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.

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.

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:... 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.

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.