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Microsoft Unveils Gaming Console
DarkenWood writes "I just got an email from Microsoft about the x-box. They have officially unveiled it." 600mhz, NVIDIA Video, 4x DVD Player.
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To answer your question, the Annihilator Pro GeForce cards (DDR) from Creative run at 300mhz. AFAIK, that's the fatest video card that you can currently purchase for the PC.
I think the idea at Microsoft is that since this "console" is just a standardized(by microsoft) PC, it will be extremely easy to port a game from the PC to it.
Are the posters shown here the same guys who were "gosh wowing" at the PS2 (with it's enormously fast 300MHz processor, that took over a year to arrive)?
The X-Box is NOT a PC, it is a gaming console. It has more available RAM than any current console, it has a faster clock speed than any current console. NVidia is coding a custom chip set for X-Box ONLY (as well as working on some core logic). It may well have a cut down version of the Win2K kernel at it's centre, but it isn't Win2K, for the same reason's that you wouldn't run Word on Embedded NT, or Netscape on Embedded Linux, and yes I know it is possible, it just isn't necessarily where these OSes are aimed!
The display is likely to be driven at about 700x500 or slightly above, with less than half the number of pixels to worry about, you don't need the same level of CPU performance.
As for the proprietary controllers, I agree that this was silly, but I don't think it will be long before people produce adapters for standard USB peripherals.
My personal hope is that maybe we could see a console that doesn't seem to rely soley on fighting and driving games as it's standard fare! (Long live UT, Civ, Baldurs Gate etc.!)
He look here!!! The're is someone who has made a slashdot-like site on http:\\www.xbox.org !!!!
get off our internet.
Yep, you're a moron. Just in case you doubted yourself...
fat guy in a little coat... fat guy in a little cooooat...
Wow, I had no idea microsofties lived such a wild life.
Boy, you are a real man, and I salute you.
btw, is that you , Zico?
Thank You.
Imagine...
A console that needs to be "shut down" before you can turn it off
"The Windows Registry is corrupted. You need to reinstall Windows"
Windows over time eating up all of the hard drive space, making a re-format/re-install necessary
DirectX occasionally not resetting your screen after exiting the game, leaving you in some really wierd resolution.
Two words: Console virii
Wonderful features such as ActiveX giving anyone in the world the ability to run any crap they want on your machine
Plug in the X-Box. It goes on the 'net and transmits to MS everything it knows about you (like Windows 98)
Oh yeah - this product sure looks like a winner!
Shit, someone stop them before the f**k everything up. FT
Be careful there with your dissing of US automakers. Don't list US companies/divisions as prime examples of fine European cars. Volvo -- A division of Ford Motor Co. Jaguar -- Also Ford. Almost went under until Ford bought it up and started pumping millions into it to restore the brand to what it once was. Jaguar has become a status symbol again. Not a bad job, if you ask me. Range Rover -- About to be sold to Ford by BMW. Mazda -- Ford owns a good portion of them as well. (Not sure on the details of this one, just read snippets here and there.) Don't ask me about GM, I have no idea what they might have bought...but I think that they own a portion of Ferrari now...
Well, /.'s always a little late with Microsoft news. I hear they're planning a story for June about Microsoft releasing Windows 2000.
The x-box was unveiled 2 weeks ago. Why is everybody talking about it like it's only just happened, and why is /. reporting on it now??? HELLO?? REALITY???
GET A JOB AND BUY A REAL COMPUTER TO RUN LINUX ON!
M$ don't care if it is behind the times. Going by their past performance they will simply give it away / bundle it with new PC's until all the competition is squashed / goes bust.
"On the other hand, a console with fixed specs has the serious advantage that it's worth a developer's time to take advantage of every capability of the hardware..." Uhm, aren't we talking about a Microsoft product here? The hardware has been completely abstacted by Direct-X. Expect Direct-X to be updated, and not always in a backward compatible way.
I'll be honest, I don't like Microsoft. I avoid using any of their products at all cost, even if their product is better. So, I'll just say that I could care less about their X-box, I won't buy it, and I secretly hope that it bombs.
And now I know why. You'll never run Linux on this puppy, because you won't be able to write the video driver.
Bwa-hahahahahahahah
Hell, didn't Apple already try this? It was called the Pippin, ran a subset of the Mac OS, sold for about 350, and bombed unbelievably? Put the parent company out of business, I thought.
I can only hope the same thing happens to MS.
What leading edge technology ? 600 Mhz Celeron Chip, 8Gb hard drive, 3-D NVIDA card. Sounds like cutting edge about six - nine months ago. Compared to a PC yes, but compared to a console it is faster/better than any console out there. The PSX2 uses a 300Mhz chip, the Dreamcast a 200Mhz chip. It is hard to compare how a 600Mhz P3 would work as a console, because it has never been used for one. It will be interesting to see if the XBox can come anywhere near close to what the PSX2 is.
I heard of some other company that makes consoles...what was it...ummm...NINTENDO?
... a Windows 2000 Advanced Server cluster of these?
XBox was announced at a developer's conference. To have games packaged and distributed for the Christmas 2001 season the games have to be finished by Spring 2001. That's why game developer's conferences are in March. They've just finished their Xmas 2000 stuff and are showing it off and are just ramping up on their 2001 releases.
These release dates mean they have 1 year to design their games for the new platform, code them, do the rendering, test and debug. High end games take a year (at least) to develop so the developers need the specs and APIs NOW to have anything to ship when the console is released. Any later announcement would mean no software at product ship.
Lets think about this: 200MHz Dreamcast processor is around the speed of a 300MHz Pentium. The Dreamcast 2 will have a compatable CPU running at 400-600MHz, and a generation more advances, so lets call that the equivalent of an 800 - 1GHz Pentium. The Dolphin has a 400MHz G4 style processor - easily beats a 600MHz PIII. The X-BOX is technologically dead before it is launched, but marketing has a large influence in this world, unfortunately.
The 600MHZ cpu is more than enough, considering that the GPU is set up to handle ALL the work. The cpu is only for all the AI type stuff, and telling the GPU where the camera, lights, and objects are.
Selling the most powerful game console in the world for 49 bucks won't mean diddly if there aren't any good games coming out for it. No support from the bog game makers == dead system. And the Japanese gamemakers (i.e., most game makers) are notoriously isolationist and will support the Japanese company (Sony, Sega, Nintendo) over the foreign company (Atari [now defunct], Microsoft, etc.) in any given market. Think back to the era of US gaming consoles. What Japanese import games existed for these systems? Veeeery few.
Well, considering that its still in development I wouldn't be suprised if there wasn't even a final design yet. You ever seen one of the development dreamcasts? They look like a mini tower (because they are) The x-box probably looks the same way.
The dreamcast has a keyboard, which costs extra (of course), and also has a "proprietary AV connector", which the SNES also had. I'm assuming that just means you need a special cable plugged into the back of the unit (doesn't have RCA jacks or whatever).
Its the 100mbit ethernet that gets me. Who wants a stupid modem nowdays anyway? Certainly not anyone that has one, nor everyone else that doesn't..
The thing you have to remember is that this isn't going to be "just a pc". It will most likely be running a custom slimmed down OS (similar to the version of CE for the dreamcast). That means special optimized hardware/video drivers.. I'm sure it will be significantly faster than a PC with the same specs.
Unfortunately for all of you Anti-MS people (all of slashdot) MS has a virtually unlimited amount of money to throw at projects like this. They can spend millions of $$$'s on marketing to make this thing successful whether we like it or not (although if its anything like the dreamcast we probably will). I wouldn't be suprised if they bought a console/game company or two in the next year. Just the fact that it uses an x86 CPU makes it highly likely that there will be a ton of games for it (ported from win32).
It'll be interesting to see MS enter a market in which they don't already have a monopoly. Even if the x-box is a POS, its still good for competition.
What ever happened to the MS phone?
-Cozmo
Because here you only see stuff posted that is done by /. cronies or companies the editors have stock in?
I'm VERY curious about this -- you can't find anything on the Intel site about X-Box, and a search on the Microsoft site for X-Box and Intel turned up nothing... Maybe AMD isn't out of the picture quite yet.
All the specs I've read say it uses the Win2K kernel.
Most popular PC games are programmed outside of Japan (USA, Europe). I much prefer PC games to their console counterparts.
I use Windows 2000 now on my gaming machine at home (I have 256mb of RAM already, and all my games work on it...). But, games are the only things that crash it. I've gotten 4 crashes now running the Planescape RPG, and 1 crash from the sblive driver. I hope they make the box more stable than the current win2k is...
No game console in the history of gaming could have its CPU upgraded. And no, huge plug-in add-ons that are actually entire game consoles that just use your old console for power, A/V out, and to reach the controllers (Sega 32X) do not count.
--
AC in South Africa
600 Mhz x86 Compatible CPU. WHo gives a rats ass when the Nintendo Dolphin has a 400 Mhz PowerPC chip.
Face it American crap sucks..........US cars sucks......their technology sucks......look....at ur pc.......hmm....probably says made/assembled in china or something like that.....America is behind the rest of the world........How many times do u see japan waiting for something to come outta USA? (as for me i've never seen that.)
The little trolls at MS know that anyone who has moved past windows won't buy this thing, and they don't care.
Now someone is announcing a _Linux_ based console system! Indrema has a web page on it at http://www.indrema.com/servlet/site?page=l600e_inf o.html. Seems to me to be a logical competitor to the MS X-box. I doubt it will go anywhere though...
NT=No Text is text...
Since most people are conceding that Microsoft will lose this race to assimilate everyone into their collective, why haven't the zealots started condemning Sony?
Maybe Sony inserts subliminal messages into audio playback when you use their CD/DVD/cassette/VHS players? Nooooo! Maybe their secret army of "spy dog" AIBOs will steal their owners credit card numbers in the night and transmit them back to Sony? Then kill their owners and make it look like an accident? Mwahahahahahaha!
linux has 2 games if you count a webserver as a game
Hey, unified memory is fantastic when your bus speed is -- oh wait, it's a PC. Nevermind.
Linuxville, LI (AP) -- With a few words of encouragement to faithful flock, Lord Jesus Linux, the embodiment of goodness and right, acended into Heaven today to take its rightful place in the throne of Eden.
"I leave Earth today knowing all is well," Jesus Linux said in a torrent of ones and zeros. "My zealots have assimilated the lesson to patently dismiss all other religions... er, operating systems... no matter the potential benefit of these heathen systems."
Reactions to Linux' departure to chair the Kingdom of God brought a variety of reactions from the largely-blinded throng of zealots.
Several saddened followers, sweat rolling down their protruding foreheads, were seen smashing an X-Box with sticks and clubs, grunting and screaming about the X-Box being "a tool of the Devil" and "full of voodoo magic."
One follower, who elected to remain an Anonymous Coward, claimed to be confused by the prospect of having to evaluate software on its stengths and weaknesses, rather than on unsubstantiated rhetoric and prejudice.
"What am I supposed to do now?" asked a Linuxian. "I get up at 2;30, eat Fruity Pebbles, and spend the day summarily dismissing everything from Microsoft. Now I that I actually have to think and evaluate, I'm lost."
Several Linux women attempted to fling themselves upon funeral pyres symbolizing the death of goodness in the world, but were retrained by a crowd of onlookers who were not confident that "fire" is free and open under the GPL.
Associated Press
And I love this bit about a "proprietary AV connector." There's Microsoft, Embracing and Extending again.
I think they are going to have a proprietary AV connector, just like the Playstation 1/2, Sega Saturn, Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64, Dreamcast...
A proprietary connector makes it easy to sell cables that are RGB, S-Video, RF-Adaptor, or whichever, without adding too many wirings to the console, bringing the cost up.
Besides which, I see no innovation here.
Can't you say the same about linux? I mean, for God's sake, Linus didn't invent a new operating system! He just copied from unix as much as possible!
Another great product ! I can't wait to but it, although I have to save up since I just bought Win2000. I'm only 16 so I don't have a whole lot of money.
They must have some genuis's out in Redmond. How do they keep on doing it? Too bad Linux can't do the same thing.
"In Windows Millennium Edition (ME), Microsoft has stripped out software needed to connect to Novell NetWare or Banyan file servers, and the operating system won't support an interface into Microsoft's Active Directory."
Makes it pretty clear that it's a home user-only system. (TCP/IP and MS Peer networking will still work.) Pretty much just a game OS. Good thing too -- businesses should be running NT.
"Bottom line is that Windows/Linux/Be/etc aren't easy to use for the average Joe "Non-technical" Consumer. " If i take your words than BeOS should have been ruled the world by now....it's soooooooooooo easy!
Supposedly, Intel is basically giving away the cpu's to MS (they went to AMD first, but AMD backed out cause they weren't about to give their CPU's away like MS wants). SOOO... this thing will probably be priced at $200. Not a bad price. But my concern is.. it's going to use a HD. Fragmentation central? Will I have to scandisk everytime I play a game?
The big question will be, does it have a [CTRL], an [ALT] and a [DEL] key..
NT = No Text
Umm, This is news that is a few weeks old and been mentioned several times here. Even the date on the site it links right to is March 10.
8 Gig HD is for the virtual memory ;) ... Just a little something to slow down your gameplay so you will buy the X-Box 2
Pop in a CD, hit "power" and PLAY.
NVIDIA is also in bed with SGI. Perhaps we should blame SGI for the lack of open source Linux driver. (Unlike with MS, you would actually have an argument then.)
Please... I'm American and I refuse to buy American cars simply because of the lack of quality.
This is why I have a bumper sticker on my Nissan that says "Be American, Buy American"
"I wouldn't be suprised if they bought a console/game company or two in the next year." Interesting idea. Lets take this a step further, Microsoft did the OS for Dreamcast (stipped down CE), Sega announced they were not going to make any more "gaming" consoles. Seems to me that it is possible that Microsoft will either have Sega making these things and selling them under the MS name or maybe they will just buy Sega. Comments?
I am still waiting for /. to announce the dreamcast.
speaking of spelling....figure out how to spell religious and Porsche you Jackass
"Public Awareness" has a lot more to do with what you can buy at the Toys 'R' Us than some press release that gets put out. As far as the average kid is concerned, there is no MS XBox, there is no Sony PSX2, and there is no Nintendo Dolphin. Sure, there's a bunch of jackoffs on usenet spreading FUD one way or another, but that's hardly the 'public'.
your post makes no sense, you use a quote from a crap film, and you can't even spell typo
Yep. definetly sound like a PC - now will it act like one. The other thing that struck, is if M$ is going to sell their console at a price that is competitive with the other consoles, then we are are currently over paying out graphics cards by $150!
GTA on the PC is MUCH better than the crappy PSX version. And GTA2 is much better again.
There currently is not a standard for HDTV connectors. There needs to be one, sure, but until then everybody is going to try to get their shots off in the standards war. And Microsoft is not one to back down when a standards war is starting.
> Remember the Super Famicon? That sucker never > even made it to the US uh... the Super Nintendo is the super famicom, just shaped differently... if you cut the ends off of the Super Famicom game, you can even play them in the Super Nintendo
I bet that you are European! Europeans are very clever people! Yes, very clever. I was wondering if is indeed a fact that most of you [monkeys] enjoy a steaming bowl of grits dumped down the front of your trowsers? Thanks, Juan Epstein
PC Jr. -- That is absolutely the perfect way to think of this thing!
Jeez...it's one world now. Don't you know, MS is going to hire cheap Korean and Indian developers. Who in the hell needs Japan's development houses.
i'm a big fan of cringely, but i hate the new format. the white-on-blue makes it look like to me like i've just selected the entire text of the article or something. and i miss the frog. :-(
i kind of wish i could tell netscape to use default background on particular sites. (guess i could modify junkbuster for this purpose... kludge though it would be)
Wow! Does this mean I can now watch an hour-long DVD movie in only 15 minutes? Cool!
And so the meta-complaints begin...
I'm giving it less than a year from the actual-in-the-store release date before it's abandoned or replaced with 'X-Box II'.
Given Microsofts "expanding into the hardware domain" history I suspect it wont even make it to the stores.
Many people in recent /. threads are forgetting that the speed of the processor is not necessarily the defining factor in game performance. VIDEO CARDS are the predominant force in the kind of gaming performance to expect. What is the nature of the video solution they are using? Well, it will be from NVIDIA, but beyond that we don't know what it will be, do we?
:)
The point is, the quoted processor speed is not as far-fetched you think. Current video cards offload more and more work from the processor with every prduct generation. As this happens the speed of x86 chip becomes less relevant. Of course, this is contrary to what Intel would have you believe...
Agreed, with a release date 18 months away, the 600Mhz pentium seems slow... But if the graphics solution is cutting edge as it's released, they have a chance to produce respectable gaming performance.
Besides, couldn't they just change the spec later? MS says, "Change of plans. We decided to use an 850Mhz chip instead." Of course they don't want to lose developer support, so they tell them "Oh yeah, the processor speed is, um, tentative."
"The blue screen of Death"
hahahaha
Grits down my pants and X-Box on my TV!!! OH YEEAAAHHHH!!!
release date of 2001? I can already buy a 600 mhz w/ mobo for what..$200 now? It's barely the start of 2000. This thing will be so obselete by the time it gets out Oh and eat my grits
I agree that the CPU speed may not be that impressive, but dont't forget the nVidia GPU.
Assuming that it's ~2 generations ahead of the current GeForce, getting this and a 600 MHz CPU for a console price seems like a good deal.
On a slight tangent, the GPUs are getting so fast that it's starting to make sense to do physics and AI calculations on the *graphics* subsystem! What you've really got is a multiprocessor with some hackable restrictions.
Finally, I always cringe when techies refer to "stupid users". Is Steven Spielberg a "stupid filmmaker" because he doesn't (I'm assuming)design every camera from the ground up before shooting a movie?
Go away Microsoft. You are not welcome in the console market. We don't like your kind around here.
shut up.
lol. That was pretty good.
Of course it won't be moderated up.
I can't believe how small that darned font is! If they seriously want anyone to care about this thing, _all_ need to be able to read it. I gave up reading it on my 21" 1600x1200 window using Netscape. I suppose if I really cared, I would have cut and pasted the text into something else. Perhaps it was composed by someone using a text-only screen and they tested it by using lynx. ;)
Why would I buy it? I already got a PC and I am gonna buy a Playstation 2 ...
Isn't it mental age over chronographic age by 100/1 ?
Well that's what I was taught, a long time ago....
In 2001, when GeForce cards proliferate, it will probably be standard on new PC's
X-Box has also noticed that you have ext2 partitions on your computer and is currently doing you a favor by reformating as fat 32 and installing M$ Window$ ME. I also noticed that you have 4 people in your household that have played this console, you have only purchased one liscense. We will be billing you $1600 for total liscense fees to bring you into compliance. Failure to pay these fees will result in the Micro$oft Nazi squad coming to your house to perform required executions for non-compliance. Have a nice day....(blue screen of death)
X-Box has also noticed that you have ext2 partitions on your computer and is currently doing you a favor by reformating as fat 32 and installing M$ Window$ ME. I also noticed that you have 4 people in your household that have played this console, you have only purchased one liscense. We will be billing you $1600 for total liscense fees to bring you into compliance. Failure to pay these fees will result in the Micro$oft Nazi squad coming to your house to perform required executions for non-compliance. Have a nice day....(blue screen of death)
Hot fine gravel?
with all of that nice hardware in there they should just about be able to run pong at 2 fps
That was just a rumour, which was denied by Sega. There will most certainly be a 'dreamcast 2'.
Having an upgradable console, however, is basically commiting suicide in the game industry. Look at the 32X, the SegaCD, the multitap for PSX, light guns for almost any system, and so on and so forth. Upgrades only serve to split the user base, and the entire concept of succeeding with a console is to keep a unified user base. If something like the 32X is released, then everyone waits to see if cool games are going to come out that need the 32X. Since everyone is waiting, not many 32X's are sold, so no self-respecing publisher will put out a 32X game. It's a nice little vicious cycle.
Hell, if they just use the same PC upgrade technique, it'll be just like PC games...every game has to be written to basically the lowest common denominator, which is precisely what consoles are supposed to avoid.
The shittiest site in town.
WHERE DOES IT SAY INTEL? IT SAYS x86 COMPATIBLE.
It's just a PC in a little box.
This will be competing with consoles you dumb fuck. Not PCs. Why do you think Microsoft calls it a console? And prices it like a console? And why do you think the likes of Capcom and Konami are writing games for it? Get this through your thick skull! its a console!
Please know what you're talking about. Mac's display text at 72dpi, PC's at 96dpi. That's why some text on webpages is obnoxiously small on macs. Sure you can specify the size in px instead of pt in the stylesheet but that's bad form. All I want to know is why the hell PCs display shit at 96dpi...
Unless you are playing Doom on an IPX network, yes.
the specs claim the graphics card will be 300 mhz...how does that compare with a current pc?
At long last we have a gaming console that is made by Americans!
It's called the Atari.
Someone should come up with a box with X on it and call it the X-WinBox (nice name for a site, eh?) Maybe a pointer to PIA?
Also, porn sites should include X-box on their pages. What is the BOX part on an X porn site :)
psssspsttt.....heard of this thing called HDTV? it's going to shock the world.
from what you've heard ? who the fuck are you? you're a nobody.
Console clockspeed != PC clockspeed in terms of performance.
put x-box on your web site and have it link to a porn site
Don't bother going to an arcade, nobody plays those games anymore (seriously, the arcade industry is dying rapidly). The console market is not the arcade and a lot of people at GameDev were excited about the possibility of developing for the X-Box... what that will turn into, who knows. As long as they don't announce Office for it, it still has a chance. RTG OUT!
Thought Intel cpu was a done-deal...
Please... I'm American and I refuse to buy American cars simply because of the lack of quality. But the X Box won't fail because it is american... It will fail because it will be old hat by the time it comes out.
A 600 MHz CPU - far better than the 200 MHz "Emotion Engine" that the PSX2 has. And it will use tried and testing gaming technology as well in the form of DirectX, which has made Windows boxes the platform for serious gaming. No console will be able to compete with this kind of setup.
Haha! Don't make me laugh. The PS2 has a 300MHz processor, BTW, FUDer. DirectX is a shortcomming fool. Playstation has legions of PSX-1 developers that are used to programming for the PSX so I don't think there is any lack of experience there...
If anyone can pull this off, it will certainly be America's most innovative and foward-thinking company, and if they succeed, their conquest of the console market will benefit all of us as gamers.
Ok, Ok, I get it... You are a troller. Nice one. ;) Almost got me going there till you gave it away.
Yeah, the Dreamcast's 200Mhz processor was horribly outdated when it was released. So is the Playstation 2's 300Mhz processor. It's NOT ABOUT MEGAHERTZ, YOU IDIOT.
Too bad this system won't be released until.. what.. mid-to-late 2001?
like anything released by Microsoft would see anything but flames and worst case conjectures by the mainline Slashdot crowd.
But keep the hypocrisy coming...I love laughing at you people praising and condeming the exact same stuff just based on whose name is slapped on it and whether it's 'free'.
Yep. Just like Sony, Sega, Nintendo, and Atari have done in the past. if you're going to bitch at Microsoft, bitch at all of them. Same "scare tactics" have been used by all console manufacturers.
Oh, yes you could install linux. And then you could enjoy all of those great linux games like, um.. uh, well I think you can get Quake, and uh... oh crap I guess there are not very many games for linux. Hmm, maybe a "GAMING" system has it's uses like, oh I don't know, playing GAMES? But you go ahead and install linux on your computer stare at the command prompt blankly. As for me I'll be an uninformed person and get an X-box and have lot's more than that you!
Ooooo, the great thing about "game consoles" is that they're waaaay cheaper than the cheapest PCs. They make great internet gateways, small web servers, print servers, routers, and with a cheap passive LCD screen, an email/web-browsing station for the living room, kitchen, bathroom, or other places where you don't have room for a traditional PC.
No. it's definitely a P3. Slashdot is posting an old link which was up before the p3 was announced.
>600Mhz, Nvidia video, DVD... gee, sounds like my PC, only with less RAM. So what can I do with this that I can't do with my PC? What games can it play - the ones I can play on my PC? I don't see what the hype's all about... Can your PC play the games coming out for it? (Several game houses have signed on including EA) What's that no? Huh. Well I guess you could always play wit VI that's pretty fun. I'll take NHL2001 you can play with Samba. Won't that be a blast?
I love slashdot idiots who post blatantly false information just to bash MS.
No M$ should release the hardware spec to the public, and have a hole heap a different offshore companies build cheap clones. Make there money out of controlling the operating system for these new consoles (this sound familiar to anyone?)
If it is pretty will you buy it? If it is ugly will you NOT buy it becasue of how it looks? Bonehead!
100MB hubs are cheap-o now anyway.
600 Mhz? That's gonna be 2 generations old by the
time it hits the stores next year...
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
What is with these lamers lately? Do they have nothing better to do with their time?
If Microsoft was never created, who would we have to hate?
Remember, the target X-box price is in the $300 range. An NVidia GeForce DDR graphics card alone will set you back $200+.
The integrated design of the X-box will, theoretically, make it cheaper to manufacture than an equivalent PC, assuming the volumes are similar.
Also, Microsoft probably intends to sell the X-box hardware for a loss (common practice in the game console world), and make their profits by extracting licensing fees from game makers. This should increase the price gap between the X-box and a similarly equipped PC.
What I don't understand is why include a hard disk? In the console world, price is everything. Why add $60-80+ to the end user price? Sure a hard disk is a great addition, but make it just that, an addition. Also, after Rob's experience with his Tivo drive going bad, I wonder how many X-boxes will be sent back with bad hard disks.
In addition, there's no way you'll be able to buy a sub-$500 PC that has the graphics horsepower of the X-box. An NVidia GeForce DDR card alone will set you back $200+.
The X-Box in particular will look interesting to PC developers because it's an architecture they're already intimately familiar with, but without the compatibility headaches of the standard Intel architecture.
Also, game developers won't have to develop to the lowest-common-denominator of PC hardware. They'll be able to take advantage of specific features in the NVidia graphics chipset to enhace their games.
What I don't understand is why include a hard disk? Since price is so sensitive, you could drop he overall price significantly by excluding it, not to mention improving overall reliability.
MS is releasing PocketPC to manufacturers soon. The marketroids really pick terrible names for the embedded lines.
4 72028,00.html
Windows CE = Wince (the facial expression of sudden pain)
Now they've updated it, added a new interface, and call it "PocketPC." Say that a few times and see if it isn't a bit too phonetically similar to a portable autoerotic contraption.
PocketPC
PocketPC
PocketPC
PocketPC
"You used to flinch in pain, but now you can just fuck yourself. Where do you want to come today? -- Microsoft"
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2
They unveiled the PSX2 the same week the DC was released in Japan. Don't bitch at Microsoft for something all console manufacturers do.
Don't hold your breath - it will be using an optimized version of the Windows 2000 kernel (which is much better than Linux, IMO)
My PC has 128 MB RAM, a Creative 5x DVD-kit, PIII, Win2K kernel (not a stripped-down version, the fat, bloated one). I guess 70 percent the same as an X-Box.
if by any, you mean not any, then yes, you are correct.
----------------------------
--
Is it just me, or am I the only one who thinks that this thing will already be outdated by the time it comes to market?
Yes, you'll probably be able to spend 5 times as much (or more) for a machine that is much more capable than this one.
On the other hand, a console with fixed specs has the serious advantage that it's worth a developer's time to take advantage of every capability of the hardware. You won't find many games taking advantage of a Matrox G400's bump-mapping, since only a small fraction of the game buyers will have a G400. But everyone who buys an X-Box game will have the same graphics cards, and thus all its features are worth optimizing for.
Speaking of different computer systems, what I would like is like a laptop, except without the built-in keyboard, but with the computer bits built in to the screen. Add touchscreen tech so it's like a Palm, only with a 10"+ screen, full color, ability to run "real" OSes, etc. (With USB and maybe firewire for adding external devices, including keyboards, mice, et al.) Give it a roll-up screen cover for protection, or some other screen protection that keeps out of the way while using the device. I wonder if anyone is working on such a beast?
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
>Most popular PC games are programmed outside of Japan (USA, Europe). I
>much prefer PC games to their console counterparts.
Who cares? Go to an arcade and take a look at the games people are playing. There won't be a single PC-type game anywhere in sight at most of these places. The arcade I go to most often had a coin-op Quake game but I don't think that thing lasted a week before it was gone.
Microsoft's "Gaming Console" is going to suffer the same fate as Atari's repackaged 8-bit computers that Atari tried to pass off as Gaming Consoles....
Just like the Sega Dreamcast uses WinCE, even though they're in competition? Or Compaq buying Windows, supporting Linux, _and_ Tru64? Companies won't switch because MS represents their milch cow right now, and until free operating systems get more mindshare (not necessarily be installed, but more awareness), you'll see the same hypocrisy from a lot of companies.
Windows 2000: Designed for the Internet. The Internet: Designed for UNIX.
They didn't unveil anything, they just put up a website! I don't see a product.
All this is is vaporware 2.0: Vaporware with a little but of cash spent on a logo and a colorful (yet ultimately disposable) website.
I'm gonna side with RXC on this one. Same old MS vaporware tactics.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Now wouldn't that be funny.
If WebTV is any indication, they'll probably do everything in their power to prevent you from doing this, but it should be possible all the same.
Yay! $200 Linux box!
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
What doeas the actual unit look like?
Do not read this
How about a port of XBill. Now there's an icon :)
Read the date on that page: It says March 10th.. I'm sure we've all already seen that page..
xer.xes -- 4181
I'm with you on this. This is so much VaporHARDware at this point. Seems to be the normal MS strategy of putting out the vapors(also known as farting) two years in advance to squish the competition before it happens.
Hey Bill. TO LATE!
Have you compiled your kernel today??
I note the benifits to the consumer AND to MS in that post.
Actually... mine was a legitimate post. And yours was just rhetoric attempting to belittle.
<BR><BR><BR>
You state, "The whole point of a game console is that the performance stays fixed, developers learn to squeeze performance, games just work, and so on.
<BR><BR><BR>
Well, ok, thats all well and good. So, say i upgrade my processor. How does this impact the games development or performance other than it being able to run faster, higher fps, etc? What about 3d archetecture? Something wrong with Nvidia making a new 3D chipset that is backward compatible?
<BR><BR><BR>
This answers your question on wether or not games will 'just work'. Of course they can if the modular design of this system is engineered correctly.
<BR><BR><BR>
Buh Bye.
<BR><BR><BR>
++Om
sorry... forgot to set the HTML tag. I'm not THAT clueless.
Nah, you didnt upset me. You have an exellent point. I can see the disaster you are indicating.
However, I dont think it would be so bad if the proper marketing was executed. I come from the Amiga line of computers. Clearly written on the box were the system requirements. (Ex: AmigaOS 2.0 or greater, 2M+ of RAM required). THIS in and of itself would make users WANT to buy the 'upgrades'. So say they have the X-Box released. Two years later, they come out with the 'X-Box Plus Upgrade Kit ' which includes a new processor and 3D chipset (thats backwards compatible with the OLD games). Games released that were programmed for the new upgrade do not work W/O the upgrade installed. So this is a marketing move AND a technological move.
Now lets talk about timelines. You can pretty much milk a gaming system for all its worth in about 2-3 years. THAT would be the moment when the upgrade would hit. The problem would be to convince people that the upgrade would be like buying a new system alltogether at a cheaper price. I'm not marketer, but I suppose that could work as well.
Now I will hit 'Preview'... ahh.. yes... and now.. this but*click*
MicroSoft may have a winner on its hands if it does the following. Now pay attention. They are on the verge of something very cool in the game console market. Like everything Microsoft does (they copy), they can copy the spirit of the home PC with this by making it UPGRADEABLE.!!
Now, lets think about this.
They are pricing it 'competitivley' (sp) with PSX 2. When you buy a PSX 2, you are stuck with what you got until Sony comes out with PSX 3. Now with the X-BOX, what if you could UPGRADE it? For example to incorporate the new 1Ghz processor? Microsoft need only sell the 'upgrade' to the box. That would reduce their own cost (dont have to constantly re-engineer an entirely new system) and just sell the chips. What about 3D hardware that NVIDIA will undoubtably make for the machine after the initial launch? Well, why not sell THAT componet as well? Bigger HD? Why not? More RAM? Sure. All these mean that ultimatly they will get more money per console than PSX -2 will, at least on the Hardware side. Sony sells PSX 2s, MS sells X-Box and all the 'upgrades' at approx 100 dollars a pop.
See the comparison? This can be the first MODULAR game console. They just need to make upgrading it EASY. Just pop the case off, take the 'Upgrade Kit' and stick it in the slot. Badda-Bing/Badda-Bang... you have a new 'upgraded' X-Box.
They can move much faster in upgrading than the PSX 2 can in re-engineering a whole system.
Now, will it be BETTER than the PSX 2? Well, probably not using x86 archetecture... but.. who will know that? You and I... yes... but will the masses know that? Thats whats important. They will see '1000 Mhz UPGRADE!' Thats all you have to say, and the masses will think, '1000 Mhz? My LORD that a lot of something! Buy it!'
Think about it. They are on the brink of something really good. To give you an example, I havent bought a new computer in about 2 years. Why? Because my old one has been upgraded... and upgraded... and upgraded...
War Quake 2/3 - LMCTF/ACTF
++Om
The biggest reason people use Win9x over NT is that when they went down to Sam's club or Circuit City or wherever, the computer they bought was pre-loaded with 9x.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
You can pretty much count on Cringely for a good column every week but the one about the X box is last weeks (changes every Thursday)and you can get to it by clicking here.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
WinCE... don't remind me, I have 2 of em, a Philips Nino 510 and a HP 620lx. I've completely locked up the Nino 510 once, which isn't too bad, but don't even get me started on the 620lx. First off, it has it's own "reset" button, and you can probably guess what that is used for. That machine frequently takes trips to the crapper, locking up, not initializing the ethernet card, and whole bunches of other things.
My favorite thing that it does, is when you turn it off and on around 3 times with the ethernet card in, the card will stop working completely, no lights on the ethernet hub. And the only way to get it back, is to yank the battery while it's alive (not a smart idea) or use the nifty handy reset button.
The only reason I still have these two things is because I got them both for free, one from work, and one from a contest.
Okay, my grunting for the day is compete.
-Drew (unhappy CE owner who can't wait to put Linux on his Nino 510)
Rule 2: Remember this box will have Windows CE underneath it (or some varient). Bloat^2.
Rule 3: Remember this box is designed to compete with PlayStation 2. PlayStation 2 can do a number of non-game things (with extensions that MS will have already installed out of the box). As the number of non-game things grows, it will fall prey to people asking more than what can be done reasonably. If the PC never did this, Moore's law would be a moot point. Albiet, when this happens in the gaming console world, its a free-for-all on who wins the next generation; the PC world is still Wintel on a generation change.
MS will use this to lock in people away from other products as best they can by over-integrating everything in site. This includes a Web-TV-like interface (don't know if they've said that, but they've thought it -- there's gotta something underneath that interfaces with the "broadband internet" system). Once you hit the 'net, you start bringing in things that change subject to the PC and Workstation world, where things ALWAYS get more intensive than your CPU and memory can handle. ALWAYS.
If it was just used for games, then screw it, 600 is overkill (unless you are doing real 3D in the processor and not an optimized card). 600 + a decent card is overkill even for doing realtime 3D at decent resolution on a PC, much less the crappy TV res. even HDTV-level resolution would work well with that chip (but then the 64M memory becomes a _heavy_ limitation at the texture-mapping process)
At any rate, there will, by the time MS gets this thing out, apps that they want to work on it that will still (for various reasons) be slower than ideal, even for a 600Mhz chip. And game makers will have to deal with the portion of processor and memory that WindowsCE (or its varient) will take away from them (you probably cant bypass it as easily as you could bypass the O/S in the old 6502 boxes)...
Advantage of the 600 chip? by the time they're ready for mass production, those will be the "cheap chips".
Every chip is excellent for what it was meant to do. Every chip user asks more of his chip than was originally intended.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
of course, MS may just choose to ignore HDTV and only send out the standard TV signal. probably wouldn't hurt, unless they were to try to integrate the X-Box w/ Web-TV or something...
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
But does it run Linux?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
A couple of points:
1. By the time this is out (4Q 2001?) it will be hopelessly outdated from a hardware standpoint.
2. I don't think it will be released then either. Microsoft is scared of the new generation of internet enabled game boxes for the same reason it was scared of Netscape. They present an alternate method of accessing functions that the average user now has to go through the Windows OS to use. If one can hook a DSL line into a game box, then all of the internet is available, fast, including the new generation of online applications that are itching to replace Office. This is a classic example of MS announcing something to scare off the developers from support the rival option. The point is, MS doesn't even have to release the product as long as they scare off enough support for the existing boxes to make them a less than stellar success.
Like I'm going to buy from people who can't write
a www compliant web-page.
Actually, almost no new (and few existing) PC/M$-Windows games will run on the X-Box; it does
...); I've seen enough long pauses playing
not have enough memory for strategy games and the CPU is not really powerful enough for "shooters".
Either of these may change, but why bother to announce a box that's Dead-On-Arrival?
For example, M$'s "Age of Empires II" locks up part way through an 8-character (computer+human)
game in machines with less than 128 MBytes and even then if you allow more than 100 characters.
At NTSC/SVGA resolutions, 600 MHz is not very much x86 CPU to run a networked or multiplayer Quake or
similar game (a 600 MHZ G4, on the other hand
networked games on 550 PIIIs to know that.
Sounds like a real waste of time to me.
The X-Box seems like a very nice waste of time for Microsoft. From what I've read, it's nothing more than a simplified PC, which really can't compete. Sony and Nintendo have hardware that is designed explicitly to play games, and play them well. Everything in their boxes is designed with this task in mind. Besides, Sony, Sega, and Nintendo already have huge followings, so it would take some monumental games to get people to move to the X-Box (esp. with the PS2 being mostly backwards-compatible with PS games). I think I'll pass on this one.
Why would I buy a pc that I CANT upgrade (or not easily) to play my games on, when I can buy a real PC, play my games, browse the web, write papers, code, and upgrade HOWEVER and WHENEVER I want
Because an X-Box costs $300 and a PC with monitor and ISP connections costs $800 plus monthly ISP charge.
Tom
It was also nice of them to break the font-resize function, so that we can't change it to a readable size. But to be fair, they broke it in both Netscape and IE.
Why'd you say 'burma'?
Why'd you say 'burma'?
--I panicked.
The big difference between the X-Box and a standard PC is that all the transform/lighting/shadowing calculations will be done on the nVidia graphics processor, leaving the CPU completely free to do other stuff (physics, AI etc...).
The kind of performance that they should get with it looks like that it will be considerably more powerful than a playstation 2 (Which is what you'd expect, as it's coming out over a year later...).
The X-Box is still going to be a good buy, being a half to a third of the price of a computer, and games developers are going to be able to make much better use of the hardware than they can on a PC due to the fact that they don't have to get it to run on a wide range of hardware.
Just a thought, but isn't an X-Box another name
for a X Terminal, or at least I've always called
them X Boxes.
Maybe MS are confusing the issue a bit.
Afterall Linux runs X, and well to the novice 'X' and 'X' sound the same ?
Speaking of checking out the facts before judging... according to this, the Playstation 2 has a 128bit processor. 128 bits at 300MHz is still a wee bit more than 32 bits at 600MHz (The X-Box uses a PIII processor, which is only 32 bit...) Funny how MS never mentions that in their comparison charts...
By the time this thing ships, 600Mhz chips will probably cost about $50 bucks at retail. PCs will be shipping with 1.5GHz chips.
Intel may well be giving the chips away for free. They could afford it.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
We can only hope that the way they decide to sell it is as a loss-leader for some kind of networked service... (like Netpliance). $200 for a mostly-complete 600Mhz system will still be a great deal in a year. If it is $400, though, the price/performance may not be there.
The price is the big issue, along with exactly when they can get it to market. But we cannot know these things with any certainty until they actually ship.
I didn't even need to use IE to look at the page. I looked great in Netscape, had no active X, and... get this, the extension was .htm, NOT .asp. The site still runs IIS, though...
Not to nitpick, but your palm pilot runs Palm OS... Unless you're referring to your "Hand Held PC" as Microsoft puts it....
Yes, this might be a problem. Since one of the first games to be "ported" to X box will be Age Of Empires 2:AOK it will be interesting to see how they resolve this issue ( AOK requires at least 800x600 but practicaly is playable only at 1024x768 or higher )
How many will they have to give away so they can "compete". Remember M$ Media and IE. Now X-box, maybe it will also play playstation AND nintendo but NOT the other way around. Curious. . .
I think your right about the Pippin. And didn't Commodore come out with an Amiga console right before it bellied up as well?
Maybe history is on our side...
Brought to you by Frobozz Magic Penguin Fodder.
Funny. Apple Computer has always seemed to have troubles because they insist on being both a hardware AND software company. Now Microsoft want's to do the same? Get me a hammer and a nail!
So... Where do you want Bill to go today?
H-E-L-L
Brought to you by Frobozz Magic Penguin Fodder.
Frighteningly enough, the average IQ is really only between 90-100. *OVER* 100 is considered high, below 100 is normal (of course 85 and below are "low")...
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
The font is so small and odd looking that I can hardly read it - and Ctrl+] doesn't help me scale it.
White on Black, so I can't print it.
Lucky I can read the source! But man, some people to make it difficult for you to read what they want to tell you....
But does it run Linux??
It might very run existing PC games,
This is the part of the X-box that I think might hurt the rest of the PC game industry. All games would be made so that they could play on both a PC and the X-box. Of course, you could have a sliding scale of quality, so that super-wonderful systems were fully exploited, but that will only go so far. If most game writers are targeting an X-box displaying on a TV (even if they have VGA out, most people will use a TV), that would drastically change the type of games that are produced. No more screens full of text, not so many tiny numbers; if there's no way to do it on a TV they wouldn't do it. Games would be designed to be playable at 512xwhatever, and that would limit them a lot.
On the other hand, lots of PC games depend on a resolution of at least 640x480, and without that (through a TV), the x-box might look very bad.
Well, since NVIDIA is actually writing their own drivers (not that this makes them good), I hardly think that's the case. What, do you think Microsoft said, "We will pay you lots of money if you make your drivers closed-source! That'll show those Linux people!" From MS's perspective, closed-source hardware support for Linux is probably about as bad as open-source hardware support for Linux.
From the press release (all that's at the site, really):
You've gotta love the chutzpah of M$ talking about their "strengths" in software. I was playing their N64 monster truck game last week, and it actually crashed! (I had joked about it earlier because the friend who rented it knows my anti-M$ leanings... and then it happened -- the first time I've ever seen a console crash.)
--
-Esme
Unless there's a Mobile Suit Gundam Wing or Dragon Ball Z game for it.
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
Guys this press release is dated March 10th! I'm sorry but i'm sure this was mentioned already here as well...
100 is average
120+ is considered gifted
70- is considered slightly mentally deficient
I really like Microsoft's spec sheet that compares the X-box to the PS2. Mhz are up. Hard drive included. It pushes more polygons.
There is one main difference, though. The PS2 exsists! It's out in Japan. If you go to the right store, you can see one in the US. I've done this. I've seen it. I've felt it. I've played it. When can I do that with an X-box?
X-box has to be some of the best vaporware stats I've seen from Microsoft in awhile.
In my opinion, this thing is nothing but FUD. They see that PS2 stands to take a big chunk out of their market, possibly starting a new one. Something inbetween a counsel and a computer. The PS2 sold like 980,000 units in the first 48 hours of it's release. It's gonna continue to sell in Japan. When it comes out in the US and Europe it'll take those markets by storm as well. Microsoft no doubt sees this as a threat to their gaming market. So make up an imaginary threat to it and let the hype-machine take care of the rest.
However, I don't think Microsoft understands the counsel market as well as it thinks. I think this thing is going to tank, big-time.
I'm no expert, but I know where my money is going. PS2 for even just one simple reason... GRAN TURISMO 2000!!!!!
--
InstantCool
now that microsoft is competing with sony,
will sony continue to support windows on its PCs.
Its ironic that Microsoft competes with sony and yet sony pays them for every PC sold.. You figure micorsoft would eventually shoot themselves in the foot..myabe sony will switch to BeOS , linux or MacOSX.
No.. There not a monopoly.
If he really meant it, then I feel that makes it even funnier...
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
You think that's bad... I'm looking at the page with IE 5.01 and I still can't read it...
I can imagine Microsoft would have a big advantage in the console gaming market if the X-box could play PSX or PSX2 games as well as X-Box games.
...
Is this ridiculous? Not really. As far as I understand it, the OS for X-Box will be Windows-based, and currently there is Bleem (the PSX emulator for Windows). Is it really that hard to imagine MSFT making X-Box capable of supporting Bleem?
Also consider that Bleem has been fairing relatively well in the court cases
yes xbox was unveiled, officially or not, at GDC 2 weeks ago. Since then there has been more info come out about it. Gamespot's article is one of the best I've seen. Gamespot also has an xbox faq. Thresh's Firing Squad also has some analysis. And the demo unit looks like a big, black X. (pics in some of those articles)
Have you used Win2K? how do you find it crippled? I've found that it is a huge improvement over both 98 and NT.
M$ would really like to push people off of win9x (for some good reasons)
Maybe if they wanted to do that, they would remove LAN support from Windows: (screw) Me.
submitted a while back but probably dismissed as flamebait, which it is.
--
+&x
I think my Voodoo3 runs at 185(7?), some of the nVidia's might go up to 200, but that's tops, IIRC.
--
+&x
Time for some cable modem X-box hacking. (well, in 18 months I guess.)
Ought to be fun watching @Home trying to ask X-Box owners to check their machines for TFN2001.
"What's netstat? I don't have that disc.."
__
__
nothin' says lovin' like an open source penguin.
__
__
nothin' says lovin' like an open source penguin.
__
__
nothin' says lovin' like an open source penguin.
I have to bring up 98 every time I want to play games.
__
__
nothin' says lovin' like an open source penguin.
__
__
nothin' says lovin' like an open source penguin.
While I applaud them for being forward thinking, I hope that's a 10/100 port, or there could be problems. A lot of DSL and Cable modems only have a 10mbit port. Now, by the time this finally comes out, that may not be the case, but for now...
stored on computers from birth to the grave
It's not the speed of your processor, it's how you use it.
That's kinda like what my girlfriend tries to tell me when I'm depressed...
Thimo
--
Avoid the Gates of Hell. Use Linux!
I remember the Pippin. At the time it was predicted to destroy its competition, namely the likes of Nintendo and Sega. Oops.
A great deal of information on the Pippin--including technical specifications and photos--can be found at http://www.online-impact.com /144int/pippin/pippin.html. From the web site:
"Be Happy or Die." -- AoN
Well, lets hear it then.
-Docvert converts MSWord to OpenDocument, clean HTML
Hey.. what about Microsoft Bob? :-)
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
As a previous poster has already pointed out,
It's a question of mean vs. median.
Imagine the following 5 scores (not necessarily plausible numbers):
70 80 90 100 160
if my off-the-cuff math isn't wrong, the median of those scores is 90, but the mean is 100.
So 4/5 of the people you'd meet are at or below average intelligence. (!)
I think the font resize thing is just a bug and not intentional, otherwise, you wouldn't be able to resize the font on the WHAT OTHERS ARE SAYING page.
Of course, when you use font resize on that page (at least with Netscape) it blows away the background and changes the font style.
Work for Change & GET PAID!
This is one of the ugliest pages I ahve ever seen. There are quotes from Bugle and Electronic Arts that are presented as images only with no ALT text, and the text that is on the page is in microprint (when I try to use CTRL-] in Netscape, the page layout falls apart and font doesn't increase.)
Also, there is an email sign-up box with no privacy statement.
You would hope that all X-box webpages would be readable on a WebTV unit as this is one of their natural target markets, but I doubt that you could read the Image only quotes on WebTV.
Work for Change & GET PAID!
"That's gonna be 2 generations old by the time it hits the stores next year..."
That's true--if it hits the stores next year. Microsoft is projecting a release date in "Late 2001." That translates into 2004, in human years.
Sony, Nintendo, and maybe even Sega will be replacing the PS2, Dolphin, and DreamCast, before Microsoft ever gets their shit together on this one. I think that the X-Box is going to turn into the Microsoft Bob-Box.
Mike van Lammeren
Mike van Lammeren
It will challenge your head, your brain, and your mind.
I wonder if the X-Box will come with a Blue Screen of Death .. function. Or will customers have to purchase the BSOD seperatly? Maybe they'll have special BSOD cards, like the PSX has memory cards, that would be really cool!
it's a sig, wtf?
Dude, this is yet another instance of M$ using their market clout to hold (potential) customers at bay while they work on a system. You must remember the whole Win95/O/S2 Warp thing... IBM had a good working 32-bit OS like, what a year or two, before Win95 hit the market?! We didn't go that route because Bill announced his new baby and let the ship date(s) slip and slip until he had a (reasonable) working build. If M$ doesn't get broken up, this is just gonna continue. If Sony were smart, they _would_ change their OS preference :-)
.02
my
mrBoB
It'll be released in 2001, but how many bugs will it have 32,000? 64,000?
This thing sounds like what my computer would be if I got around to upgrading my processor. Heck, my dad got something close to it through one of those e-machines deals for free (ISP contract, but he needed an ISP anyways). Why would I want something with the same parts as my computer for only playing games?
And I love the press release: "Microsoft is developing a high-performance, easy-to-use platform that will enable developers to create better games, faster." Why do I feel like I've heard this line before? Couldn't be all those claims in the installation processes of Win95 & 98 ("It really does make your games faster! Promise!")
Well, from these very preliminary specs, it sounds like it MIGHT run Linux! It will probably have VERY proprietary Ethernet, Video, etc - but at around $300-$400, which is the MOST they could charge for it if they want to compete, it could end up being a good, Microsoft-provided Linux box!
You've got to be kidding me. (First the disclaimer: I currently work for Intel, however, I do not represent Intel, and my comments are my opinion only.) Processors cost money to manufacture (remember, they are a physical product). You can't just make copy after copy like software.
The most likely real reason for MS' decision for Intel over AMD is production capacity and stability. AMD has a rocky past, and has a long way to go before they can erase that past. They also can only deliver about 1% of the number of chips that Intel can. By Q3-4 of next year, 600MHz chips will be dirt cheap, small, and manufacturing will likely be able to churn them out in huge volume without a problem. MS is probably betting on Intel's ability to produce more than anything else.
So the real question is... can we get Linux on it? or even Be? .. perhaps even dual-boot? ;)
/* Lobster Stick To Magnet!*/
The press release says the X-Box is slated to launch in 2001 and I remember reading somewhere that they were _hoping_ (and this is Microsoft) for before Christmas 2001.
Now what I have to ask is, will a 600MHz PC with 64 MB RAM and an NVIDIA card really be all that by Christmas 2001, 21 months from now?
I doubt very much that the X-box will be available for a similar price. And by the trime it comes out no one will care about it. 600Mhz will be nothing. Might be ok to turn into a Linux Proxy or FTP, but still the price is a big problem.
The goos trhing about the I-opener is that it is cheap
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
I was working with a crap keyboard in the access lab you jacka$$. And the film could have been crap, but I like the quote, cause Nineteen Eighty Four kicked butt. Best novel I ever read.
My post makes perfect sense. By 2001, the X-box will be junk. And the thing is basically a computer used for gaming, how easy would it be to use it as a regular computer? Look at the I-opener.
Think before you post.
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
Um, hello? The X-Box was "unveiled" at the GDC, right? At least it felt that way, when they paused NVIDIA's presentation for an hour of finicky Bill, talking about the new console. Still, that happened almost two weeks ago...
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
You're correct, according to Bill's presentation it will run a stripped-down version of the Win2k kernel. Interesting, I didn't think stripping down software was within Microsoft's capabilities. ;^)
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
In the press release Microsoft states that the x-box will use the DirectX API. This is very interesting. It appears to mean that it will be the first game console to release it's SDK to the general public! Anyone with a modem can download the DirectX SDK from Microsoft's site and program games for this console! The specs say the x-box comes with an 8 Gigabyte Hard Drive. Does this mean we will be able to yank it out and toss in a 40 gig 7200 RPM drive? I know it won't support ultra 66 or anything but just the rpm increase is a 30% performance boost. What about the RAM? Unless it's soldered onto the motherboard it will most likely be in a Dimm slot. Another possibly easy upgrade? What do you guys think? I'm also assuming it will be able to play almost all of the current PC computer game titles right out of the box. Does anyone know this for sure? If so this system can't lose. The release of the x-box marks a milestone for the console gaming industry, possibly marking a couple headstones along the way.
Bill
Why does everyone seem to think that PlayStation 2 programming is the same as programming for the PlayStation?
The PS2 may be evolutionary in some respects, but on the whole it is an entirely new beast.
Wherever there's a will, there's a motorway.
Does anybody else get the feeling that the folks in Redmond are starting to panic a bit. We've had vaporware after vaporware touted for the last three years and it looks like the only thing Microsoft is really making money on is Office and their developer tools. Product announcements are now coming out years before the product will be ready. Windows 2000 was hyped up quite a bit, but since its release there has been much talk about. I think Microsoft has had some big financial losses with MSN, Windows 2000 development, and them also beginning to lose the internet server market. What does Microsoft really have besides Office and their development tools - a huge, bloated OS that looks like it is going to turn into one of the biggest money pits of all time. I personally have nothing against Microsoft other than their marketing practices, but they appear to me like a dinosaur fighting extinction. I mean who really anounces a product almost two years before it comes out.
Matt
Just think.. a stripped down version of Win2k should only take up about 500-700 MB's on that HD!! I can't wait... woo. Yeh my sig is ugly, deal.
(`._(`._( , , . JimmyPop[nL] . , , )_.)_.)
Hmmm...So where are they going to place the Ctrl+Alt+Delete buttons on this thing? ::grin::
I'm sorry, but it was just way too easy.
Why would I buy a pc that I CANT upgrade (or not easily) to play my games on, when I can buy a real PC, play my games, browse the web, write papers, code, and upgrade HOWEVER and WHENEVER I want. Is this even worthwhile for hardcore gamers? I can't forsee it playing any games that aren't available for a standard PC. This is about like going out to gateway and buying a pile of crap PC with the audio and vidio built into the mobo to force you to use them to upgrade. This goes a step further though and uses proprietary connectors. Any bets on whether or not MS has a copyright on the pinout so that only they can make joysticks and gamepads for the console? Expect to see sidewinder profits go through the roof.
Other concerns, under the hood, will it have any PCI slots for upgrading? How about memory expansion?
I ask again, why the hell would anyone buy a proprietary PC that only does games and movies when they can go out and get a real PC for not a whole hell of a lot more?
"Anyone who can't laugh at himself is not taking life seriously enough." - Larry Wall
And have you seen the HTML source? ;0)
I give up! I don't need a games console anyway, I have XEmacs
The Leyden-Gath converse to the Goldbach conjecture: "The sum of two odd primes is an even number"
Less RAM _and_ it's unified with the graphics memory...* Anyone have a PC with one of those really cheap motherboards with unified memory? I wonder if the X-box will suck as much as though did
* http://www.xbox.com/intro.htm says "64 MB of RAM (unified memory architecture)" at the bottom in the specs.
[A bit OT, but can you still get those m/bs anymore, or did they die off as quickly as they seemed to appear?]
Yes well you're probably right about most of that... but as an avid gamer with many years under his belt, I can tell you that you are not going to see gaming consoles replace PCs or vice versa. The only possiblity is if there were to somehow merge. I can tell you firsthand that console gaming and PC gaming are utterly worlds apart. The game styles themselves are radically different. PC Games are developed mostly in America and Europe, whereas probably 80-90% of all console games are developed in Japan.
As a short example, I was personally disgusted with every port of the Quake family to console systems (mostly due to shoddy controls), but I would never trade anything in the world for those long evenings of a Final Fantasy session. Sitting on the floor, controller in hand, and pepsi nearby. Ahhh....
yeah, even though i'll readily and eagerly admit that it sucks, every video game console manufacturer worth their salt "releases" their game system YEARS ahead of the actual release. Remember the Super Famicon? That sucker never even made it to the US. Super Nintendo was WAY late, which is why Sega is still around today.
BTW, Dreamcast is incredible, even though it runs on WinCE. I love polygon graphics that are sophisticated enough to make breasts bounce up and down on the screen. Gotta love video game programmers.
lf.o
What's going to be interesting is what nVIDIA delivers: given that MS/nVIDIA have been in a position to design this kit from the ground up, how about a high-bandwidth (4096 bit wide) bus to dual-ported main memory with the whole rendering pipeline (geometry calculations, T&L, polygon filling and rendering) in hardware. In that case, the processor's reduced to doing little more than scanning the ports and running the AI, which a 600MHz x86 piece is more than capable of.
Consider: your 600MHz PC has to run Windows 98/Windows 2000/Linux (with all that entails) underneath any games - all those other processes running in the background certainly aren't helping your main aim of throwing lots of polys around. It's got to communicate with its video hardware via either the (slow) PCI bus or the (slightly faster) AGP bus, but both these are still horrible bottlenecks.
Let's face it, if you were going to design a hardware architecture to play video games on, the PC's probably about as far from ideal as you can get. Similarly powered hardware in a properly architected system will blow a PC out of the water - compare a SNES (running a modded 6502) with an AT.
--
Cheers
Cheers
Jon
--
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
A lot of people will care; those people who, unlike you, have absolutely no desire to run linux in their living room. The X-Box draws consumers because of its simplicity; you can just pop in a DVD and play it. No installation hassles, no DirectX to update, no compatibility difficulties. It draws developers because they only have to support one platform, which relieves a huge headache from development and support angles. As for having sub-PC specs, look at the modern consoles from the other companies. Console hardware is universally far from the cutting edge, because it doesn't have to be. Using chips from a few generations back allows these companies to sell their products at a price attainable for the average household. And extensive customizations to these chips allow them to commonly whip the piss out of competing PC games. Yes, you can get a "better" PC for a similar price, but there are still a lot of people who don't want one (or a second). John Q. Public isn't as "smart" or "informed" as you.
Your forgetting something very important... Monitor resolutions are typically at least twice that of TV resolutions. Imagine the frame rates you will get with the X-box specs when the resolution is less than 640x480.
The company offers a wide range of products and services designed to empower people through great software - any time, any place and on any device.
Does this sound familiar to any of you? Personaly I haven't been able to run an MS product on anything but x86 and even that's not fully implemented... :-)
42 !
Great answer! At the risk of being redundant. This sounds like typical FUD tactics to compete against the Playstation 2. For a history of the relationship between M$ and Sony, check out Cringely's article. It's obvious M$ is afraid of losing the set-top box war with Sony, so the FUD machine is in high gear.
Until there's an actual box on their web site, this will be vaporware as far as I'm concerned.
They actually do that well. I like their keyboard, joysticks and this box sounds sweet. If only they would leave the OS and NOS market alone ;)
Not that I am defending Microsoft, but at the same time, they could very well suprise us all and release a *completely* different spec'd box by the time it hits, simply because of changes in the industry. Also you can't compare this to a computer, simply because that is not its final goal. Granted it seems not to far removed, but then again, neither is any other console, yet you don't compare a pIII 800 to a Nintendo 64.
I assume you're referring to the quote from an AMD exec saying something along the lines of "we weren't prepared to give our chips away". I don't imagine that this means that Intel is literally giving away their chips, but more that they came down to a very low price that AMD couldn't afford to match.
Ah, but will they be similar? I agree that from a technical point of view it will be easier to port PC games to or from the XBox than other consoles, but that doesn't necessarily imply that this is what most game developers will do.
Fact is that consoles and PC are generally suited to different types of games (with some overlap, of course) - and it's not really anything to do with the technology. The PC environment has the user sitting on his/her own, close to a high resolution display, with a mouse and keyboard. The console has one or more users sitting in the same room, some distance from a low resolution display, with a gamepad. It makes sense that different games are suited to the different situations.
Many PlayStation owners are also PC owners. I assume that the same would apply to XBox owners. The question is not how XBox compares to a PC, but how XBox compares to other game consoles.
--- Joe Seghatoleslami | joe@cranbury.org
Sony has been very quiet about Linux. This jump by M$ into the game market hopefully will spark Sony into investing into Linux as an alternative. We all know the tech reasons how about the biz? Sony has to pay for every copy of M$ it installs but when a customer has a problem Sony gets the call. Sony has to maintain the call centers and pay the staff either way. How about Sony help to improve Linux on the desktop, give it away and use its giant powers to support it.
That's incorrect info. I have a good friend who lives on my school campus who's beta testing ME, and it works just dandy on our school's novell-run LAN. (not that i am pleased to defend ms... but let's keep our facts strait.)
Where are my GPFs? I WANT MY GPFS!!
"Reviewers tend to send the game back if it crashes even once."
You know, this is still the most wierd thing on earth;
People can send back a losy game for not working, but what about all the programs people rely on at work that crashes atleast once a week? They sure as hell don't get sent back.
WHY?
While dedicated video memory is faster, I can use more memory for textures and video on the O2 than an Onyx Infinite Reality... In fact, you may find this stupid, but I was given the choice of an SGI Octane or an O2, but at the time the most texture memory an Octane had was 4MB, and the price difference was big enough that I just took the O2.
My opinion, though, is still that the best performance is not going to be derived from UMA. At least, not yet. In the future I believe it will definately be the way to go. Need more texture memory? Just add another DIMM (or whatever it will be by then).
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Stupid sexy Flanders.
This is worlds ahead of other consoles, and if that's what you like to play on, this is a good thing.
This means that it is heavy, noisy, susceptible to heat problems, and certainly not anywhere near indestructible or ultra-portable - which is why I will continue to use my PlayStation, despite owning two PCs with any number of operating systems.
"... and more and more now there are all kinds of electronic goodies available" -- Pink Floyd 1972
...first off, it's running on the NT 4 kernel... apparently, Bill didn't want little kids to get the Blue-Screen-Of-Death each time they played their favority video game.
Secondly, this thing needs more RAM! I'd rather have a smaller hard drive than get fragged while my character was moving at one frame per second since the hard drive was trying to crank data out of the swap file!
And finally, since this thing's going to be using the internet, I can just imagine a whole line of links aimed solely at the X-Box to try and make the thing crash miserably.
Actually UltraHLE runs a bunch of games now if you apply all the patches or something like that.. (not that I care, I don't think n64 games are that great) and you could easily make an emulator work with carts.
I recall an old peice of PC hardware that had a genesis cart port in it. All you had to do was stick the cart in and you could play genny games on your computer. It wasnt a backup unit either.. and im pretty sure it was lisenced by sega..
Rumours are abound now that dreamcast is going to start shipping with a psx emulator on disc.. with enhanced graphics.. dont know yet, but that would be pretty damn cool
no
The dreamcast is SEGA's last console.. they are going to be a software developer from now on. (where did I read that anyways?)
no
I originally tried to get this posted on the 10th. What interests me more than the x-box is the picture of the actual X-box (or the one that's in this article from ZDNet ). That's gotta be one of the coolest cases I've ever seen. I wish they had more pictures of them, maybe with specs for how the motherboard fits in there, etc...
Seems like a lot of people are missing the point here. It's not designed for running Linux or Office, but for playing games. It won't appeal to PC gamers (they've already got PCs), it'll appeal to console gamers - and there's a lot of them about. It'll offer the price, and all the power-up-&-go convenience of a console, with the ease of development of a PC.
Some specs (e.g. CPU, RAM, hard drive) will be low-end by general-purpose PC standards, when it's released, but the graphics will be state-of-the-art. Sure your new PC will run POVray twice as fast, but I bet the X-Box games will be similar, or better. Developers can usually take better advantage of a known, stable platform than they can with a PC, because they don't have to cater for the lowest common denominator.
Although it'll be running "a version of Windows 2000", you won't see it. There won't be configuration problems, or patches to install, you just pop in your game CD & go. The OS will boot fast because it'll simply load a RAM image from the HD, a la Win2K hibernation. They're going to hide the PC-ness from the user, and present only the console face.
Of course, clever people will doubtless find a way to install Linux on the hard drive, and then suddenly they'll have a $200 PC with networking, sound, fast gfx and a DVD drive, but to the 71 million PlayStation owners out there, it'll be a new console they can run their PSX games on (via Bleem!), but which is just as easy to use as their PSX2, and looks considerably nicer. Not to mention that it'll get all the latest games a lot sooner than the PSX2 will, due to the ease of porting from the PC (ever heard how hard it is to use those wonderful PSX2 features?).
I think the hardware will certainly be competitive (with other consoles), and the games will be plentiful (so long as MS get their marketing right, and they've started off on the right foot - the PC developers looked happy). MS say the price will be comparable to other consoles ($150-$300).
So, think of it as a console, with easy to use, consistant games, with the potential to be a really cheap, basic PC. Just don't expect anyone to replace their main PC with one.
Namarrgon
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Oh c'mon. Don't what if it's a 600MHz P12 (joke, but it proves a point). It's not the speed of your processor, it's how you use it. Also, the whole "spec" is about as vague as can be. MS is trying to rain on the collective Dreamcast/PS2/Dolphin parade. Of course, this is what scares me: ** Proprietary A/V connector ** could be harmless... could be MS trying to corner the cable market!
Wait, wait wait. Does this mean that Cable/DSL modems wont work on ME?
----
Don't underestimate the power of peanut brittle
ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
Will it still have enough LAN functionality to make it work with Cable and DSL modems? And waht about home networking for Lan Parties and such?
----
Don't underestimate the power of peanut brittle
ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
like that, so there would be a good reason for it not being readable.... Isn't the web for disseminating information, not hiding it!?!? Cheers,
Que Deus te de em dobro o que me desejas
[May God give you double that which you wish for me]
120+ is considered gifted
70- is considered slightly mentally deficient
Ok, that depends on what you mean by average, doesn't it?
Do you mean average in the sense of score of a person considered of average ability, or average in the sense of median score for the people tested in the United States?
They are two different things. It is highly reasonable to say that the median score of the tested people is not average by range of the test (unless the test recalculates it's average score dynamically)
OB Topic:
I personally think MS does not have the clout to bring cheap broadband to the masses. It is a difficult proposition (This is known as the last mile problem), and if they can do it, I will be impressed.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Does this spell the end of those memory cards ?
None of the other systems (PSX,N64,Dolphin) have hard drives, why the X-Box ?
Then again, this release w/the product itself has FUD written all over it
-Bungle INC
What leading edge technology ? 600 Mhz Celeron Chip, 8Gb hard drive, 3-D NVIDA card. Sounds like cutting edge about six - nine months ago.
--
Duh.
BoneShintai
The last line of their full press release. .... any time, any place and on any device. OK, what about my Alpha, your mac, his N64, their Sparc and ............
Micro$oft
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
Any gaming console running in the same OS as my palm pilot should be taken out and shot.
Then again, I *am* just another idiot.
Stop thinking of the X-box as some kind of PC.
It is not--just because it uses components that
are familiar to PC game developers does not mean
that it is a "PC Jr."
Xbox is supposed to have a psychotically
fast bus architecture and a graphics system
to match. This means that mhz of the cpu aren't
so important... just like how the PS2's graphics
can blow away PCs with 3x more mhz.
Think of it like a closed-arch console, not a PC
when you try to decide if it will succeed or not.
I've seen it and it looks very COOL. A big metal x, all chromy and shiny with a cool glowing orb in the middle.
BTW: The x-windows x is fscking ugly!
Hooray for cool cases! I'm hanging out for a perfect hermetical sphere case for my servers, so I can stack them like a family of rats.
:wq
Hey isn't this a bit to late? X-box was shown over a week ago on game developers conference by Gates him self, I was there and i was not that impressed. X-box is over 1.5 year away and nvidia and 3dfx will have released 3-4 generations of 3d hardware before it will be out. The generation of nvidia chip set that the X-box will based on will be in you PC this fall. Shore it looks cool but so will everything else by the end of 2001. compare it whit PS2, ok it not as good as the X-box but it is out now! and currently it kills the PC, in the end of 2001 X-box wont kill any thing, not whit a 32 bit pIII, a year old Nvidia chip set, and only 64 meg of ram. I don't think it will Die, I just think it will be a lot less success full compared to the PS2. And btw, nothing is clear about who gets to develop, marketing, pricing royalties and a bunch of other stuff that we need to know. Sorry Bill but I don't believe in it
Personally, I've given up with submitting stories. Everything I have submitted has been thrown out. Then, a couple of days/weeks later, the same or very similar story appears via someone else.
Find funky gifts
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The press release is about the worst web page I have ever seen. I wonder if the product will be any better.
"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!" -- Dr. Strangelove
Just because its been tackled by M$, it doesnt automatically mean that there is an additional monopolistic motive, or that its going to be uter crap. They have very intelligant engineers working in Redmond (wheelmouse anyone), and they try to do AS WELL AS THEY CAN under given design constraints. If they start of with a crappy API and 9 months to release a product (Chicago anyone), they'll do the best they can to engineer a product. If they are given the luxury to scrap everything and start fresh (aka BeOS), I'm sure they'll release a kick-ass product. The long-term success of the MS-X will depend on the design decisions they make today - will they start with a brand new API, or hack Win32API? Will X software be compatible with PC software? At the end of the day, I want a bullet-proof/idiot proof product which I can use in the living room with a 70cm TV, and I don't care who makes it
Revolution = Evolution
It is quite old news. The product was announced and shown off (Demo's) almost 2 weeks ago at the GDC and in Japan at the same time.
Byron
http://www.activexbox.com
It comes with a hard drive so you have somewhere to store all the software patches that will be released.
If they do things right....
Hah! That's the funniest thing I've heard all week! ROTFL!!!
I read some intruiging reviews about QIII and performance. Nvidia is seriously in bed with Intel as well.
The reviewr basically said he could not figure out why for any reason the PIII's of lower processing power were beating out higher powered athlons (incidentally the athlons and PIII were equal Mhz but the athlon isof course the quicker of the two.)
QIII Was running a good deal faster more than 5-10fps in some instances on the PIII's. The reason suggested was Invidia/Intel optimizations that intel made to compilers for them and the chips for them. Stuff they are not just going to give out. So I truly believe Nividia is slowly and quietly (to the masses) in bed with intel and microsoft and their regime. (It could be worse yes but it does not change the facts.)
Okay if this thing is in the 200-300 Dollar range here are a few reasons *I* would buy one.
:-)
:-)
:-).
:-)
:p hehe I love new toys I really dont care if it is made by ms or anyone else. If I enjoy it I will buy it and waste away my days playing with it. I try and not let idealism get in the way of my enjoyment of life, its been rough enough without being an RMS and not using anything but Free software.(Note I know thats not politically correct.)
:-)
Proprietary disk formats? mmmn, nothing like reverse engineering it. And you know people will and I will help
USB? Hack that to, I know this sounds lame but lets port a useful opearting system to it. Meaning a BSD or Linux since these are tools we have source code for
Porting will probably be less of a task since we will have x86 compatible which means little to no porting for the processor arch this helps.
You get a Free OS Kernel on this thing and you can do whatever the heck you want with it. Ethernet? Cool, get a device driver working for it (I imagine MS is cheap and unless they are really stressing making reverse engineering difficult they will use a name brand nic with quality drivers out there already. to which we will most likely already have drivers for)
I dont play games much so I would not be buying one for games
Reverse engineer the USB port's and how they communicate and you have access to a lot more stuff.
Another important factor to consider is how much on die integration all of this will have with the mobo. The more there is the harder it becomes to hack. but if you have say.. an open PCI slot.. the sky's the limit.
Granted its lame for gaming but they will be in a HIGHLY competitive market and if we can take advantage of this...
Overall I agree with your point buying an X-Box is a bad idea over a PC however its wrong to assume it will not be useful in certain capacities.
I am sort of excited
Alright so dont discourage them damnit. With maybe two weeks of saving I could afford 3 or 4 of these. Beowulf anyone? ROFL (Okay thats a lame troll
Jeremy
Actually, they have released some movies from the console at the GDC. Here they are at pc.ign.com.
Bleem I _MIGHT_ be able to see... but certainly not ultra HLE. It would be feasable to install bleem onto the HD, and run a NON-COPIED PSX disk, therefore not really breaking copyright legistlation, but there's no good way to do that with a cart - UltraHLE only ran like 3 games well, anyways....
Americans have never really been any good at writing console software though. Not being funny or anything, but all the good amiga/64/spectrum stuff was written by Europeans, and most of the best Megadrive/Snes stuff was written by the Japanese.
American coders wrote all that spacequest/civilisation/wing commander stuff that was high on graphics and stuff, but low on fast, slick side of things.
Given that the x-box is supposed to be a console and not a pc (heh - discuss!), i`m not sure what you yanks are going to do with it!
If I worked at Sony/Sega/Nintendo, i`d be trying to get Jeff Minter an x-box developement kit. The `Curse of Minter` is enough to finish off just about anything.
P.
Well, if u turn the CSS on, it won't make much difference anyway... They have use 'px' instead of 'pt' to define the font size. Come out 4-6 pixels hight. I'm not sure who's fult that is, or even if it is a bug. But u thought thay would have tested it out on At least One other browser other than IE. Oh well, no pretty pics to see either...
- - -
600 MHz x86 compatible CPU
/here/, and /here/ -- $price for a overpowered X terminal, now that is a good deal.
Custom 3-D NVIDIA graphics processor
64 MB of RAM (unified memory architecture)
Custom 3-D audio processor
8GB hard drive
4X DVD drive with movie playback
Four game controller ports
Expansion port
Proprietary A/V connector
100 MBps Ethernet - Bungie, Inc. - Electronic Arts
8 GB HD, 100 Mbps Ethernet! Fuck yea. X86 proc, I wonder how many hours it will take before slashDOT posts:
Hacked: Linux running X Box
somegeek@geek.com has gotten Linux and NetBSD up and running on his X box. You can find info
read more
My bet is 6 hours after these are shipped to your local walmart : )
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
I seriously doubt that it is a good product. Not because I'm a MS-basher/linux-freak/fascist-computer-user, but for these reasons:
Then again...this could be a wonderful product that provides an easy game-programming interface that allows joe smoe to program his own game and let people have a web-tv/game/movie player in one that is really great.
Well...there is my ill informed opinion. (I didn't really look at the webpage)
Roy Miller
--Roy
Is it just me, or am I the only one who thinks that this thing will already be outdated by the time it comes to market? What they are describing is already in use by hardcore gamers....... I'm not a MacroSoft basher, I just don't understand the market they're going after....
That's probably accurate if you're talking to a Quake fanatic. Too bad the PC games market is about half the size of the console market...
Dan
It is about time, but all that I have ever really wanted is a good old , capitalistic, god-fearing gaming console made in Detroit. Is that too much to ask for?
Throw me a frickin' bone here...
-ShelbyCobra
Living life in the right side of the s-plane
What, me worry?
That is not so difficult ;-))
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
For other consoles this might be true...
But according to M$ FUD this thing will have a x86 processor and some crippled (I didn't know it could get even more crippled) w2k. So it will basicly be a pc. I think you can compare it in this case.
Grtz, Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
And every controller comes equiped with an analog stick, 6 buttons and Ctrl+Alt+Del buttons.
phew, I almost thought they forgot it.
Fortunately they remembered, 8 Gb should be
just enough for the swapfile.
Just like Microsoft to make a big deal out of nothing. First off we have known for some time they were working on this, so much for the "unveiling." Now they announce that a year after they were supposed to have it they will finally finish. Where have we heard that before? And the specs are ridiculous. That kind of hardware will be obsolete by the time they make it available. Even so it is doomed to fail as Microsoft has no concept of the true power of the console market, just as they failed to understand palmtops. The whole point of the console is that the game is optimized for and directly controls the hardware (read ultra-low overhead) In other words, exactly the opposite of anything M$ has ever made. If it runs Windows, it is NOT going to work out. Also, M$ has had game divisions before. Its just that they did not stand behind them and did not consider gaming important; they never have. That is why they will not be able to attract the better game developers. Game developers tend to be mavericks and will probably not be attracted to working at Microsoft, especially under a manager who has no experience whatever with gaming.
Sounds like it could do the work of a TiVo or Replay box also? No? True convergence from the bottom up?
This seems like a net appliance with game controllers.
What is going to be the medium for game distribution with the X-Box? Download over the Internet? Software you must load onto the HD? DVD?
I don't trust Microsoft Hardware with a ethernet connection...they could do some scary stuff. What the hell is this thing and why does it need an expansion port?
"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch." - Jack Nicholson
If I remember correctly, IQ is based on an average. Your IQ is based on what the average person in your age category scored.
I forget if the quotient itself is scaled, but i think it is on a sliding scale, thus making 100 always average.
I am also unable to setup the email with netzero.
>Computers for the smart, x-box for the stupid and the uninformed!
Well, yeah.. exactly. You just summed up M$'s whole marketing strategy. Remember that _average_ IQ is 100. The ratio of smart vs stupid and uninformed is in Microsoft's favor!
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
They said that about Saturn, too.
I just wonder what operating system it will have. Linux is out of question, but I hope they don't install standard win2000 in it. Probably it will have a special version of W2K, or what do you think?
When you smile, the world laughs at you.
No kidding...who thinks this thing has any staying power?
I'm giving it less than a year from the actual-in-the-store release date before it's abandoned or replaced with 'X-Box II'.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
While in general I agree -- Microsoft seldom seems to reach thier software/OS goals -- the hardware they've speced for the machine is minimal and is available already. They also tend to put out good hardware, even if it is mostly mice, joysticks, and keyboards. The WinCE and PC?? specs tend also to be fairly well thought out, even if MS didn't actually create the hardware.
Getting the hardware together for a game console should be easy, allowing them to meet the 2001 deadline without too much stress.
As for the software, I doubt that will be as stable, timely, or practical...but when has that prevented them from shipping product?
(Side note: WinCE; good hardware with an inappropriate OS...who wants to deal with a desktop metaphor -- including all the baggage -- on a handheld?)
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Can anyone see Microsoft convincing anyone to even port their games to this thing? But wait, if MS uses their market power to "convince" people to port their existing games and to write new ones for it, say in return for access to API's in W2K or some other market technique. I see it having alot of games real fast.
Kensignton had a scroll whell mouse available beofre M$ did....
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
But it's all meaningless until I see the games. ... tho it will likly use a variant of Win2K's kernel.
A handful of games have been officially announced from US publishers. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 and Ready 2 Rumble 2 are some of the games currently in the works. As it stands now, the list of developers and publishers includes (but is not limited to): Electronic Arts, Konami, Eidos, Namco, Acclaim, Infogrames, Activision, Capcom, Take-2 Interactive, Ubi Soft, THQ, Sierra Studios, Lionhead Studios, Midway, Hasbro Interactive, Universal Interactive Studios, Rockstar Games, Fox Interactive, Koei, Titus, Hudson Soft, and Bungie. Realistically, it's pretty hard to develop a game for a box that has just started to begin the design phase. They're not even completely sure on what OS it will run
And I love this bit about a "proprietary AV connector." There's Microsoft, Embracing and Extending again. Who's going to use that, anyway? If the X-Box is going to work with current TV's (and it has to), it'll have to have an adapter of some sort. Better to throw in a $10 adapter with a TV than make something you can only hook one thing up to; monitor manufacturers have done this for years with Mac monitor adapters.
The custom A/V-out port does not just do TV... it also supports CRT monitors, LCD flat panel, and high-definition TVs for a maximum resolution of 1920x1080.
Honestly, MS; you're getting sloppy (in tactics; you always were with coding but that's beside the point). WinCE failed to capture the PDA market. ... I think WinCE has been an incredible success. Has there been any other palmtop since the Palm Pilot series that has made a dent in the consumer market? I can't think of any other than the WinCE palmtops. But we'll save that topic for another discussion.
I disagree
By the way, in case people are interested in seeing screenshots:
Some Game?
MPEG demo
So, tell me this. Will the X-Box be 128 bit like the PSX 2 or will it just be the same 32 bits...
Sweet! It's already obsolete!
85% of Americans think this signature sucks
I don't know where the hell 96dpi comes from but it certainly isn't any kind of standard.
Hey moderators! A three? I think this guy actually meant what he wrote.
YEY! Lets put linux on this bad boy! No but seriously that would be pretty bad ass, i think it would work too :]
MS sees the new consoles coming out and realizes that with all the application service providers on the net, it won't be long before a LOT of people are using one of these things to hook up to the net, do word processing and everything else they do with a computer now.
Microsoft's obvious strategy is to make sure they get a piece of the action. They know that what would have been Windows market share will go to consoles, so they have to move into consoles themselves.
The really nice thing about the X box (from MS perspective) is that since it will use mostly off the shelf PC hardware, they may be able to break even selling the box, which something none of the console manufacturers are doing at this point
As far as the processor being slow, that isn't really a factor with a console since you have much less overhead running on it, and with a stable non-changing platform you can optimize code like a mad man. Do you remember how far EA managed to go with the Atari 2600? They were doing stuff that Atari swore was impossible
But Microsoft will have "3D Solitaire" and "Minesweeper Millennium Edition" available by the time the X-Box launches. That and the really frustrating game that comes with Windows 2000 called "How the @#?$ do I get this damn ACPI working?"
Microsoft sees the Playstation 2 as a huge threat. The average computer user plays games, surfs the web, and sends e-mail. The Playstation 2 will do all this, all without any Microsoft software. The Playstation 2 could be the often predicted
"Information Appliance" that finally takes off.
The X-box is nothing more than an attempt to keep customers away from the Playstation 2. The future of the X-box is silly, however. Will the X-box play Diablo 2? Of course. But I've already got a computer that will do that so why should I buy the X-box? I won't.
The Playstation 2, however, will appeal to many people that want to do the things they usually do on a computer - but without the computer.
Machines used solely for gaming can optimize the processor so that a 600Mhz chip is a lot better than one you'd find in your PC. For example, the Dreamcast is a pretty sweet machine, and it only has a 200Mhz processor.
Does it support digital flat panel displays? RGB? Can it be rewired to? Also, what kind of video processing can it do for DVDs? Progressive display? I'll buy one if it allows for flexible video output!
Somebody will be hurt in the coming console war. Either Sony, Sega or MS will see their much hyped 2nd gen console fail in a thunderous manner.
History has shown that the market can only support two consoles at a time (in Europe, anyway) and since three consoles will be out by end 2001, one of them will prove financial disaster to the company behind.
Since Sony has already hit jackpot with the PSX2 (one million sales in 3 days) they're pretty sure to not lose the war, but it's a completely different story for Sega and MS.
Sega are shooting themselves in the foot right now because they are overlooking large parts on the european market in their marketing campaigns (ie scandinavia) and are mainly focussing on the UK and a couple of countries similar in size and population. Add the fact that the Dreamcast isn't exactly that hot hardware wise any more...
MS has a completely different problem in the fact that their machine wont be released until next year, and new PCs will be twice as powerfull at that time. And this is MSs first venture into the market.
One of them will see their flagship go down...
It looks to me like the XBox will either bridge the gap between console and PC gamers, changing the gaming industry forever... or just plain suck. Frankly, the latter outcome wouldn't surprise me, but it would be interesting to see what Microsoft might be able to do with the gaming world.
ok, obviously your ignorant (doesnt mean your dumb, though that is highly likely) You think its slow, what about the P2 with a 300MHZ proc? check out the facts and specs before you judge moron http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2000/0 3-10xbox.asp
I guess it sort of makes sense... you give MS your chips that are at the bottom of the line (the equivelant of P5's now) and you get free advertising every time the box is fired up.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
What irks me is that every time something doesn't go right with Linux, it's Microsoft's fault. It's never the fault of NVIDIA, Matrox or Diamond. Because we all know how willing hardware manufacturers are to release their specs.
This is getting ridiculous. I don't care about Microsoft one way or the other. Some of their software works great for me. Some doesn't. The solution? Run vmware in Linux (I've got a very interesting and humorous story about an NT 4.0 install and attempted upgrade that should be good for a few laughs).
--
Was the karmic punishment for those stupid enough to actually VISIT the xbox.com site the insanely small seizure-inducing text, or quite possibly the ugliest logo I've ever seen in my life?
I reserve judgement on the xbox - I won't bash it simply because Microsoft will build it. I'll bash it if it comes to market and sucks.
But for the love of GAWD, please, xbox people, hire a clueful web designer. I'd be happy to forward my resume.
The ethernet is to make using it with a cable-modem easy. Most of those use 10Mb, so this has to support them.
The price difference between 10/100 and straight 100 Mb chipsets is trivial anyway, there's no reason to not support both.
I have a P2 450 with an nVidia card. I get very good framerates in Quake 3 at resolutions higher than standard TV. The graphics of games like Q3 are far better (IMHO) than those consoles. It's not about the MHz of the CPU
As it seems to be running standard PC parts, does that mean it's upgradeable? Will I be able to swap the CPU for something newer? Or beef up the RAM? I wonder if they'll integrate the nVidia graphics into the mobo?
Translation: We don't have any licensees or partners yet...
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
I submitted a quickie about something I'm pretty sure was NEVER submitted before in the past.
Something about this neat snack product over in the UK that can be obtained elsewhere, called Penguin Biscuits. It's this nice chocolate covered, chocolate creme cookie that has Penguins on the packaging.
This item got rejected for whatever reason.
Seems like there's been a LOT of this going on lately. People having sumitted stuff only to find out that it's been declined and then have that selfsame subject posted by Rob & Co. as old news. What's going on here gang?
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
The GUI wasn't new technology either, neither was pens or a 32-bit OS.
In the public awareness, microsoft already has a gaming console, the x-box, and in 2001 they have been on the market for more than a year. This is what counts. It's lame but it counts, and it's called marketing, like it or not.
By the time the x-box eventually hits the streets (by that time it will have a new name though, because the x-box will get bad press sometime before, because of better specs (or whatever) from the established console companies) people will remember that Microsoft has actually been in the console business for a long time, regardless of the fact that the ``y-box'' is the first thing to actually hit the streets.
The only reason Microsoft's saying anything right now is to try to derail any momentum Sega's Dreamcast and Sony's PS2 are building up.
...
Microsoft is an adept at the vapor game. Although they'll have to work to acheive the level of hype Nintendo was able to garner for the release of their N64. Now that was a feat
-- Rick
The Sonys and the Segas had some kick-ass hardware in them that made for some stunning games, stuff that I've never seen on a PC... and I doubt I'll see on the "X-Box."
---
what?
Mac's were at 72 DPI back when there were only Mac's, Mac Pluses, Mac SE's, and SE30's... Also classics, color classics, and classic II's were locked into 72 dpi.
But ever since multisync displays arrived on the scene (what? around 1987), mac users have been free to use whatever resolution they cared to use...
I like 1600x1200 for stuff like Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, and maybe some 3-D apps, but when i want to read text i switch to a much saner resolution.
Their style sheets said 9 px, not 9 pt... hence the type was exactly 9 pixels tall, not points, by the way.
my buddy but I think I ought to defend this innocent piece of hardware. I wouldn't expect MS to port the craptacular 95 kernel to this puppy, I think they're going to move CE onto it with some enhancements gleaned from NT.
1. Stop complaining about Microsoft not optimizing its code libraries, people who write REAL games are going to use their own stuff.
2. The hardware is most likely NOT going to be a problem. nVidia is damn good at the graphics processor stuff, I bet the chipset in there will be a modified GeForce processor. With stuff specifically written for the GeForce the T&L among other things till be done on the GPU, this means the processor doesn't have to handle the really intense graphical stuff. My guess is that as many of a game's functions as possible will be done with full hardware acceleration so the processing gets distributed to the stuff which does it best.
3. Another guess will be that MS is going to try to revitalize WebTV with the X-Box. The MSN and WebTV infrastructure already exists, this will just put a much more powerful front-end on it.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Windows unfortunately has a reputaition of an os that crashes. If they make a gameing console will it crash too?
I would not touch this thing till they have the bugs out. If it is like there windows software, well let see, there was 3.1, 95, 98, and 2000 may have gotton it right but it is just to dam bloated.
send flames > /dev/null
Only 'flamers' flame!
Remember Mac use 72 dpi while others use 96, so if their CSS say 9 pt, you'll get 9 pixel letters. :(
So, it is unreadable on the Mac
O/T, did you check out this month's "Web Pages for Designers" article? Talks about using JavaScript to figure out which browser you're looking with, and loading the proper CSS def for your browser/platform.
I Haven't got it 100% working on IE 4.5 Mac yet, but worth a look: WPFD
Pope
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
I can say with some authority that nVidia has been in bed with Microsoft for a long time now. The MS hosted graphics conventions were always the sites of big nVidia announcements.. Developer outreach programs would be by MS and nVidia together..
;-]), back when there was a realistic need for MS to break into the gaming API market segment.. Back before Direct3D was worth the paper it was printed on. When Glide was proprietary but popular.. Anyway, now I'm reminiscing. nVidia basically is being forced into the Open Source market, like everyone else.
:-) [last point is tounge in cheek]
This has been going on since the days of the Riva128 (damn I feel old
MS would never drop them, they have too much invested.. Besides, ATI is an Apple partner, Matrox is open-source friendly.. Maybe they'd get S3 but I doubt that. The simple fact is that nVidia has never been about their consumers, they've been about hype and the next-best-product. An alliance with the Devil just reinforces that
Some of us are actually following the development of the XBox with interest and curiosity. Zealots besides, M$ has HUGE resources and all signs point that they are commiting a lot to this box. If they do things right, and keep an API similar to the one PC developers are used to working on, creating games for this new console will be easier than any console before.
Last week at the Game Developers Conference Microsoft decided to use the Pentium III as its cpu of choice, thanks mostly to Intel being such a big bully. In this new website, the cpu is not specified... so, any chance the cpu choice is still not final, or is the brand new web site just, outdated?
When have you seen MS go into a new market at less than full-force? If they're dumping billions into the console, making it cheaper than PSX2/Dreamcast/NextNintendo, and dumping billions in convincing companies to port to them (and maybe exclude other systems), and dumping billions to sell the games for cheap... it's going to hurt competition. And we've seen this happen before. And they can do this.
And when was the last time they were sucessful at this? WinCE? I guess that's why right now I have a Palm, and looking around me at meetings I see a sea of Palms.
Just because they can throw a lot of money at it does not mean they have anything close to a certain victory.
And as for dumping - I would say that Microsof is but a small little bunny rabbit of product dumping compared to the dumping behemoths Sony, Nintendo, and Sega!
Furthermore, the problem I see with the X-box is that the majority of early adaptors already have a computer, and by that point will have computer with a lot better specs than the X-box - why then would these people have any desire to buy the X-box? Right away, they cut off a huge (and probably the most desirable) segment of the market that will be dominated by Sony, Sega, or Nintendo.
Another possible problem (as if they needed more!) is that it looks like the Nintendo and X-Box release dates are closing together (in that Dolphin probably will not ship until fall 2001 as well). In the scenario of a concurrent Nintendo/X-Box release - who do you think will dominate (hint - the winner will be aided by a plumber).
I love PC games - but I'm also buying a PSX2, and don't see how the X-box could possibly draw me in.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
One of the BIG advantages of the consoles,
is that games-creators know excactly what kind
of platform they are working with.
The playstation is a playstation.
For the PC-platform, you have to consider a lot,
even with good APIs.
You have to decide between everyone being able
to play it, or being really cutting edge.
True, Microsoft would never think of using market power to influence another company to limit a competitor (like they said they would in los documentos de la Dia de los Muertos, or like the gub'ment said they did in DOJ v Microsoft).
--
+&x
It might very run existing PC games,
MS has stated that the X-Box will have its own proprietary disk format, X-Box games will not run on PCs and visa versa. the USB ports on the X-Box will also not accept non X-Box devices.
Many game companies port once for console, once for PC
right, and this is the big issue.
the X-Box will not be out until Q3/Q4 of 2001.. this means that :
- at this point the X-Box will be at best equal to existing PCs in game performance (but with a smaller HDD, much less ram and a much slower CPU, i am betting 3d hardware for the PC will improve enough to be on par over the next 18 months.)
- MS completely controls what games can or cannot be released for the X-Box, they have stated they will be more restrictive than Sony about this. a lot of developers will not want to be bothered with going through MS.
so buying an X-Box over buying a PC is a terrible idea, the point of buying a game console is that you can play games that you cannot play on the PC,.. or at least, that are better experienced on a console.
the X-box is a pile of crap.
...dave
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
Whatever you do, don't visit the site using Navigator with JavaScript off and CSS support off and images off. You'll be greeted with a screenful of image placeholders with the text at the very bottom of the page (it relies on CSS-positioned layers).
Cthulhu for President!
(darren)
On the other hand, I love how Microsoft calls it the X-box. Are they now trying to steal the meaning of X from X-windows? Shouldn't they call it something generically stupid like "Microsoft Box" or "Microsoft Console"?
This article contains the best discussion of why we can't trust MS's intentions with regards to consle gaming any more than in ay other arena. The strategy is textbook by now: perceive of a threat to your hegemony, release specs for a super-powerful, industry-breaking alternative that you may or may not have plans to produce, and the 3d party developers for the competitor will hesitate -- "should i wait and develop for this monster supermachine that MS is building?" Development for the competitor is slowed, and everybody loses except MS, who hides in the vapor until they can address the threat in some way that doesn't actually involve producing anything.
This sucks for gamers. I, for one, am pissed as hell at the idea that MS is worried about digital home delivery from Sony's PS2, and has chosen to f up *my* gaming opportunities because of it.
*sigh* Is anything safe from them? i would be willing to wager that if they announced a super automobile, 300 mph top speed, 900 mpg, with 200 cupholders, a heads-up in-winshield dvd player and a laser for shooting at pedestrians, to be introduced, maybe, in 2003, ford's stock would drop. this is vapor. it's marketing, and it sucks.
god is just pretend.
Microsoft is developing a new version of Windows, specifically for the X-Box. It's going to be called X-Windows!
HH
Yellow tigers crouched in jungles in her dark eyes.
Yellow tigers crouched in jungles in her dark eyes.
She's just dressing, goodbye windows, tired starlings.
The reason that your submissions were rejected is probably that on March 10th (day X-box announced), Hemos posted Microsoft Unveils The X Box. Taco is 13 days behind with this piece of 'news'.
HH
Yellow tigers crouched in jungles in her dark eyes.
Yellow tigers crouched in jungles in her dark eyes.
She's just dressing, goodbye windows, tired starlings.
It's aimed at gamers. Gamers (even fairly casual gamers) are usually pretty savvy about hardware specs. In 18 months time when this thing is launched, Moore's law suggests that we'll have 2Ghz processors. Playground rivalry and peer pressure will put kids off owning one:
"What you got?"
"2Ghz Athlon. You?"
"600Mhz X-Box"
I'll leave you to imagine the teasing, feelings of inadequacy etc.
PC games designers won't want to be writing games for 2 year old technology either. They'll be too busy pushing the latest hardware to the limits.
Mind you, by the time it's released the spec may well have been upped to a much faster CPU - but will Intel still be willing to give Microsoft fast CPU's for nothing?
HH
Yellow tigers crouched in jungles in her dark eyes.
Yellow tigers crouched in jungles in her dark eyes.
She's just dressing, goodbye windows, tired starlings.
ethernet?!?! did i see that right? it comes ethernet compatible? now i know im getting old.
i know all y'all out there remember the good ol days of excite bike and legend of zelda...or maybe even that atari classics. these kids now a days are just spoiled.
The designers behind this better be going to som kind of super-duper proprietary FP monster of a processor that will be doing the graphics along with the NVidia and Intel parts or this thing is going to be much slower than the other stuff that's out. By the way, what form-factor will this need to dissipate the heat of the toaster^H^H^H^H^H^H^HProcessor that's inside it? Aren't the Coppermine 600s the ones everyone is having problems with anyway? What if my freaking X-box takes two presses of the power switch to turn on? By the way, here's how they're going to make it proprietary: Software sound. That way the processor gets some usage and Linux won't work on it.
The specs say it's 100 MBps Ethernet. Not 10/100. Will the thing not run properly on 10? I'm not going to get one of these, but I could see this as being a problem. Having to buy an expensive switch rather than a cheap-o hub to connect it.
Paul: What are we doing today, Bill?
Bill: The same thing we do everyday, Paul. Today we will take over the world!
My point - this is another part of the "Windows Everywhere" campaign. Do you really think that if microsoft builds their own box, that you could put your own OS in it? Right. The whole thing will be proprietary, including where it can connect on the web (MSN will be get hits, at last!), along with what you can load on it (read: Microsoft certified products only!). With a new version of Windows, some type of CE, I'm sure, they are trying to make sure the more-and-more powerful consoles (Dolphin, PS2, Dreamcast) don't infringe on their new internet campaign. With Windows focusing on a internet distribution network, you know that this is focusing on a MS propritary internet. They control the hardware, and the software. This console is just the beginning - next it will be MS Internet Appliances. Is there any doubt? And so many of you out there will buy into it with their billion dollar ad campaigns. And when you turn on your toaster in 10 years, and a Windows logo come up (probably followed by a blue screen of death) you will wonder how it all happened.
Don't you dare reverse engineer your toaster!
Winter is Coming.
If it is as it sounds, I can forsee the battle commencing one of two ways:
- A GPL library is released to develop cross-platform games including this console (perhaps/probably booting its own OS so you don't even have to install).
- John Carmack (for example) decides that Quake IV will be twice as fast if he writes past whatever software M$ place on this, and writes a GL implementation that again boots its own system.
Apart from the obsolescnce of this console by release (and lets face it buy 2001 Sega will be talking about Dreamcast 2), the only way I can forsee M$ convincing people to develop for this is if they can run the same games on a PC, and if you can do that who is going to buy a deliberatly cut-down slow PC......definetly not the gamers of the planet. I guess this is really a way to try and get the technophobes to use a computer by putting it in a flashy box and letting them look at a TV instead of a monitor.Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
1) The lesson of VHS VCRs - Most people keep the same components of their home entertainment systems for years. Just look at how long people hold on to the same VCR (at least 2 years, probably many more). I doubt that people will want to replace their brand spanking new DVD-playing PSX2 with an X-box. Nor will they be very likely to buy it to supplement their primary home entertainment system with a X-box (just as not many people buy several VCRs for their main home entertainment system). The thinking may very well go "Sure, I could play games and watch DVDs and access the internet with an X-box...but I can already do that with my PSX2!"
Sony has reportedly sold a million PSX2s in the first week of their launch, just in Japan. The US and European markets, huge compared to Japan, will get hit with the PSX2 a good 8-12 months before the X-box. That translates into many millions of units of software and hardware sold and once a PSX2 has been bought, the likelihood of an X-box being bought in the next year will be much less.
2) Name recognition - Microsoft will face a very large uphill battle to position themselves to compete against Sony in the living room. Most people associate Microsoft with those computers they use at work or in their homes, not with a system that sits next to their TV and VCR. On the other hand, tens of millions of Playstations have been sold, giving them a clear brand name for games in the living room, and adding a DVD player and possible internet access can only make that position stronger.
3) Timing with DVD - A PSX2 launch this year will probably hit when DVDs suddenly become the "must have" item for most Americans. (I don't know how well DVDs are doing in Europe.) Just looking around me, only a few of my friends (college graduates, grad school, tech work force, 20-35 year olds) have DVD players but most are looking to buy one by the end of this year. Several, having seen the the rise of the PSX, are talking specifically about getting a PSX2 for its dual use (games and DVDs). That's not proof, I understand, since it is anecdotal, but I think it seems reasonable.
4) Capturing the console game makers - Microsoft has listed some big names (Konami, Capcom) as having "signed on" to the X-box developer list. While they need those developers, I'm curious how many will really jump in with both feet. Those developers would be foolish to not say "we're considering the system" but are probably not actually under any contract to really develop for the system. Several of these companies (Capcom with Resident Evil and Konami with Metal Gear Solid) know that begin associated with Sony and the Playstation has been a fantastic partnership for them. With indications that Sony's machine will do extremely well out of the gate, they'd be giving up a lot if they started making exclusive deals with Microsoft.
5) Icon appeal - Sony has Crash Bandicoot and several other recognized properties (like Spyro, Gameday, Twisted Metal, or Jet Moto) that they can leverage in marketing to pull in the gamers with games and related advertising. Nintendo, as another example, can release Pokemon or Mario anything and make several million in sales. Microsoft will probably have to come up with a comparable set of icons to market their machine and the software it runs and to this point, the PC market has been a tad anemic in that department. If MS can pull in the big companies (as mentioned in 4) this may not be such a big deal.
Anyway, that's the stuff I've been thinking about...should be an interesting play to watch it unfold.
matt
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
you may want to check out this website for more info: www.xboxpc.com
It clears up many common misconceptions you have about this new console system.
Speaking of the X-Box explicitly, I think it will be the most powerful console for at least 2 years after it is released. That doesn't translate directly to success, but here are some reasons I think it will:
The main reason it will succeed: Microsoft has seen Sony nearly double in profit after the debut of the Playstation. They want that money. Sony has proven that game licensing is a VERY lucrative business. MS will do whatever it takes for X-box to be a success. Insert immoral/illegal conspiracy theories here...
*These are my own opinions. I have no "insider" information, just reactions after hearing the specs at GDC and hearing from other developers.
Dan
Here is a little something I came up with from looking at pricewatch prices for the items that will be in the X-Box. Of course these are all a little more high-quality than Microsoft will use, especially since I pointed at Athlon here, not Penticrap 3. But take a look:
MS X-Box comparison system
--------------------------
$300 for Athlon + Mobo
$40 for 64MB PC133
$110 for 8GB HD
$150 for Viper 770 Ultra
$50 for 3Com 905C
$90 for 4x DVD
total: $740
Please remember this pricing is vague, and, again, uses more high-quality components than MS will use. For example, MS will probably use something to the effect of a Vanta nVidia card. But it would still cost a lot more than $300 for any of us to make a system like this these days.
That's all...
............ no.
MS is not going to be competing against the hardcore gamer market with this thing... So it doesn't matter if its specs are outdated by the time of it's release. The X-Box is going to be a combo WebTV/cheap PC/DVD player.
Think about it- They already have MSN. With their capitol, they can get MSN ready for broadband in 18 months. They sell these things at a cut rate compared to the PS2 and Dolphin, take a loss on the hardware, hook a few million parents into buying it for their kids, then MS gets that $30 a month access fee for the new MSN ASDL Service. Not to mention $10 a month for their new online game, Asheron's Call X. I'll bet MS even gives discounts on the x-box if you agree to sign up for "MSN-ADSL". Get the parents in a 2 or 3 year contract, who cares if the system is cutting edge or not?
The games really don't matter... As long as they have a lot of ports and a lot of "Wal-Mart" style cheap games, the parents will be happy. For, say, $200 they bought their kid a dvd player that plays some games and lets them get on the net and keeps them from messing up Dad's computer... This is the market MS is aiming for with the X-Box, and I'm sure they will succeed. I sincerely doubt it will affect any of us, or hurt quality game development in any way.
X-Box is going to be the AOL of game consoles... A lot of people will have it, but the people who are "in the know" will look down on it and the really cool stuff will happen elsewhere.
Josh Sisk
At long last we have a gaming console that is made by Americans! For too long our country has neglected the lucrative console market, and the Japanese have had a clear playing field. This console, by far superior to anything the Japanese have ever manufactured, will blow these foreign "competitors" out of the water.
I mean, just look at the specs! A 600 MHz CPU - far better than the 200 MHz "Emotion Engine" that the PSX2 has. And it will use tried and testing gaming technology as well in the form of DirectX, which has made Windows boxes the platform for serious gaming. No console will be able to compete with this kind of setup.
I have to say, well done to Microsoft for providing a console that looks like it could become the preferred choice for gamers when it is released. If anyone can pull this off, it will certainly be America's most innovative and foward-thinking company, and if they succeed, their conquest of the console market will benefit all of us as gamers.
Could this be the source of the problems from NVIDIA with Linux? Could MS have said "Nix the plans for the Open Source Linux drivers, or we will go with ATI?" Hmmm, possibly!
ttyl
Farrell
...just because you are not paranoid doesn't mean Microsoft is not out to get us!
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
I'm willing to listen to what MS has to say. But it's all meaningless until I see the games. But MS won't even release shots of the console itself, much less anything that runs on it. As far as anyone knows, it's pure vaporware.
Besides which, I see no innovation here. All I see is an ultra-cheap (in both price and quality) computer, hobbled by lack of even a keyboard, though I'm sure someone will make one that'll cost extra. But then, when has MS ever innovated anything (with the possible single exception of the scroll wheel)?
And I love this bit about a "proprietary AV connector." There's Microsoft, Embracing and Extending again. Who's going to use that, anyway? If the X-Box is going to work with current TV's (and it has to), it'll have to have an adapter of some sort. Better to throw in a $10 adapter with a TV than make something you can only hook one thing up to; monitor manufacturers have done this for years with Mac monitor adapters.
Honestly, MS; you're getting sloppy (in tactics; you always were with coding but that's beside the point). WinCE failed to capture the PDA market. This isn't likely to capture the console market given your current apparent tactics. And then there's the DOJ to worry about. Keep this up and you might actually be where you belong in a few years: the bottom of the heap.
This is probably untrue if MS paid any attention to the OS/2 saga.
Why write for the X-box when you can target the Playstation and corner both markets?
Additional note: Your purchase of this product is non-refundable. Under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act you may not modify, redistribute, or reverse-engineer this product for the purposes of allowing any additional functionality. Yes, we do know that you paid for it but since you don't own your home (mortgage), car (loan), or computer (encrypted 'monitors') anymore, we figure we'll continue the trend and not let you own this either.
"Where are you taking me today?"
those quotes on the site from Bungie and EA sound so, so canned - like watching a video tape of captured POWs, scarred, bruised and all doped up, reading a script saying how well they have been treated and how much they are enjoying their stay with the enemy - just robotic verbal buzzword flak with no enthusiasm.
"We, uh, at Electronic Arts, uh, (just read it!) are (yawn) very, uh, yeah - intrigued, (is that what it says?) at the opportunity to, uh, an intriguing - no, were looking forward to an intriguing cutting edge, ummm, we're intriguingly cutting forward..."
(director) CUT! It's "Electronic Arts is intrigued by the opportunity to develop exciting new games for the x-box". Now try it again! Take 27! Camera! Action!!
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Except I don't think that's their plan. The biggest reason people use win9x over NT is that win9x tends to be better for some games especially the older ones. M$ would really like to push people off of win9x (for some good reasons). They were along the lines of saying so with Win2000 saying that it would be the personal release too, but they backed off. I would expect 1 more release of the personal versions of win9x line, then a discontinuation. You'll only be able to buy NT for your computer, or this X box.
But that's just my impression of what they're doing.
-cpd
I realize it's incredibly difficult for most folks here to be anything but objective about a Microsoft product/project (and for good reason), but it's important to address the issues at hand with some objectivity and knowledge of the console market. That being said...
1) Will X-Box compete with PCs?
Nope. Consoles in the US basically have a price ceiling of $300 to stay competitive, and X-Box will be hitting the market at a time when you'll be able to get a Dreamcast for at most $125, and a PS2 for $200. The unit will be priced to move at $250 tops. Right now no one seems to be able to sell a functional PC for under $500, mainly due to the issues of manufacturing costs.
2) Looking at these specs... this is just a dumbed-down PC??? why would I want this???
Yeah, err... what exactly do you think a console is? 8) It's a personal computer, streamlined and stripped down to be cheap to make and play games well. In fact, that's the key to one of a consoles major strengths: the hardware is *always* the same. The primary technical gripe of PC developers is the huge hassle of making games work on a wide variety of hardware. The X-Box in particular will look interesting to PC developers because it's an architecture they're already intimately familiar with, but without the compatibility headaches of the standard Intel architecture.
-Ed
What is the X-Box?
Certainly not a revolution of some sort. A revolution requires something different, something new. X-box isn't - it's a PC with a lot of proprietary hardware, a questionable release date, technology that will be outdate by the release date, and what will eventually turn out to be massive problems.
X-box is just another PC, priced more attractively in order to chain more people to Windows. It's all fairly standard, albeit made proprietary, components you could buy from your favourite computer store. Things like the CPU, the drive, the NIC, etcetera. Wrap it around some crazy motherboard and you're good to go.
And none of this technology is even mind blowing - hell, it's mostly LAUGHABLE for a 2001 release date. A 600MHz x86 processor? 64M of *UNIFIED* memory? (Which means memory is stolen from the CPU for the video card - my laptop has it.) It's a freaking PC for crying out loud!
WHY is everyone going nutso over it, besides the fact that Microsoft is trying to claim it as a console? Give me a BREAK! It's nothing more than a PC. I'm not impressed.
And people are going wacky for it WHY? It's not even all that impressive - so much less so if you look at it's planned release date.
Microsoft only announced it to work to kill Sony, Sega, and Nintendo's business. And maybe they did get Nintendo, since they haven't caught up to PSX2 and Dreamcast yet. But then again, obviously neither has Microsoft. This is just some hohum gamer PC that will be so outdated in 2001, assuming Microsoft doesn't play change the specs or buy the competition, that very few people will want it save for the Microsoft name.
You all have fun with your PCs, I'm going to buy a PSX2 and not waste my money on a faux console.
=RISCy Business
your company here.
shelby != ford
...the X-Box will be twice as popular as the MSX system!
2000-03-10 03:37:37 Microsoft Announces X-Box (articles,microsoft) (declined)
2000-03-10 14:59:38 Intel Inside X-Box (articles,microsoft) (declined)
2000-03-12 11:06:22 MS announces official X-Box specs (articles,microsoft) (declined)
2000-03-12 18:59:47 FiringSquad looks at X-Box (articles,microsoft) (declined)
I'm not kidding here. All of these were rejected. Is there a thread to discuss rejection of timely comments? Look at the datestamp on the press release - it's March 10, the day I submitted it under "Microsoft Announces X-Box."
--------
Oscarfish.com: tropical fish with attitude. Way t
The XBox proposed stats: An x86 CPU running at 600mhz
It has 64MB unified DDR SDRAM
8 gig HD
DVD ROM drive
So here we're all whining about it being obsolete by the time this thing ships and blah blah blah...
Well, if it's made from pretty much generic, off the shelf PC parts, what is really stopping MS from replacing the 600mhz CPU with an 800mhz CPU by release date? How about upping the amount of memory? Increasing the size of the HD?
The only thing they have commited to is a paper spec. The beauty of it is that the only proprietary part in that spec is the NV25 which dosn't yet exist. If they happen to upgrade any of the hardware along such predictable paths, I'm sure that the developers wouldn't mind.
I don't think throwing a faster CPU into the mix would be a death blow to any developer, though if they didn't plan for scaling then their game might not be as impressive as one that uses ALL of that power.
Not only that, but if they decide to stick to exactly what their paper spec says, by the time of the XBox's release, the component parts will cost next to nothing (except for the graphics chip) allowing them to undercut their competition's prices. And that's just good business sense. Just think about how much SONY has ahd to invest in the PSX2 just to get it off the ground. Proprietary this proprietary that... by comparisson the XBox is half-way to being an open system.
I'm sure that within moments of release, some enterprising H4x0r will develop an interface allowing you to use the hardware for just about anything, much like that 'net appliance (the name eludes me at the moment) that people've been snapping up from BestBuys (or wherever) and turing into dirt cheap 'net surfing wonder toys. Heck, with the amount of hardware in the XBox, and the fact that it practically is an x86 PC, there's got to be some way to bend it to one's will. :-)
-- kwashiorkor --
Pure speculation gets you nowhere.
-- kwashiorkor --
Leaps in Logic
should not be confused with
Jumping to Conclusions.
Console gamers are going to react the same way they initially did to the Playstation. They will regard it like an old smelly fish until the games start coming that make the thing worth more than their current system. Console gamers expect maybe two crashes in the course of a badly ported game where the previous version was operating on a processor with different sized instruction words. Random crashes throughout a game are not acceptable on console systems. Reviewers tend to send the game back if it crashes even once.
While I am continuing to be tempted to dismiss this product out of hand, I am trying to reserve my judgement to see what they actually do. MS can do great work if they actually take the time to debug their code, test its usability, and don't try to make it interoperable with everything under the sun. Unfortunately, their business model usually nixes all three of those. If MS can run this as a product where the first release can't be the first of many and seriously debug this thing hard before it sees the light of developers, they could shock us.
The biggest hurdle for MS is and always will be the developers. If MS advertises this as a port your PC games as they are senario, you get no innovation. Any special tricks that developers could pull off with the X-Box won't happen if they regard it as a PC Jr. This is the factor that tends to make or break a console these days, IMHO. I don't know what processor speed Final Fantasy 8 requires for the PC version, but I'll bet it is a wee bit higher than the PSX's 33 MHz. This is one of the (or perhaps the) most graphically stunning games I have seen in recent years. The initial PS2 games will probably be pretty poor until the developers stop trying to develop for the PSX and start developing for the PS2. If you just port like its the same thing, there is nothing special about the games. If you learn to use the engines, you make breakthroughs.
Oh well, I guess it is wait and see.
B. Elgin
B. Elgin
"Read at your own risk; feel free to ignore."
According to one of my friends who works for Microsoft, they had a special unveiling for their workers, and one of the things they talked about is shipping it with things like Bleem! and UltraHLE or whatever the equivalent is when this thing finally ships so it could run PS and N64 games in addition to whatever they can convince companies to port native...
Would make sense.
The Microsoft Game Consol has determined that you have shot at a bad guy. Please save all information and reset the consol for the change to take effect.
Finkployd
Cringely has a nice article about this over at pbs.
Geeky modern art T-shirts
"Slated for release in 2001" - because we all know how good Microsoft are at meeting their release dates. This looks like Microsoft's usual trick of making product annoucements when they don't even have a working product, just to get people to hold off on buying someone elses technology. They did it with Windows itself (remember when Windows was just a stop gap to maintain Microsoft's ability to leverage DOS?), Pen Windows (remember that?) and the Microsoft Network. Unfortunately I think the Market Droids have made an error here - it's not like console technology is some new, unproven, region of the electronic frontier, nor is it like Nintendo or Sony don't have huge brand recognition either. (unlike those poor chumps at GO computing who got squished by Pen Windows)
"Just once, I'd like to meet an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets." -- The Brigadier, Dr. Who
What about AOL? I actually set gave my unused *free* internet account to an AOL user to save him the grief of dealing with such a lousy company but I returned a week later to find out he went back to AOL because it was *easier*. Yes, thats right - paying over $20 a month to have an ISP crap ads down your throat all day. Made me sick to the point of going postal. And then it made sense. Bottom line is that Windows/Linux/Be/etc aren't easy to use for the average Joe "Non-technical" Consumer. If MS can put one of these boxes together and partner with some broadband co's, then we will see a real winner. Just understand that you are the minority.
More
By the time this so called 'X-box' is out, will anyone care? Currently you can get a system with a celeron chip that's almost as fast, and keep in mind that this is a computer we're talking about. Now by the time the x-box with its 600 mghz chip hits the market, we'll be able to get a complete system minus the monitor with similar specs for the same price. Why then, would anyone choose the x-box over a computer, since the games for the x-box and the computer will be so similar? personally, I'd much rather get the computer over the x-box, so that at least I could run linux!....Now sure, this sounds incredible now but by a year and a half, I doubt that many people will care. Computers for the smart, x-box for the stupid and the uninformed!
- It might very run existing PC games, but those aren't quite as easy and fun for the typical 8-year-old as sticking in a Playstation disk. However, the PSX2 will also come out with lots of pre-existing games, 'cause it will run normal PSX games. Having lots of games available the moment it becomes available, especially the games you currently have, is a very nice feature, and one that will help the PSX2 sell.
- Many game companies port once for console, once for PC. Don't you think it would be attractive to just port once, for DirectWhatever?
- The X-box has a hard drive. While this allows you to have lots of save games, it also allows games to add complexity, interfere with each other, and so on. Also, if the OS will go on the hard drive, there are opportunities for MS to fix bugs/introduce new ones... which will cause a moving target for game developers... something they don't want.
and, perhaps the most important thing that might help the X-box- When have you seen MS go into a new market at less than full-force? If they're dumping billions into the console, making it cheaper than PSX2/Dreamcast/NextNintendo, and dumping billions in convincing companies to port to them (and maybe exclude other systems), and dumping billions to sell the games for cheap... it's going to hurt competition. And we've seen this happen before. And they can do this.
By the way, did you hear why they are using Intel chips rather than Athlons? Intel is giving MS the chips for free. AMD wouldn't give the chips away.-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997