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Another Xbox Anatomy Lesson

Posted by timothy on from the lookit-th'-extra-ram-space dept.

Keith writes: "Icrontic.com has taken apart, examined, and modified an Xbox. In their latest article, they point out some debugging leads on the Xbox, and a possible USB hack. The Xbox is looking more and more like a PC." A lot of the investigation here is incomplete; watch this space, because it won't be long until Xbox surgery is commonplace.

2 of 495 comments (clear)

  1. Re:HardOCP have their review up by smackmonkey · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    You think you're so good just because you're all netted up to the interweb. Not everyone's a geek, you know. Some of us go outside from time to time.

    --

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    CNN declares War on Islam!
    Left-wing America declares War on its Civil Liberties!
  2. Re:One major difference by voronoi++ · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Actually idiot,

    The xbox has plenty of bandwidth. UMA is in fact a huge advantage:

    1) When you stream in data from DVD / HD the cpu has almost no work to do to in order to use that data. On other consoles a memcpy() or an additional DMA will be needed.

    2) The cpu can play with anything and everything. This is great for special effects.

    3) Unlike the Gamecube all xbox memory runs the same speed (not all Gamecube ram is the 1t fast stuff).

    4) Segmented ram is a pain the in arse for many reasons, it's often very difficult to get at some ram (e.g. vu0 ram on ps2) this makes debugging seriously interesting...

    5) FYI: there is in practice enough bandwidth to keep a DVD, a HD and the audio DMAs going at the same time as the CPU doing heavy work and the GPU rendering close to max fillrate.

    BTW this is not to say that the Gamecube is crap in anyway. I've had a Japanese cube for a while now & I love Nintendo games (esp Myamoto stuff)! But for speed XBox is king.