Slashdot Mirror
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.
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)
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.
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.
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
Basically, what it comes down to is the Xbox has the shared memory architecture, and the PC does not. That is, there is no video card RAM on the Xbox, there is no system RAM on the Xbox, there is just 'RAM' on the Xbox. The GPU and CPU both have equal access to it. The PC, as you surely know, does not work like that.
Then there's the fact that the Xbox games are all designed to run at Ring0 in the kernel, too...
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.
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).
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
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...
The DMCA. If you reverse engineer it and try to profit off that information, you've violated federal law today. The code inside is copyright MS, you broke the code, you sold it, you go to jail.
:-/
Isn't the land of the free wonderful?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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...
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...
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)..
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.
Reboot macht Frei.
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.
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!
True, but having seen what MS can do to an entire industry, people are a little nervous.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on