Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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
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