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.
Could this be used as a (relativly) cheap X Terminal?
Yeah, Who wants to place a wager on wether or not Microsoft is going to try to take some legal action against the authors of that article for reverse engineering their proprietary hardware?
-- www.RoachMcKrackin.com
In other console news, Hong Kong has hacked the gamecube into playing pirated games burned onto MINI-DVD or CD-R formats. They have developed a CD/DVD addon and use the Gamecube's expansion ports to implement it.
Pretty quick if you ask me.
That's Funny.
From the other Slashdot link to techtv , the innards of the Xbox show a Seagate hard drive. This one, however is a WD. Different brands of HD in different Xboxes?
I would think that kind of odd - wouldn't it be cheaper to just use one brand?
Never. It's common information that MS is selling the box cheap to get more cash on the games. If you're buying the box but are not going to buy the games, why should MS give a rat's ass about you? Actually it's kind of ironic - microsoft is selling the xbox so cheap that the cruelest thing a microsoft-hater could do to microsoft is to go out and buy the box and use it just for cd's, dvd's and stuff like that. That would mean no profits to microsoft.
...slashdot sure seems to have blown its collective load several times over since the XBox's release.
/. saying that we've figured out how to get linux, a X11 server, and SDL ported onto the Xbox. It would be like shoving a million needles in microsoft's eye when it happens.
And why not? I think MS is irrelevant to the fact that it is indeed a cheap alternative to the PC once we get the internal workings figured out. In these hard economic times, who wouldn't want a cheap PC?
And what would make us blow our load harder (and Bill Gates top higher) than an article on
Of course, there is the argument that we're just throwing money back into the devils pocket. Actually though, we're not. MS is taking about $100's loss per unit. With Linux running on it, it would give game developers an alternative to MS licensing on the XBox. You see, every game company that want's to make a game for any console system has to pay the console maker a royaltee on every game they make. So if we get the Xbox figured out, we could really start fucking with MS's head.
One last reason to blow a load on the Xbox, it's just PC hardware, which I myself really understand well myself. Sure I could be taking apart a SunE250 server, but who has the money or the access to one? Even if you had access, my boss would certainly look at me strangely if I had a screwdriver near anything Non-PC in the enterprise class of hardware.
Hope you enjoyed that, please aim your load away from me now.
I think the original poster meant that the launch developers were "rushed" to get their titles out, so they weren't able to make all the tweaks that later developers can do. Usually the difference between "generations" of games is fairly vast. Look at the PS1 (yes PSOne) launch titles and look at the ones being released now. The developers have learned in the ins and outs of the system, what it is good at, what it is not good at. They have developed libraries of code to reuse. This is what developers can do with a machine that remains constant for over 5 years.
On the other hand, since X-Box is basically a PC, I don't know if the differences will be that great after the second generation games. From what I hear, PS2 was hard to program for because of its multiprocessor design, so the differences between the launch titles and today's games are fairly vast since the developers have gotten a handle of things now.
Second, do you honestly believe an established multimillion dollar game publisher is going to risk MS's wrath by publishing games that run on the X-Box but are unlicensed? Not to mention the legal ramifications if a publisher decides to skip on the royalties. Sure, I expect the X-Box to be hacked, and yes, we might get PC games to run on it and all of our other software, but I seriously doubt any of the big publishers (e.g. EA, THQ) has the balls to stand up to MS and release unlicensed games designed for the X-Box but not anywhere else and just release it as is. I'm sure that the publishers have some competent developers around that could reverse engineer the consoles, but there's a reason they just don't release unlicensed games.
Anyway, just some thoughts. I'm not saying that MS's move into consoles is necesarily bad, but this is just a broader strategy to increase their goals of dominating new areas and increase their growth. I also personally do not believe MS has a chance against Sony, and from the looks of things, maybe not even GameCube. Their hardware does look very nice, but I don't know if they can hold out for the long haul without itching to build a new device too quickly.
and it's even a low-end PC: it's a fairly unimpressive processor, and they're not even using the highest end video cards available, which is, of course, crucial for a game console.
the use of DirectX is another thing, however. in terms of PC compatability (not interesting to me, since i don't use M$ ever, but it's still a market factor worth talking about), it helps alot, and that's really apealing to a game designer. the problem is the M$ doesn't know crap about portable code, so DirectX is pretty closely tied to x86 architectures, without major work. which is why they put an Intel chip in there, which costs them in terms of performance. which does not look good to a game designer. it remains to be seen whether they made the correct tradeoff.
what i'd like to see is someone design the game interfaces around something more cross-platform, like OpenGL. that'd open the way to more games on more platforms, and PCs running varous OSs. but most console makers don't want that. M$ was willing to "compromise" with DirectX because they own the only other place it runs, too! (excluding small, not-really-relavant-to-the-market hack jobs for other OSs, with poor performance and not-quite-finished functionality)
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
Any X-Box owners out there that can testify to the existance or absence of any sort of EULA for the hardware? Microsoft is somewhat famous for their software EULAs, would it be so supricing to find one on the X-Box?
I've looked at the boxes they come in, but short of buying one I haven't been able to check out the included liturature. Perhaps one of you can stop gaming/hacking for a moment and actually read the paper waste that came with the box.
Not that it will make a difference one way or the other. But you figure they have to know there's a hacker community out here just waiting to rip this thing apart. If not, I'm sure it will be a real i-opening experience!
I'm against picketing, but I don't know how to show it.
Microsoft will most certainly bust out the DMCA on you and have you arrested.
You have been warned.
M$ shareholders would most certainly demand prosecution under the DMCA. M$ will be forced to act.
The flip side is that if you can figure out enough about the XBOX internals, you could potentially write an XBOX emulator, and all those great XBOX titles can run on your home PC :-)
If they are using a relatively standard PC-style API, it might not be infeasible...the trick is probably figuring out what tweaks are in that nvidia gfx and sound chip.
Firstly, don't think your going to be able to put RedHat bootdisks in and fire it up.
MS will have pretty good security here to stop this working (I know, Dreamcast's protection got hacked eventually, but we need a simpler way of doing this).
What I suggest is the Trojan way in. We need to get a boot disc that has the capability of loading something like VMware/Bochs, and is certified by MS (The tricky bit). Once that is done, we're in. We use that as a bootloader, swap discs, and carry on as usual.
Not the perfect solution, but it's a start to get a development system onto the machine.
And it would show Linux running on a XBox onto a TV, this fact alone would be an achievement, no?
So, who's up for a bit of social engineering into talking someone at MS to let us use a CDR with emulating boot code?
As an aside, does anyone know if the XBox is region locked? I'm visiting the US tomorrow and would like to know if it's worth me bring a machine back to the UK. Ta!
Waiting for an amusing sig.
It's the TV-Out chip.g in e.class/Web/products/products.jsp?Type=Prod&ProdFa mId=10&ProdCatId=0&ProdSubCatId=94&PartId=278&clrT rail=yes
http://www.conexant.com/default.sph/SaServletEn
If it was doing the DVD playback it'd be marked 'Video Decoder'
and I don't think Conexant actually makes an MPEG-2 decoder chip.
HardOCP made the same mistake... Hmm...
Paul "TBBle" Hampson
Paul.Hampson@Pobox.Com