(b) is what Dmitry's been charged under. It only prohibits devices that circumvent methods that "effectively protects a right of a copyright owner."

In this case, Microsoft can claim copyright on the BIOS in the Xbox. Suppose that we remove the MS-BIOS and replace it with one that'll boot anything (L-BIOS). We've circumvented a measure that prevented running unauthorized games, but that authorization or lack of has no legal weight behind it. Microsoft must enforce it themselves by creating strong measures.

We have to be careful that L-BIOS doesn't allow booting copies of games or we will run afoul of the DMCA.

LEGAL - Reverse Engineering

The Emulation FAQ AppendixB Appendix C provides a good background. Also see CASE SUMMARIES OF COMPUTER COPYRIGHT CASES and Overreaching Provisions in Software License Agreements by Michael Liberman.

The two cases that I think are most apropos are Sega v. Accolade and Sony v. Connectix. Accolade tried to create Genesis-compatible games. Connectix tried to emulate the Playstation. Both cases were about copyrights on games that were disassembled in order to figure out how the game machine worked. The odd thing to me is that disassembling the code and creating a work that used the ideas contained therin was no problem. What Sony & Sega attacked on was making a copy of the ROM into a computer's memory to do the disassembling. The courts found (post-DMCA in the Sony case) that the copying was fair use to gain access to the ideas. Copyright only applies to the expression of those ideas in the object code of the ROM.

Disassembling MS-BIOS to figure out how to talk to the memory, USB and hard disk controllers and create L-BIOS is perfectly legal. It's important to avoid copying MS-BIOS code directly and a clean room would be a good idea (the disassemblers send specs to the L-BIOS authors who never see the actual code), but it seems that Connectix did not employ clean room techniques and got away with it.

TECHNICAL

The Xbox System Software Overview says in part:

The ROM [...] will provide the following [...] services: FAT32 file system, UDFS file system, Copy-protection support, Certificate/signature validation

Supported media are CD, DVD, CD-RW, or DVD-R. There is no CD-R support.

Power Up- When the user turns on the console, the system software is decompressed out of read-only memory (ROM) into random access memory (RAM). Once in RAM, the system software initializes the hardware[....]

Media Detection- Upon power up [...] If it determines that the media [in the DVD drive] is a game, it loads the game into RAM, checks the signature of the game to verify that it is an authentic copy, then starts playing the game.

-

So it appears that MS-BIOS will only boot signed (presumably using strong encryption) DVDs. There are, of course, two answers to this:

1) Replace the MS-BIOS with a more pleasant L-BIOS that'll boot anything and perhaps boot off the hard drive instead of the DVD. Loading "real" games sounds pretty hairy and I'd rather not figure out how to do that, so you won't be able to play them anymore. I'm envisioning replacing the Flash ROM (I have access to a nice Nikon binocular microscope and a Metcal soldering iron for working on surface mount parts), but there are a couple of alternatives: a) piggy-back on a 2nd ROM containing L-BIOS except for chip-select which is hooked to a switch or b) use the JTAG port to reprogram the part in-circuit (only possible with some mfg.'s parts).

2) Figure out how to sign our own discs. This is a good excuse for me to get a DVD recorder. I'm concerned that this method is fewer steps away from a "mod chip" that plays duplicated games.

-

Well, that's what I've found out. I'm interested because it sounds like it'll be sort of hard. If we need to hook up a logic analyzer & watch MS's code do its thing I can handle that. I think getting Linux up & running, talking to keyboards & mice over USB & doing TCP/IP over the ethernet port shouldn't be too bad. Getting basic graphics (VGA emulation) up shouldn't be bad, but I make no promises that we'll be able to use the nVidia 3d. I'm thinking a server is a lot more likely than a nuevo-Indrema/TuxBox.

Worst case scenario is that the chipset itself has encryption hardware built-in and it must be unlocked by the CPU before it will enable access to RAM or peripherals. I doubt they had enough time to do something that clever.

By the way, you can reach me at morganw@yahoo.com (posting preferences not workin' for me)