Slashdot Mirror
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.
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
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); }
From : http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20000316. html
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo...
--
It's FUD. They are announcing it 18 months in advance of their "projected" delivery date. I think that MS is scared of the Playstation 2 and the Nintendo 64 as well as the Dolphin. They don't want to lose control of the desktop, but these new game consoles are so powerful they can replace many home PCs. So MS announces the X box (as they've done many times in the past with other products), hoping that consumers will decide to wait. I'm giving 50-50 odds that the X box will never be released, it will just wither and die on the vine.
-- Error: Cannot find file REALITY.SYS - Universe halted, please reboot!
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