TechTV Cracks Open The Xbox

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.

Comments

Hmmm...

[Wavicle]

Rather light on information, even for slashdot... Still, it looks like a hackable box. Since consoles are generally sold at a loss, the Xbox could find itself a popular distributed computing node. We'll probably have to do an old TiVo trick and make a hard drive image backup before plugging in the unit... Then let the hacking begin.

Of course, MS almost certainly has used a proprietary filesystem to thwart such an effort. And reverse engineering such surely violates the DMCA.

Re:Hmmm...

[t0qer]

They're prolly using NTFS, I betcha balloons to bannana's if MS did try and accuse someone of trying to break thie proprietary filesystem all it would take is any kind of NT license to thwart the DMCA.

Re:Hmmm...

[Wavicle]

There is all manner of copyrighted content that may be jeopardized if you hack the Xbox. And that's what the DMCA is there for. To prevent you from doing something which may defeat the copyright protection measures of some device.

For a real life version of this, check out aibohack.

So, my thoughts are as follows...

[haxor.dk]

1) The components look awfully cramped. But that's not really surprising considering that it's essentially a PC crammed into a console box - size matters.

2) While it should work at standard operating parameters (i.e. not overclocked), I think the lack of proper ventilation (as a result of pt. 1, see above) could halt any overclocking efforts.

3) I wonder how much noise the box will make after 3 months woth of dust and use... TWO fans (if not 3?) is awfully muich for a console - in my experience.

4) It's Microsoft... ewww. Yes, that's my blanat bias.

- Peter

Wow... looky here.

[SynKKnyS]

Doesn't that look like a normal DVD-ROM and a normal harddisk? That leaves a lot of possibilities.

You can upgrade the DVD-ROM drive and make load times faster.
You can upgrade the harddisk drive when it gets full.
Whatever copy-protection mechanism the XBox has can be broken easier since it uses standard PC parts.
The possibilites go on and on...

Looks like a hacker's picnic to me. =) Also, look how much room is in that thing. They could of at least added a PCMCIA slot or something.

... and the it all begins

[muffen]

I wasn't suprised by this article. I don't understand how Microsoft can think that it is a good idea to have "normal" PC hardware in the Xbox. I think there must be millions of people out there who have in-depth knowledge about the PC hardware. This means that it is not going to take long before we start seeing hacked versions of the Xbox and hardware that can be connected to it that is not released by Microsoft.

I don't know what the copy protection looks like on the Xbox (if anyone knows anything about it... please post it), but I think it will be bypassed very shortly.

I remember the playstation, it took almost a year to get the first chip. The reason was that this was the first console where you needed to do a hardware modification in order to play pirated games combined with the fact that it was NOT standard PC hardware inside it.
With the Xbox, one don't have to worry about any of these things

On the box it said supported operating systems was Windows 95 or better... I therefore asumed Linux was supported

Re:... and the it all begins

[DarkZero]

I don't understand how Microsoft can think that it is a good idea to have "normal" PC hardware in the Xbox. I think there must be millions of people out there who have in-depth knowledge about the PC hardware.

Yeah, and some of those millions of people are game developers, and that's why it's a good idea. Games can be ported from the X-Box to the PC or from the PC to the X-Box with incredible ease, which means that the X-Box can have a lot of cheap games thrown onto it to quickly develop a library and developers will be attracted to it because they'll be able to port their X-Box game to a completely different platform with different players very easily, thus bumping their profits up 25-50% off a single game.

As far as piracy goes, I believe Microsoft is counting on the fact that DVD drives are ridiculously expensive. If they're really planning on chucking the X-Box in favor of a second console within only a couple years, which is a pervasive rumor that supposedly has some legitimacy to it, then that's a really good bet. If not, then the X-Box will be relatively free of piracy for about as logn as the PlayStation was, i.e. one to three years.

Re:... and the it all begins

[MadMirko]

I don't understand how Microsoft can think that it is a good idea to have "normal" PC hardware in the Xbox.

Simple: MS wants the XBox to become as popular as possible. If it can be canibalized, hacked, tweaked, improved, whatever, it will become a beloved toy of the cool hacker type guys. Everyone wants to be a cool hacker type guy, so everyone will want a XBox.

In an interview with the German magazine "Focus", a MS representative explained that the XBox wasn't viewed as a cash cow (like Windows), but rather as a means to get more popular.

Re:... and the it all begins

[Elbereth]

You're talking like a PC and an X-Box are two different things. The X-Box is simply a custom PC motherboard with a custom PC chipset. Does this make it any less of a PC? I think not, but this is just my opinion.

Why not just put together your own "X-Box"? Get a standard MicroATX or FlexATX motherboard (1 to 3 PCI slots, 0 to 1 AGP slots, 1 to 3 DIMM slots), stick in a 2.5" laptop EIDE hard drive and 2.5" slimline DVD-ROM, and you're mostly set. You need to figure out how to get decent graphics out of a motherboard that probably has an integrated graphics chip (S3 Savage4, SiS 5xx or 6xx, ATI Mach64 or Mach128, or generic crapola)... but consider this: the most popular games right now are not first person shooters. The most popular games right now are Diablo II, The Sims, Civ III, etc. These games do NOT require anything better than a crappy ATI Mach64 chip (ie, Rage Pro).

Once you've got something running at 900 MHz (have you seen anything slower sold online lately?), a 20GB hard drive (again.. ever seen anything smaller sold online?), and an adequate graphics card (or even a next-gen graphics card like the GeForce3 or new Radeon All-In-Wonder), you can laugh at that silly X-Box.

Advantages of the Flex-ATX system

1. I'm using a standard chipset, probably from Intel, SiS, or AMD (no, not VIA, because VIA sucks). My chipset is well-supported and proven.
   
2. I'm using quality components and not skimping on the power supply, RAM, or CPU fan. Again, my Flex-ATX system is more stable.
   
3. I know the hardware and diagnose problems easily. I know everything about Asus motherboards by now, after using them for so long. Most importantly, I know their quirks.
   

Disadvantages of the Flex-ATX system

1. It does suffer from using "random", commodity PC hardware, rather than a uniform system (but, then again, I hate every Compaq I see because of their uniformity in suckitude).
   
2. It costs a little more to build
   
3. There's no billion dollar ad campaign behind the F-Box.
   
4. It's not exciting to hack.
   

I know, I know... I'm a spoilsport, too cynical, I "just don't get it", etc. I've heard all the flames before, but I haven't heard a good, rational argument that would change my mind.

What's the point of OC?

[Shaheen]

Most people would want to overclock a system for higher framerates, but it's pointless on Xbox, because the framerate is tied to the refresh rate of the display. This is why you will get a constant 60 or 30 frames per second on most games, rather than massively varying framerates like in PC games.

The reason to lock the framerate is that this frees up processing time for other threads in your application to do things like physics simulation, collision detection, etc.

Re:*Yawn*

[Wavicle]

The 'stripped down PC' uses a shared memory architecture that you won't find on a modern PC.

In this case that's a function of the operating system kernel.

Also runs all code at Ring0.

Also a function of the kernel.

And I think it's quite clear that the Xbox was designed (hardware-wise) specifically as a gaming system.

I disagree. Games don't need a hard drive, a dvd drive, USB port, or ethernet port. Although it is marketed as just a games box, it's pretty clear that it is also intended to serve tasks such as a DVD player, broadband WebTV (and all that goes with it), Personal Info Manager (Outlook Xbox), etc.. Microsoft hinted that they would discourage xbox usb peripherals from being developed... I'm betting within 18 months you'll see an internet access pack for the Xbox that includes a usb hub, usb keyboard and usb mouse.

I think the Xbox could become what CD32 and CDI were trying to become.

Re:Who wants to place bets

[inburito]

Yeah.. uh.. in normal pc's you only got one address space also.

And whatabout that pc I built for my sister that has an integrated video driver on motherboard and uses system ram (to your specifications) for video memory..

And whatabout nvidia's upcoming athlon chipset?
Uh.. wait.. Isn't xbox already based on it..

For anything more complicated than plain vga(etc) you're going to need specific drivers that interface with the o/s that then provides an api for developers to use. As long as someone can duplicate that api(which is going to be different than win32) everything is going to (more or less) work. It doesn't matter if memory is shared or not(heck, agp specs let you use system memory)..

Re:Who wants to place bets

[haruharaharu]

Yeah.. uh.. in normal pc's you only got one address space also

No, they have two (at least). A GeForce2/32MB card has 32MB of ram in its own address space. This may be mapped into the main physical address space, but it isn't necessarily done.

Chilly reception

[nutznboltz]

According to the Washington Post the xbox failed to sell out completely like other consoles have. Seems many people were waiting for the GameCube instead.

Re:like economy pcs?

[irix]

Not just Economy PCs - you can use this architecture to to do much more than that

AGP memory hogging?

[jawtheshark]

Now, you may be better informed than me, but as I understood it APG cards use the system memory to store textures and PCI card don't. So indirectly it fills up the memory that otherwhise could have been used by the game and thus resulting in swapping dropping game performance when you do not have enough memory. Just set for kicks your aperture gate size to your whole system memory, fun eh?
AGP memory usage can be read here

Okay, so if I'm wrong, please explain me why my Pentium Pro 200, 128Meg EDO RAM and a VooDoo2 card with 16Meg onboard (PCI, I don't think those come in AGP) kicks the hell out of my P-III 800, 128Meg SD-Ram and NVidia GeForce MX2 with 32Meg onboard (Aperture set to 64Meg, as set by default in my BIOS). Both systems ran under a stock Windows 2000 install, after bootup ideling at about 55Meg Memory used as reported by the taskmanager. Both had the latest available drivers installed. The game in occurence is Half-Life, which has good support for both graphic cards: Glide for the VooDoo and Direct3D for the NVidia. Why did the P-III suddenly used about 196Meg Ram instead of 128Meg on the PPro. Both games were set to 800x600x16bit and maximum details. The only plausible explanation I found was that the P-III reserved a huge amount of memory for graphics data in main memory and the machine got low on memory and had to swap. Proof to my theory (for me) was that adding 128Meg (more now) to the P-III fixed the problem.

I'm not a big gamer, but I was really astonished by those results.