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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.
Warning:
By opening, you might let out the intel!
Of course, MS almost certainly has used a proprietary filesystem to thwart such an effort. And reverse engineering such surely violates the DMCA.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
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))"
Now that we can get our hands on the parts and see what they are has anyone summed up their street value and compared that to the unit price. Next time I put a system together would it be worth it to pick up an Xbox strictly for cannibal purposes?
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.
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
"Whoaaa, your new ultra-fast shoot'em up game really kicks ass !"
"Well, er, actually it's a port of Super Mario Bros I"
Thomas Miconi
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.
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 ?
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.
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
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.
To me it looks to me that if you want to port, let's say Linux, to it you would have to define the address range you want to use for graphics displaying and the rest for the system. "Just" separate them in software, you know the amount of RAM anyway for the hardware. Not that I could do it, but it probably is a quite simple exerice for someone with the right experience.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
I don't think it will take much hacking. Nvidia chip set, Intel CPU, Segate HD. If CD Boot isn't disabled you can probably take the HD out, put your own in and install linux. I'm half tempted to buy one just so I can see....but I vowed I would never own on, so I'll have to let somone else try it.
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.
It is NOT a regular PC. CPU, chipset and GeForce3 are modified for console purposes, first and foremost they share the entire 64 megs memory of the box. So, no AGP etc. necessary.
As for copy protection, it's a DVD-9 drive, which consumer-level DVD writers can't do (yet).
Didn't Connectix reverse engineer the Playstation so the games could be played on a Mac? (I forget what the name of the product was). They were sued, but won. So what's to prevent this company from doing the same thing with the xbox.
Also, is MS going to have games released [b]only[/b] on the xbox, and NOT on Windows xxxx?
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Here're some direct links to the pictures, without having to jump through hoops. (TechTV's not particulary standards-compliant site that crashed Konq on me once; the dreadful JS that is used for *everything*; the pop-ups required to get to the pictures; the slowness of the site)
Please no Karma claims; I'm at the cap - it's just a much more convenient way to get to the actual images.
Xbox screws
Warning
Pat sizes thing up
Righty-tighty, lefty-loosey
Just a couple more to go
Under the hood
Hard Drive
The motherboard
These hands have killed Athlons
CPU central
Intel inside
The 'silly' link titles are TechTV's, not mine. You may have to copy/paste the shortcuts into your URL bar in case TechTV's site plays nasty with image linking from other sites. (I don't think it does, though)
Alex T-B
St Andrews
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.
pics are small and hard to read, but if I'm seeing things right, there's what looks to be a standard TSOP packaged FLASH ROM in there. Very desolderable and readable...too bad all the stores around here are sold out of XBOXes. I'm supposing someone's already done it, but if not, as soon as I can get my hands on one I'd be glad to provide the ROM contents to interested parties.
FYI, the gamecube ROM appears to be merged into the DRAM chip, so good luck hacking. There are five chips (basically) in the GC: PPC core, ATI "flipper" chip, 2 MoSys SSRAMs, and the "ARAM" part. No ROM on the list...however, when the disc unit is removed, system still boots okay, so there has to be a ROM on that board somewhere. I guess it's in the ARAM because it's the only chip that is cheap enough/simple enough to accomodate a mask ROM as part of its contents. Perhaps it is a stacked RAM-ROM package or a multi-die on lead frame package...gotta get another gamecube and bust out the sulfuric acid on the package...
having seen these pictures of the inside of the x-box and the inside of the gamecube first-hand, though, I'll have to say that the gamecube wins hands down for elegance of design. The 14-month design cycle of the x-box is painfully evident. Look at the size of the x-box motherboard! The gamecube motherboard looks to be the footprint of the processor heatsink on the x-box. :-P agh, and that ugly power supply....and all those empty spots on the motherboard. Future upgrade potential, maybe...And *two* fans!!! no surprise M$ is losing $100+ per box. I'm not sure about Gamecube, but at $100 cheaper than X-box, they could still be making money on the console with its clean design and small parts count...
of course, good hardware is only half the formula for success of the console. Games are important too...
And so the final big question is: what do you do when 50% of the units shipped have failed hard drives after 3 years? Those can't be "quality" hard drives in the x-boxes, and they probably aren't working in the friendliest of conditions...
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.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
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."
Warning: doing this might reduce your eBay resale value.
:)
Only if you conisder selling yourself.
Come to think of, I thought slavery was abolished looong time ago. Hmmm...
It has onboard ethernet, no need for all that usb nonsense other than for alternate controler devices. I think a hard drive is not a bad idea at all for a game machine instead of a stack of memory cards ala playstation, also you open up the versatility of the machine greatly with storage options combined with the elimination of many of those blasted loading screens is what I'm thinking.
That's why I said "in this case".
Most "onboard video" motherboards and laptop video also fit into this case, but the kernel sets up a virtual mapping so you can't just plug in a physical memory address into a mov instruction and have it show up on the screen. In this case the only reason you don't see the "shared memory architecture" on a modern PC is because the CPU's MMU is set up such that you don't.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
That simply isn't true - the CPU has no direct access to the RAM on a graphics card. Period. Instead it must use memory mapped IO to set up DMA transfers to and from the graphics card's RAM, or poke each byte individually over the bus - very unlike the direct cache-line level access it has to its own RAM chips.
Xbox on the other hand has all of the RAM available to both devices; they share access to the same physical RAM - PCs have two physically distinct RAM banks; one on the graphics card and one on the motherboard.
Of course there is AGP but this is a way for the graphics card to read and write to a limited subset of the mainboard's RAM - and very slowly at that, causing all sorts of contention issues. At no point can the processor or its MMU access the memory on the graphics card directly.
GodboltBlog
Some info:
1) XBox will only boot from layer 2 of a DVD
2) The bios is held encrypted in the nv2a
3) IIRC the dvd drive isn't a normal one.
4) There is meant to be all sorts of encryption built into the hardware.
5) I think there are monitering routines to detect code tampering at run time.
6) The network stack is encrypted.
7) There is a custom disk format i.e. not fat32.
etc...
It will probably be cracked eventually, but I doubt we will be seeing linux on it any time soon...
Last night was a terrible night for TV! Scrubs and The Tick were runing concurrently, so I ended up trying to watch both, comprehending neither! *sigh* What I did see of the Tick renewed my faith that the show will at least be decent...
As for the Will & Grace spot, I almost wanted to vomit. Microsoft should be punished in the marketplace (by consumers) for such blatant, badly done plugs.
I haven't seen anything on that scale of cheese since Fred Savage played Super Mario 3 with the Power Glove in The Wizard . Sheesh.
I wish I had a kryptonite cross, because then you could keep Dracula and Superman away.
Rumor places the HD/BBA releases in the first quarter 2002, in time for Final Fantasy X, which will require the Hard Drive. ps2.ign.com pegs FFX's release as January 2002. We'll see.
You can buy a USB e-net adaptor right now; unfortunately, the only game that can take advantage of it yet is Tony Hawk 3. Supposedly FFXI will be utilizing the BBA, as well as an upcoming game called SOCOM, with a release date of February 14th, 2002.
So I'd peg the BBA release as early next year.
I wish I had a kryptonite cross, because then you could keep Dracula and Superman away.
I can imagine a pretty profitable buisness model based on letting MS subsidize the hardware for compute clusters based on the XBox. I suspect that would be a nightmare for them too.
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.
I'm disappointed! It took a whole DAY for someone to disassemble an XBOX, and post pictures on the web for everyone to see? What took so long?!?
At this slow pace, it might take over a MONTH to get a custom Linux distribution running on it!
Come on guys, hurry up! I had my heart set on building an XBOX web server running Apache before Christmas.
You're right that you couldn't build a PC with XBox specifications for less than the cost of an XBox, but that's not likely to be the goal for most of us. The more likely target is to answer the question, "what PC hardware do I need at a minimum so that I can run an XBox emulator and play XBox games without buying an XBox?"
Virg
...I mean, I can build a cheap PC with all that crap for less than the asking price of an Xbox.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
That's just plain untrue; developers have full access to the components that matter (i.e. the graphics and sound processors). Those that aren't time-critical, such as the HD and network card are driven by the kernel in BIOS. So MS can upgrade them to cheaper components as time goes by without breaking games. There is no plan for 'future upgrades'.
Xbox runs in RING0 all the time, so game code can poke the hardware as much as it likes...the 'API' you mention is as thin as possible and can be bypassed directly.
Yup; but you'll be lucky to get past the crypotographically signed data going back and forth; you'd have to sign all the data with Microsoft's key first...good luck there.
Where the heck are you getting your 'information' from - you don't appear to have a clue what you're talking about.
GodboltBlog
Not just Economy PCs - you can use this architecture to to do much more than that
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
dammit! I knew there was something I was supposed to be doing last night. Stupid Metal Gear Solid 2.
Now that game rules, btw.
Brant
Argle. Bargle.
Sure, if you spend several hundred dollars more for parts, rack up 3rd party developers, and get the FCC to approve the final product. Have a blast.
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!!
Yeah, I'll give you that much it can be shown that they can never come to visit U.S. soil without fear of prosecution.
The older Sony Vaios do it.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Xbox is a virus, which seems can infect anything, even subway turnstiles...
Microsoft has addressed the problem of constant and continuous freezing. As can be noted in the illustrated disection of the XBox, you will see multiple fans placed within the chassis. You will also notice that there appears to be a heat-related device placed upon one of the chips on the main board.
Given that the machine's outter chassis doesn't lend itself easily to the free flow of air through the chassis, then surely, the fans are used to distribute the air within the chassis itself. If that is the case, which I believe is true, then the air passing over the heat-related device affixed to one of the system's chips is then warmed and distributed within the chassis.
This would give the effect of evenly distributed warming within the chassis of the XBox device and thereby ambiguously warming any device within the XBox that is otherwise prone to freezing.
I have heard that if the problem perisists that Microsoft will supply a service-pack module (for $150) that strangely resembles a George Foreman grill. You are expected to mount the XBox within the service-pack module. The service-pack module is to be pre-heated a minimum of two minutes prior to game play.
At first note, it might appear to be objectionable that a user would have to wait such a long time for "pre-heating." However, Microsoft recommends hand-stretching exercises during this time period to help reduce the adverse effects of using their game controller.
So you see, it all comes together rather harmoniously in the end.
Long live XBox!
I found this scan of a motherboard pic through google images. funxbox.com no longer has the picture referenced on their page (let me guess why, oh, maybe blatent ripoff from some magazine), but the image is still there.
Interesting: this older picture shows all of the ram populated, no seperate fan on the graphics chip (I guess they added it due to overheating problems or paranoia), and only 1/2 of the flash populated. The new pictures don't show the second flash site, so I can't tell if its still the same.
This older picture has a small key showing what's what on the board. Does anyone know which magazine it came from?
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Karma whorin' since 1999
Wow, that's pretty amazing. You couldn't have just hit the mute button on the TV and played them on your stereo instead? And you could have saved money overall by buying a couple of fat memory cards rather than paying for the hard drive.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
And how is this a troll, I think this is a legit complaint for people surfing with ad blocking proxies, lynx and other browsers.
In other news, Slashdot readers were less than shocked when a clueless fanboy was incorrect on every point made in a post.
stripped down PC
Ah yes, stripped down in the sense that the NV2A Xbox GPU is more powerful than any nVidia card you can get ?
PS2 superior... specific gaming system
Ooh this one is funny. Guess what CPU the PS1 uses ? MIPS R3000. Same thing the SGI Indigo's used as well as the DECstation 5000s, not to mention a zillion embedded devices. The PS2 again uses a MIPS 4000 family CPU. Again, off the shelf stuff.
The NES, Masterdrive, Genesis, SNES, PS1, Saturn, Dreamcast, PS2, gamecube, and XBox have all used off the shelf CPUs. And all of them except maybe XBox and Gamecube have been cpus that are already effectively obsolete in the desktop space.
So don't delude yourself about "real console hardware".
Besides. Superior is many things, graphics, audio, usability, features, and most importantly - games.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
The Unified Memory that exists in Xbox is there IN THE METAL.
Games get unfetted access to hardware. The OS runs the "dashboard", and is the gateway for access to disk/filesystem. The OS is not managing your resources, theres no VM or any bullshit like that. On the other hand, the game writers dont need to care aout the voltage level coming off of pin 2 of the 3nd controller. (if they dont want to)
XBox is very much all about gaming. It is just as much a specific gaming machine than any dreamcast or PS2. The fact that it does a lot more than either of these should be a _benefit_, not a reason to say "its a pc".
Games not using hard drives ? Gosh, silly of Sony to decide after the fact that they'd start shipping one for PS2. Every XBox game will utilize the hard disk in various interesting ways - because Xbox decided that gaming could really be improved with a HD as part of the standard system. Load times are faster, levels are larger, you can save a bunch of save games on the hd (and saving is faster, and you dont have to buy a memory card that you fill up after playing 4 games)
Not to mention the ethernet connector. I love my dreamcast, but how stupid is it that i have a home lan and DSL but i would need to use a 56k modem (and tie up my only line) to use any of DCs broadband features. All to get a connection thats slow and laggy ? No thanks. With Xbox's ethernet adapter you can make lan games with a crosover cable or a hub, or eventually you'll be able to go online for MMORPGs and a number of other things.
So yeah. Ethernet, insane graphics capability, hard disk - they aren't needed for the games of today. But xbox isn't about the games of today.
Xbox is about the games of tomorrow.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
1. The video is "on board". The video chip has no physical memory of its own and must use some of the system memory. This is very common for low price consumer PCs (like eMachines).
2. The video is on an AGP card. The system bios will have an "AGP Aperture" setting so that the chipset will map physical addresses requested by the processor to addresses on the AGP card.
In both those cases, as far as the processor is concerned the video memory itself is simply part of the total sum of physical addressing space.
AGP was originally sold as a technology that was going to save us tons of money because video cards would no longer need to have on board RAM. Instead they could use some of the system memory. This is exactly how case #1 above works. All those "on board video" motherboards claim the video is AGP... because it is.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
But electrically, there's this thing called an 'AGP bus' in between. That's the limiting factor here - The Xbox CPU has full bandwidth access to the raw geometry, textures etc, and the GPU does too. On a PC with an AGP bus, data must be painstakingly transferred manually or via DMA over a relatively slow connection (extremely slow, if you want to read data back again).
By an astounding coincidence, the nForce motherboard has an 'enhanced AGP' bus to the main memory, equivalent to AGP 6x, as the graphics core also has direct access to main memory. I'd assume it works fairly similarly to the Xbox...
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Yes, actually. I spent the first five years of my professional software career (91-96) writing games for Amiga, CD-I, Macintosh, DOS and Windows.
Now, let's see if I can think of a few gaming consoles that haven't needed a hard drive, dvd drive, ethernet port and USB port... Ummm... Hmmm... Atari 2600, NES, Sega Master System, SNES, Genesis, N64, PS 1, Saturn... That's a lot of systems, and I'm not really trying.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
I compare low cost all in one motherboards because that's what the xbox uses.
This unified architecture is not at all foreign to the PC. The big difference here is that the video chip is not usually a GeForce.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
That's sarcasm, right?
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
You don't see many rogue apps writing all over the screen on your PC - the directly accessible frame buffer isn't as directly accessible as one might think because the kernel has put the memory into a protected page descriptor. (obvious exception for directx)
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
Are you sure it's journaling? For something so simple as saved games and prefs, it may not need it. Does anyone know any real facts about the file system?
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
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.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
What the fuck? Someone paid $366 for an empty box - and this time, the seller comes right out and says no less than 3 times, "There is no xbox inside. This is just an empty box."
Whadda ya wanna bet the buyer gets pissed and claims to have been ripped off?
-Ryan, with the unoriginal sig
True, but having seen what MS can do to an entire industry, people are a little nervous.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Nice pics. Could you put up a nice hires pic of the motherboard? What are the chip numbers on the memory chips? Just curious. It's strange that they have places for 4 memory chips but only have 2 on there.
Regarding the HD; if you've got an extra >8GB drive lying around, you might try sector-copying the Xbox drive to the larger drive and see if the Xbox will recognize the larger drive and its larger space.
XBox has a 128 bit/200 MHz DDR memory bus (6.4 GB/s) shared, and the difference is of course obvious. nForce also has a 128 bit memory bus, at 133 MHz DDR, for 4.2 GB/s.
And yes, as I said the framebuffer mapping into user space is optional (done only for DirectX), but that's irrelevant. Memory-mapped IO is not the same as a UMA shared-memory architecture. It's a convenience for programmers only; it doesn't greatly affect performance.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?