Official Xbox XDK Details

SpoddySpice writes "Xbox365.com has released some interesting detailed specs about the X-Box" Talks about the UI, mentions that ether and a 56k modem will be supported, what media it will play, formats supported etc etc etc. Gives ya a good idea of where this thing is actually headed. Meanwhile I'm still deciding if I want a PS2, especially since it comes out within a couple days of the next Zelda.

Comments

Re:And this differs from a computer how?

[spiral]

> one can see that the X-box really seems to be just a regular computer with a few things disabled

This is exactly the point. Their strategy is obvious: make a machine that games developers can port to easily. Most game shops target Win32/DirectX. (Sorry, Linux dudes but that's the harsh truth). That makes for a huge base of games that can probably be made to run on Xbox with little or no modification, and a huge base of developers with valuable experience long before the hardware even ships.

The second half of the equation is consistency. The major cause of NT crashes is bogus drivers. With a fixed platform like this they can smoke (most) all of the bugs out of the drivers, not to mention optimizing the snot out of them. They don't have to worry about whether or not the latest driver patch works with last month's firmware upgrade for some bogus 3d card that nobody cares about this week. Each game can be intensively tested since the target hardware/OS is perfectly known.

> who would want a computer that is simply disabled just to play games?

Sure it's just a crippled computer, but I'll work right out of the box. It won't need configuration or tweaking. It won't crash randomly. Plug in your cable modem and it'll surf the web. Kids will be able to use it -- Hell, even parents will be able to use it. It'll be cheap, and games will be everywhere. Most people don't want the hassle of a "computer", they just want lots of cool games and their daily pr0n. Give the users what *they* want, not what *you* want.

Microsoft has come up with a great story (from their point of view). However, it may fail -- they may blow it, or nobody may care when it ships. It wouldn't be the first time, and won't be the last.

Not a protected mode OS

[Animats]

Note that the X-Box runs everything in Ring 0. No protection, just like Windows 3.1/DOS, even though the kernel is supposedly based on parts of NT/Win2000. Patch out any OS code you want to.

But unlike most game consoles, the X-Box has a high-speed network connection and a hard drive. Find a buffer overflow exploit in a game, and you're into the kernel. Wait until the script kiddies get going on this one.

And every X-Box is identical. Crack one, and you've cracked them all. It's a monoculture. The distributed denial-of-service attack people are going to love the X-box. Millions of slaves on DSL lines, and no annoying sysadmins to interfere.

Re:Running Windows 2000? SP1?

[Nakoruru]

PS and Nintendo games written resently DO crash. A friend of mine who worked on X-Treme G for N64 says that he can sit down with a retail copy of that game and make it crash easily (it helps that he was a programmer on the project ^_^). I have several playstation games that have bugs in them as well as old SNES games. Game console software is not bulletproof.

I have run Win2k for 6 months without a crash. If anything XBox Win2k will be much more stable because it has been vastly simplified. There is only one hardware configuration.

Why, praytail, would it take longer for games to boot? The HDD is only used as a cache to store frequently accessed data and saved games. Games will still be mostly kept on the DVD (its only an 8 GB HD). Also, considering that I can load a saved game onto another X-Box, it can't store anything permanently on the HDD or I could not play my game anywhere else.

I have probably been successfully trolled, but many people do actually believe what you said, what a shame.