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Official Xbox XDK Details

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the its-vapor-for-now dept.

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.

2 of 134 comments (clear)

  1. Not a protected mode OS by Animats · · Score: 5
    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.

  2. Re:Running Windows 2000? SP1? by Nakoruru · · Score: 5
    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.