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Another Xbox Anatomy Lesson
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.
Look at it! the hard drive even has a red to one IDE cable for gosh sakes, its a PC that looks like a console, what a clever company though, get a pc, package it as a console and call it the most advanced console ever (altho they did ignore the diffirence between RISC and CISC chips)
smart company, shitty product
Microsoft IIS is to webserving as KFC is to healthy eating
Now that would be sweet - an XBox as an XTerminal. However, you probably don't want to have to look at everything on a TV, and it's cheaper to get an old Pentium computer with a network card.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
All consoles mainly differ from the pc by their Unified Memory Architecture. This basically means that all of the hardware shares the same memory so the latency between the various parts is nearly zero. Basically your graphics card and cpu use the same memory as your sound card. Xbox just takes the top of the line graphics card and eliminates the bottle-neck of pushing numbers to it. Don't kid your selves the first genaration titles look better then PS2 and weren't designed to truly take advantage of all the xbox can do. Later games will look MUCH better. Of course, the true secret is in the sauce. If the games aren't fun what does it matter how much better they look. It's why nintendo is still alive. They make good games.
Run Linux on it, and with the built in broadband, it could be used as a decent MP3 player maybe? It has Dolby certified audio output if I remember correctly, which would be great to run through a home theatre system
That would be pretty cool to see... a game console that doubles as a self-contained MP3 player/server...
So when is this Linux for X-box coming out? heh
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
Similar obstacles have all been tackled by the TiVo hackers. It's very doable once you know the format of the fs.
My sig has a broken link in it.
Irony # 1: Paying M$ money (buying XBox) in order to run Linux on it. They'll be laughing all the way to the bank. I guess techies will find any excuse to conveniently forget why they hate MS - just offer them tech candy and they submit.
/. about how ironic aforesaid misunderstood course of action is. Joke's on you, my friend.
Irony # 2: Doing #1, then thinking somehow you've won a victory for Open Source. And then, posting on
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
Regarding PC ports, I wouldn't be surprised to see an emulator come out pretty quickly. As long as Microsoft can build into Windows (maybe it's already in XP?) a way to enforce the copy-protection mechanism of the discs, they should have no problem with people without X-Boxes trying to buy and play games for their PC. It just means $100 Microsoft saves on X-Box hardware.
The reasons against are support and development issues. That is, you can make a much cooler game much faster if you know exactly what hardware with what capabilities each user will have. That said, if someone goes out and makes a PC port, and it's recognized that all guaranteed-compatability bets are off (as was the case with Connectix's VGS), then it shouldn't be that hard to write it, and if it sells more X-Box games, then Microsoft probably wouldn't have a problem with it either.
Kevin Fox
That doesn't make much sense.
Maybe it can't be made to boot from anything but the hard drive (or some ROM on the board) but the drive can, at the very least, be repartitioned on another system.
The big hurdle will be getting it to boot the "wrong" OS. I'm sure it is rigged to check, and some sort of ROM update or hacked BIOS will be necessary.
-Peter
While it's true that MS is losing money on the hardware, any purchase of the hardware will help them achieve the exonomics of scale that will allow them to reach break-even (or even profitability) on Xbox. By the way, this is standard console practice; the Playstation 2 was also a loss leader at its intro:
Driving down production costs will be a determining factor in profitability over the next five years. According to most estimates, Sony's PlayStation 2 cost the company $450 per unit upon initial production in early 2000. The company had first sold the machine as a loss leader for $360 in Japan and for $300 in the United States and Europe. The strategy paid off with the first Play Station because Sony was able to reduce the product's cost from $480 in 1994 to about $80 now (it was initially priced at $299 and is sold at about $99 today). Meanwhile, the company sold about nine games for every console. That model allowed Sony to make billions of dollars over the life of the PlayStation, even if it lost money at first.
source: Red Herring
While estimates say MS will lose $2 billion on hardware before break-even, much of that could be recouped in games from Day One, and the hardware should itself become profitable relatively soon.
I survived the Dick Cheney Presidency 7 to 9 AM 7-21-07
I'm also keeping a close eye on the preferences page for an "XBox" section I can uncheck so I don't have to see these useless stories anymore.
-Legion
As someone who has used and maintained Macs and Wintel boxes since Windows 3.1, and *nix boxes since 98, I can genuinely say that there is a lot to the anti-MS argument besides their monopoly power abuses. I do not hold that against them as much as the average /.er either; I have Office v.X and IE for X on my system (although I tend to use other apps instead of them most of the time).
Now your argument seems to be that MS's problems are gone. First, stability is improving, but it is still playing catch-up with the other OSes. A complaint that is still valid in Win 2000 and beyond, however, is that Windows is much more prone to having problems for seemingly random reasons, as opposed to other OSes where I may still have complicated problems, but at least i will find a reason for them. Anyone else know what I am talking about?
Secondly, you argue that bloatware is no longer a problem in Redmond. How did you come to this conclusion? I see no trend towards more compact software in their latest products. As MS said, it is very hard to take features out, and as most of us know it is hard to consolidate and reengineer with such large development teams.
And the monopoly power does have an effect on the product they make; it inspires it to be mediocre and overpriced. Consider Office v.X vs AppleWorks (I know most of you son't have direct experience with both, but it's a good example). Yes, Office does a little more, but I would say 95% of the features are in AppleWorks, and AppleWorks is a beautiful example of how not to overbloat a program and is therefore more efficent for me to do most of my work in. Why is this? MS made some progress in Office 2001, then got complacent because they know they need only do a mediocre job. Same with IE for Mac, back in version 4.0 chief evangelist Guy Kawasaki himself endorsed it for freeing us from the weak Mac version of Netscape, and the development has slowed to a crawl and resulted in a mediocre product that has been surpassed by OmniWeb. Now consider that AppleWorks is $99 and Office is $499 (full version prices for both).
Anyways, I think the quote in my signiture sums it up best; who would know better than the man who figured out how a computer should be designed to work with people in the first place. Consider how many good products have buckled under the competitive pressure of mediocre MS software, and hopefully now you understand why so many people want to buy an XBox and turn it into a cheap Linux system just to make MS lose money:)
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
Unless, of course, it's developed outside the united states.
So I've been thinking about all this interest in hacking the XBox, and I've decided to take part in the fray. Bold statement: Hacking the XBox to do other stuff would be cool, mainly because it would earn one bragging rights, but it would be useless.
The technology in the XBox is more expensive than a comparable PC. A $300 PC has much higher resolution video, more/expandable memory, standard expansion slots, a faster/larger HD, compatability with productivity software, and some even have TV output. The one thing that it doesn't necessarily have is the DVD-ROM.
THAT'S IT.
In the time it takes you to hack this device, the hardware gap will only increase. The only advantage to owning an XBox over a PC is in its entertainment value. Porting Linux to the XBox is an absolute joke. Since when has Linux been a platform for playing video games? Porting Windows would be far more interesting, but in all seriousness, Microsoft did that for you with DirectX (hence the X in the name XBox).
Microsoft designed the XBox knowing that you're going to try, so if picking all the Microsoft protections satisfies your personal vendetta, go for it. You won't be able to market anything you come up with without a team of lawyers larger than Microsoft's, and if you're looking for render-farms, I hear that people waste CPU cycles all day long on the internet. If you convince a whole bunch of people to donate their unused CPU cycles, you benefit far faster than you do spending $300 a pop for a Box that's likely to be sold out at your local toy store for months.
Don't listen to me. I just work here.
-Mike
yes we are, and you know something? It's pretty damn nice in this here ideal world.
Btw - why can't I just hate MS indiscriminantly and be taken at my word? Why do people think that I need to somehow justify to them my relationship (or lack thereof) with a company?
I hate their guts. I don't use their software - case closed.
sic transit gloria mundi
Tradtionally, UMA is a huge performance issue because all the components are accessing memory over the same, narrow bus. However, Xbox uses AMD's HyperTransport bus, which effectively provides a dedicated channel for each device on the bus (in the Xbox's case I believe just the CPU and GPU are on the bus).
sigs are a waste of space
xterms are about $400 to $600 new - not including monitor.
they're not cheap capital wise, the benefit is fire and forget, zero maintenance, less admins needed to tinker and care for workstations. (it breaks, just throw another in it's place).
--paulj
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.