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No X Box for Xmas?
occam writes "Nagging question in gaming console industry seems to be whether MS will make its Xbox launch in fall (as promised). Knowing MS, it seems unlikely, especially since an unstable console isn't nearly as useful as an unstable office PC (with an army of IT heads running around to support it). Plus, despite the heavy-hitting nVidia hardware in the Xbox, every month is ground lost to the PS2 and potentially also the Nintendo Cube.
Daily radar has a good piece on the hurdles (even) MS faces with its Xbox launch, and why they'll try like heck to make their fall date.
The 7 reasons why Microsoft cannot afford to push back the launch of the Xbox.
Ironically, release in time for Christmas is not mentioned! So, there's an 8th reason MS needs to release on time."
It looks to me that with the X-box being a simply a PIII 700 with a GeForce 3, 64MB of Ram and 32 MB of video texture RAM, as well as Ethernet and USB I.O, that the hardware alone will sufficiently beat a PS2. The Playstation 2 lacks ethernet out, has only 8MB of texture and 38MB of system RAM. and firewire/USB out.
That said, I love my PS2. I plop a disk in and play, no screwing around. The biggest dissapointment came when I discovered that I can't attach a usb keyboard and mouse for use with Quake III Revolution, which is a problem with Quake III, not the PS2. I'm also dubious that Sony will sell an ethernet card which doesn't require Sony ISP service, or some other subscription model... so if the X box is open enough to allow me to hook it up to my home network and play across the Internet I'll consider it a significant improvement over the PS2.
Except for lacking Ethernet, the hardware differences between the two appear to be noise and not significant. However, I'm willing to bet that the ease of porting x86 games over to the X-box (almost no porting whatsoever) will give this system the majority of games titles very quickly. I just hope my PS2 purchase doesn't bocome obsolete as quickly as all those Dreamcast owners...
All that said, I still love my PS2 and I hope Sony does the right thing.
--Maynard
Hmm... I can't comment on any of the unsubstantiated claims in this post, but I can say one thing, with a high degree of assurance.
Nintendo have somewhere in the vicinity of 20 developers for GameCube, which pales in comparison to Microsoft's hundereds.
More developers != better product (note for logically-challenged: more developers != worse product either). Especially in hardware, where understanding the whole (or large portions of it) is important.
Witness K7 vs Willamette. Intel had more than 5x the developers on that project than AMD had, and the result is well documented.
Have a nice day.
The enemies of Democracy are
Microsoft has admitted that the Xbox will not be released in Europe before 2002. Read this article:
http://www.vnunet.com/News/1115777
I'm not proud of buying a Micro$oft product, but in the PVR market, I was led to believe they had the best product/service combination.
Ultimate TV is a service offering from Microsoft, that like the X-box, has little to do with PC software. Well, I found out today that they fscked that up too.
Whaddyagonnado?
There is absolutely no reason to assume that the Xbox will be delayed. Unstable OSs are pretty much a thing of the past with Windows on the PC. On the Xbox, there is only one hardware set to support and no need for all of the extra crap that might cause any problems.
Aside from the fact that the video processor is arriving a little late (Which it does in most video console development, like the Dreamcast, PS2, N64, and GameCube.) there has been no evidence that this will hold back release of the machine. If anything, having a video processor from Nvidia makes it more likely that the machine will release on time, because of existing relationships with chip fabs that allow for higher volumes of chip production early on as compared to the problems making the custom chips for the PS2.
If you want to insult Microsoft, go after their shady, anticompetitive business practices. Stability is no longer an issue, and given all of their careful work and partners on the Xbox, assuming it will be unstable and/or late is just idiotic.
There's nothing ironic about Christmas not being mentioned. Irony is, most commonly, "incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result".
Here are some other things that are not ironic:
And I don't how the hell to classify "ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife"
--
Please name the time, place, and circumstances under which you said you saw MGS on Xbox. The director/producer has already said "We're working on PS2 first. We'll start working on Xbox near when PS2 is done." (paraphrasing) So, how did you manage to see it?
Further, the Xbox may cache things to the hard drive, but from what I've been able to get out of developers, the Xbox docs seem to indicate that the hard drive will house only preferences, high scores, saved games as persistent data. To get things cached onto the hard drive, you'll still have to deal with initial load times. That is, the hard drive is not some magical device that eliminates load times; it only mitigates them.
And as for "no reason to buy a PS2" here were my reasons:
Now stop trolling. Thanks.
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
In the truth table for fun and entertainment, where the inputs are the various existing video game consoles as well as future ones, the X Box remains a don't care for me as long as Sega's Dreamcast keeps releasing games. With Dreamcast titles being sold for $10 and $20 *retail*, and the rave reviews for the large majority of these games, it doesn't matter when the X Box comes out; I'll still have my DC!
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
Really people, when you take all that shit out of windows and only run the core (no services, a couple processes, simple memory management), it's not that bad of an OS for gaming. As an Xbox developer, I haven't found that much to cry about - at all. There are some bugs, but they have workarounds and have to do with the graphics hardware. It basically feels like DOS with a bunch of Win32 libraries... You could never run Excel on it ;)
-- This sentence is false.