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TechTV Cracks Open The Xbox

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the aaaiiiieeee dept.

Kevin writes: "TechTV has posted some pictures of the inside of the Xbox ... Interesting stuff, I believe Patrick Norton from The Screen Savers is working on overclocking it." Warning: doing this might reduce your eBay resale value.

12 of 400 comments (clear)

  1. Pretty cool pics by PigeonGB · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Too bad I don't have a few hundred to spend on a new computer to crack open and look at. Oh wait...I can easily make my own video game console system, can't I?
    I wish there was more to this article, because then there might be more to my response to it.

    --
    I have 3656.9 Bogomips. How many Bogomips do you have?
  2. Who wants to place bets by dimator · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Who wants to place bets on how long it will be until someone hacks a way to play X-BOX games on your PC? (And who wants to bet that they'll run better on a non-staticly configured home system with the latest and greatest hardware?)

    --
    python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
    1. Re:Who wants to place bets by Jace+of+Fuse! · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Who wants to place bets on how long it will be until someone hacks a way to play X-BOX games on your PC? (And who wants to bet that they'll run better on a non-staticly configured home system with the latest and greatest hardware?)

      As long as one part of the equation is static, you are probably right.

      Get this --

      All XBox systems will be identical. So, all games will be written to run on an Xbox. Now, we know that games for the Xbox will require at least a Pentium III 733, a GeForce 3, blah blah blah.

      Now, if we wanted to make a system that could play Xbox games, we would need to have at least those specs of course. Seeing as how the XBox uses DirectX, and a Windows 2000 type OS (Stripped down to be lightweight) it would probably be easy to put together a system based on a standard high-end PC using Windows 2000 or XP that lied to DirectX and pretended to be an XBox.

      As long as the "Liar" software, or Emulator if you will, lied well enough to LOOK to the software to actually BE an Xbox, everything should be fine.

      After all, the Xbox software KNOWS the one type of system it will be running on, right? That type and that one type alone?

      Everything will be good and perfect as long as a whole slew of mis-matched hardware types don't start popping up in various models of the XBox and various systems aren't trying to emulate such machines. It's then that the software will start to have a real piss-fit.

      --

      "Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"

      Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
    2. Re:Who wants to place bets by ConsumedByTV · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Unless microsoft does some sort of hardware checking when each game starts as part of the SDK...

      --


      "Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness." - M
  3. Pictures, eh? by KILNA · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I don't meant to be your usual cynical "What's this story doing here?" flame, but half the pictures are a guy with a screwdriver. And the pictures that are of something I want to look at are just too small to be informative. It appears to be a PC in a console cabinet, for what its worth. There are some chips, but you can't read the writing. There isn't even commentary except for useless captions like "Righty-tighty, lefty-loosey" So...

    What's this story doing here?

    --
    Error: PANTS NOT FOUND. Press <F1> to continue.
  4. Re:Hmmm... by muffen · · Score: 5, Insightful

    And reverse engineering such surely violates the DMCA
    You do know that there are other countries than the US where people do have PC knowledge. The DMCA does not apply to these countries. Also, how many reverse-engineer projects do you think has been discontinued or never started due to the DMCA??
    I'm guessing zero!!

  5. Is XBox noisy ? by n-tone · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I've seen there are two fans in XBox/10Box. So, the question is : Is the XBox/10Box more noisy than my Dell PowerEdge 1400 ?

  6. why? by geomcbay · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Why would anyone overclock the XBox, unless they first managed to figure out how to run a standardish OS on it?

    The only benefit would be extremely increased system instability on a system already known to have heating issues when not very-well ventilated....

    Virtually all console games are frame-locked to 30 or 60 fps, so its not like you're going to get any performance increase out of your games.

    Sounds like a waste of time.

  7. A good read on the Xbox being a PC issue... by Glonk · · Score: 3, Insightful

    On Byte.com dated April 11, 2001.

    So yes, AGP sort-of does some of this stuff. But there is still the issue of going on different busses to get to the CPU and RAM from the card, instead of a direct physical link between them. As far as the Xbox is concerned, the GPU is another CPU but is only sent instructions for doing graphics. I guess you could say it's kinda like SMP.

  8. mp3 by leuk_he · · Score: 2, Insightful

    All dvd players can read CDroms....MP3 player

    Wrong. Not all dvd drives can read cd-r cd roms. This has to do something with the color of the laser. Since a mp3 cd would be self made (I think you want to burn your own). this might nog be the solution you want.

    just look on mp3.com for your own mp3 car radio.

  9. Like a Buick by krmt · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Well, at least we know why the XBox shouldn't be moved without a forklift - the damn hard drive is taking up more than a quarter of the space. Since no other console has it, I think it's fair to say that without the hard drive the XBox would be more on par in terms of size. The controllers though, are still bigger than Australia.

    Makes you wonder how badly they wanted the hard drive though. It certainly would have cut down on cost and size had they not included it, but they obviously didn't care too much about size or else they would have fixed the controllers. I personally think the hard drive is a dumb idea, but then, I think console games and PC games should remain forever separate (case in point: my friend tonight asked me if he should buy a USB mouse, keyboard, and $50 PS2 copy of Deus Ex, or just buy the $20 PC version of the game). I dunno, does anyone feel that the hard drive will really be a help to the console? I'd assume it goes along with their whole vision of it being MyDigitalEntertainmentX-Hub(tm). And we all know how people are wetting themselves for one of those!

    Come back with a better form factor, a good price point, and some cool titles and I'll buy one. Right now though, I'm thinking Game Cube.

    --

    "I may not have morals, but I have standards."

  10. Re:Hackable...? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Right, OK, off you go then. Please impress us all with your hacking mastery, and while you're at it, give us lecture on shared GPU/CPU memory space and Ring 0. We expect to see your emulator in the next 4 weeks. There WILL be a variety of hacks out for the system, but they will be made by genuinely intelligent people who spend more time coding and less time boasting.

    Go on! What are you waiting for?
    The community is ready to be held in awe...
    Bloody school kids.