For reference...
by
Dicky
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The last time this page was reported on slashdot was back in August. The story is here
-- Paranoia isn't an infectious condition, it's a way of life
Cabinet Choice
by
alister667
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Looking at this story I have to agree with Otaku - the XBox would be an ideal choice for a MAME cabinet, as it uses a standard TV out, has a HD, comes with controllers etc. Now how can we get the ported application? Can MAME be ported to the XBox without using the MS developers bundle? Will this allow XBox MAME to be released? Anyone have any ideas?
It's noticable that about 1 year after the same guy ported MAME to the PS2, there is still no way (I'm aware of) I can get MAME on my PS2 at home.
--
We ARE the peat bog soldiers.
Re:The other way round
by
Weavus
·
· Score: 4, Informative
There seems to be a common misconception that the Xbox is just a pc console. Every slashdot story about the Xbox has numerous posts abotu this. The Xbox may have some standard pc components inside it (x86 cpu, hard disk, geforce etc) but there is a lot that is different.
The biggest difference between the two is that the Xbox uses unified memory. This means the cpu/graphics/sound all use the same memory and dont have to contend with the pc memory bottleneck of getting stuff to the graphics card. Emulating that is going to take a lot of time/effort and cpu power.
Apart from that, i'm sure Microsoft have put in plenty of other measures to stop people emulating the Xbox on a PC. BIOS checks, DirectX differences, Stripped OS etc...
Dont expect a game playing xbox emulator for a long time.
kids across America see this, complain about the xbox's crappy graphics, and buy a gamecube.
-- daed si luap
Oh, the possibilities!
by
Forager
·
· Score: 5, Informative
This is dated July 20th, 2001; it was, needless to say, done on a development box. Anyone know the difficulties between running it on a dev box vs running it on the actual consumer box?
Thought this paragraph was interesting:
So I've found the computer I want to put in the M.A.M.E. cabinet I am still trying to find time to construct, it's going to be an XBox, it's got a built-in hard drive, Ethernet connection, and supports analogue & digital controlllers, and only costs a few hundred American dollars, plus it already supports a standard TV signal so I can wire up any decent TV instead of an expensive Wells Gardner monitor.
What I'm curious to know is how many other people will find applications like this? Hook up a USB keyboard and mouse, you could have a $300 linux box, or a $300 quake server, or a $300 mail server, or a $300 SETI@home bean counter. Point is, the potential for the XBOX BEYOND its original purpose is pretty big, if only people can get around Microsoft's software.
~Aaron.
-- student of animation and the fine arts
My own Xbox notes
by
Dark+Paladin
·
· Score: 5, Informative
For those who don't have an Xbox, here's my own notes on this system. I want to apologize, as this is very long, but it's everything I've discovered about it after playing with it since Thursday night.
First, there's no USB ports. The Ethernet controller doesn't work yet (more on that in a second).
Now, let me get to the meat of the Xbox.
The Xbox is like a hobbled warhorse. You can see how big, how powerful it is, the sleek, black muscles with the power to crush anything else around it. You can feel its energy, its need to break out and use that power.
But the creators, fearing its power to much, fearing those that rode it might use it for what they wanted instead of what the creators wanted, have attached thick, iron chains to its back legs, so matter how fast or how powerful it is, it will never reach that ability - unless the creators finally see that its power is not something to be feared, but something to be celebrated in, and to let the rider use that power for what they see fit would be the greatest use of this powerful animal.
The Xbox is truly one big box. It's made to stand up one way - with it's bottom on the surface. You're not going to stand it on its side at all, and to do so would be folly.
It feels powerful, solid. Everything about it says its solid and strong, from the weight (almost 10 pounds), to the hard, black plastic on the outside, and even the wires. The RCA plugs are thick and meaty, and the ends are covered in thick, black plastic except for the colored ends. On top is the gigantic black X with the rounded circle stating that this is the Xbox.
It's also brutally simple. On the back there are three slots - one for power, one for media output, and the Ethernet port. Let's leave the Ethernet port alone for now - we'll come to that in a moment.
In the front we've got 4 input controller slots, the eject button, and the off button. That's it. No USB, FireWire, or otherwise. I can understand why there's no USB, and it's going to be a recurring theme. With USB, Microsoft might have given keyboard/mouse access to the Xbox, and above all that, they can't have that happening, because that would encourage hacking, and above all else, Microsoft cannot allow that to happen.
Why no hacking? Well, because this is as close to a computer that plugs
into your TV as most people will get without building their own - and for $300 dollars, the idea is temping. It has an Intel 733 processor. An
Nvidia graphics/chipset controller. 64 MB RAM. A 8 MB Seagate HDD (Hard Disk Drive). After finding the screws so I could get the pictures inside, I want to find the tools to dig deeper, to unplug the hard drive and find out how its partitioned, how to make it do what I want it to do.
But we'll get to that in a little bit.
When I first turn it on, I can hear the hard drive crunch for a moment,
and it's obvious as I move around the settings and listen close that the
operating system is probably stores on the HDD. (Again, if somebody
figures out how to hack this thing open and start messing around, we
might see something like LILO or Partition Magic in the works for dual-booting).
The menu system is very green, not "Daikatana annoying green" but more
cool and high tech green. Looks very nice and I could find what I
wanted in a few moments. The text was clear - perhaps the clearest text I've seen from a computer anything on screen.
First, let's hit the settings. Sound (mono, stereo, Dolby), video
(normal, wide, etc) - then the DVD and Game rating section. You can use
a parental lockout for both the movies or games, which for parents can
at least offer some help to make sure they aren't going to find their
copy of La Blue Girl in the machine while they're away for the night.
But there is one thing that absolutely kills me. I refer to Page 15 of
the Xbox Instruction Manual:
Do not connect a telephone line to the Ethernet connector on the back
of the Xbox console.
Broadband compatibility is scheduled to go live in
the summer of 2002." (Emphasis added.)
That's right, the Ethernet controller is like my gall bladder - it's
useless. It does nothing. There is no reason for its existence. I was
actually interested in plugging this into my home network (I use DSL and
have a Linux box providing NAT) and going online for...well, some reason. After all the crowing the Xbox guys did at E3, I was expecting to do something on the Internet with the damned thing.
Now I know that's not going to happen until - when? Summer 2002?
What's the problem here? Last I checked, Microsoft had a TCP/IP stack.
They couldn't put some simple FTP/Telnet/SMB protocols on the box?
DHCP can't be that hard - let me get this guy doing something. Multiplayer for Halo? Not over the Internet - which, at least in my head, was going to be one of the cool things about the game. How about Metal Gear Solid 2 X and finding out how well I did online instantly? Nope - not gonna happen.
But I know the reason why, and it comes down to hacking. Once they open
this thing on a network, it's going to become a mini-PC, and down goes
the $$$ from game selling. Folks are already working on MAME (an arcade game emulator) and SNES (Super Nintendo) emulators for the Xbox. If that becomes a reality, you've got yourself
a $300 PC that runs all the games you want, and with a Ethernet IP
connection - well, you can put the pieces together. For those who can't, that means that Microsoft could be losing money every time they sell an Xbox.
Personally, I think they can capitalize on that. I think they should say to themselves "It's going to happen, one way or the other. So we'll hope that people do buy the Xbox for reasons we don't want them to - because they're also going to want to play the games that are coming for it, and if they've already got an Xbox, no matter what the reason, they'll come around to the games - and we'll make out money once we get that Killer Application, the one game nobody can live without. And from that one game we can make more, and eventually win."
For now, I'm wondering about that Ethernet port. How is the broadband going to look come Summer 2002? Are we going to be forced to
play MSN (Microsoft Network), or are we going to be allowed to use our own local systems for
Internet capacity? We'll just have to wait and see what happens, but
for now, I'm disappointed. After all the hype about the 100 MB Ethernet port - and it turns out its as useful to me as my gall bladder. You could take it from my body, and everything would work just the same.
The music system alone is almost worth the purchase. A good MP3 player
is around $300, and the Xbox could compete with them, thanks to Mr. Hard
Drive.
When you stick in a music CD, you can listen like normal. Or...you can
copy it to the hard drive. I tried Phantom of the Opera out. Waited
about 23 minutes and 20 seconds before it was done. It took long enough that the screen saver kicked in (well, it just turned the screen blank), but it was about as long as converting the CD to MP3 would have been.
Any bets that its in WMA (Windows Media Audio) format instead of MP3? (Someone at Xbox tech support said it was, but since they weren't an official company rep, I'm holding out on that one.) But once again, just as I start thinking something about the Xbox is cool, something else gets in my way. Remember that useless Ethernet controller? Well, already this could have been useful. By plugging it into the Internet, I could have used a CDDB (CD Database) to pull the CD's name, the name of all of the tracks, and had the Xbox store that automatically.
As it is, I'm forced to do it with the controller. Now, I might not have minded that, except that if we're talking, say, Phantom of the Opera, we've got 4 CD's with 15-17 tracks apiece, and I'm going to t-y-p-e-i-n-e-a-c-h-l-e-t-t-e-r-o-n-e-b-y-o-n-e - well, you can already see how annoying that is.
The first CD I used was Disk 1 of "The Phantom of the Opera". The disk contains 475 MB of musical data, and by the time it was done, the Xbox reported that it used up 3209 blocks. If you figure that each block is 16.3 kilobytes (calculated by the 8 MB memory module being 503 blocks), then it's been reduced down to 53 MB.
Sound difference? I played Phantom of the Opera through the same
speakers on my computer (a pair of flat-screens with a sub-woofer), one
with the PC, one with the Xbox copied. Sounded the same.
So I decided to take the test an extra step further, and plug it into
the stereo system. speakers are 3" infinity. I still couldn't hear the difference, and I've had 7 years of band, so I'm pretty sure I know what I'm hearing.
Once on the hard drive, you can make up your own playlists, copy tracks around, and so on. It's still clunky with just the controller instead of using a mouse, but the capacity is there. Of course, you can't just copy the MP3's you've already got on your hard drive, unless you converted them back into WAV format, copied them into a CD-RW (seems the Xbox doesn't accept CDR's, but CD-RW is fair game), then had then re-encoded on the Xbox.
Still, the potential for having a great digital music player, with all of your CD's on the Xbox plugged into your stereo system is a temping one. I'm already considering it as I look over all of my Final Fantasy Music Collections on CD.
You know the whole thing about having to purchase a DVD remote
controller to watch DVD movies on the Xbox? It's true. I stuck in a DVD movie to see what happens, as
was politely told "Nope - you need that DVD remote controller". I'm
assuming that MS is making folks buy the remote to pay for the DVD
license, and to avoid Sony's initial problem (folks in Japan buying the
PS2 for a DVD player rather than a game system).
I don't get this part. Maybe they can claim that since folks can't
watch movies they don't need to pay the DVD license, and by making
people buy the remote (then using that money to pay the DVD licensing)
they can make sure they don't pay for it - but it's still annoying. I know it's another $20 Microsoft would have to pay out, but, dang, it's still annoying.
Like the box itself, the controllers feels like you could take a hammer to it, and it
would come back for more. The cord is interesting. First, it looks
like a FireWire cord, which if it is would mean you put put a lot of
bandwidth down the pipe. Then the controller can have the end plugged in - perhaps the idea is that you leave one part plugged into the Xbox, and if you want to plug in a new controller or a different one (keyboard, mouse, steering wheel) you don't have to pull the jack from the Xbox itself.
The controls are obviously inspired by the Dreamcast line. The memory
cards go in there (not that you really need them, which now that I know I could have saved myself $35 at Toys R Us, unless you want to
copy things to the memory card and from there to someone else's Xbox
system).
And yes, damn it, the controllers are too big. The controller runs like this:
Two finger triggers
Two analog sticks
1 Dpad
8 buttons - a, b, x, y, black, white, Start and Back.
At this moment, I'm looking at the controller for the GameCube, and it's almost the same - 2 analog sticks, one D pad, 4 buttons, and three finger triggers along the back - but I can get to every single button without having to stretch.
The black and white are too far from the analog sticks (assuming you've got
both thumb on an analog stick) to be able to reach without physically
moving my hands. My hands can span 1.5 octaves on a computer, so I'm
no small dandy man - but I would have preferred either two more thumb
controllers for black/white, or they be moved to the left instead of up.
And...the big green X on the controller. Get rid of it! I know it's an
Xbox, and the useless, gigantic center spot does nothing but take up
real estate. Make it a tiny little green X if you must, but then you'll
have room on the controller for something important, like...my thumbs.
Here's a short gut level review of the 3 games I've been playing with the system. The scores are not
final, may change, but these are my "gut" feelings after spending some time with them.
First, each game takes a long time to load. Some games, like Dead or
Alive 3, mask this by having cut scenes/messages, and by the time that's done, the game is done loading up. (The initial "copy this software and we'll break your head" message is just perfect for this). Others just say
"loading" as you wait, and wait, then get up, walk to the bathroom, "take care of business", and by then it's ready. Then again, once it's done loading, you usually don't see any delays until the next time it has to load. What's going on here?
Well, that hard drive is what's going on, which is both a crutch and a blessing. DVD seek
times (the amount of time it takes the DVD to find a specific area of
memory on the disk and read from it) is around 150-200 milliseconds.
Hard Drive seeks are around 10. So if you copy the information to the
HDD (that's Hard Disk Drive), you can quickly access it during gameplay
for better performance.
But that means you're spent waiting for the game to start as the developers have decided to copy all that information to the hard drive instead of jumping right to the game. Compare this
to Metal Gear Solid 2 - looks great, and I wait 3 seconds for a scene
change, and there's no hard drive. Or Soul Reaver, which even on a simpler system (like the Dreamcast) had practically no load times at all. So I can't say the HDD is really giving any benefit, except in the fact that you don't have to shell out for memory cards all the time.
So, without any further ado, here's the games:
Dead or Alive 3:
It's Dead or Alive 2...with better graphics. Same
controls (different controller), same gameplay, same nonsensical "stories" that are really
characters saying things to each other for some reason - but it always leads to somebody's ass getting kicked. But let's face it - the
women are incredibly hot, and that reason alone makes me keep them in the ring.
Except the last boss. For some reason, they felt the need to change the
camera angle for some dumb ass reason, so it was harder to figure out
what I was trying to do. Then again, I usually don't like fighting games except for Dead or Alive 2: Hardcore, so I'll have to keep playing and see if it grabs me.
Gut score: 7-8
Halo
First person action that reminds of Half-Life, looks like
Half-Life after the high resolution pack. Actually, it looks pretty damn good. Until you reach the planets surface, then I was truly impressed by how beautiful this game could be. Surrounded by the hills, the waterfalls, looking at the sky above me - granted, a rather static one with the Halo running up into the sky - but still, for the first time I've placed my hands on the Xbox, all I could say was "Damn! That's just pretty.".
I have that "new babe"
feeling in the beginning - here you are, dropped into the middle of a
situation, learning on the fly what's happening as fast as you can while
learning the controls (but it's in a good way, since it gets that fear
feeling from the start without actually putting you in risk). The
controls are interesting. Left analog stick moves you
forward/backwards/left shift/right shift. Right analog button "looks"
about. Thumb triggers fire weapons.
The game itself feels like it's going to be pretty cool and fun, with
Bungie's own sense of style working for it. But I still find myself
reaching for the keyboard/mouse to get that precision that I need. (Note to game makers for consoles: if the console allows you to use a keyboard/mouse with the system, and you don't program your game to take advantage of that, I will come over and teabag your keyboard.
Teabagging a keyboard: (verb). Describes going to an opposing geeks computer system, lowering one's pants, and (assuming the teabagger is mail) dropping their scrotum upon the keyboard. Usually used a sign of disdain, or can be used for flirting (see Romero/Killcreek).
Gut Score: 8-9
Munch's Oddysee:
Munch's Oddysee: I've spent the least time with this one, and that's something I plan to fix. First, the humor is already there (the Almighty Raisin got lots of kicks from my co-workers). Abe and his world are rendered smoothly, and it looks good.
Then again, I'm wondering if this is just the previous Abe games in 3D. Oddworld has time to prove otherwise, and I'm willing to give them that chance.
Gut Score: 8-9.
So far? I have to say that based on the games, the system, and
everything else, I'm underwhelmed. The graphics are good, but the only
thing that impresses me is the lack of jaggies and the clearness of the
text. Maybe its because I don't think visually (ask me about that sometime and I'll explain it to you), but I'm not impressed by the graphics.
It's like looking at a good Dreamcast game, or worse, like a game I'd
play on the PC. The music thing is cool, but the games themselves are -
well, like anything else I'd see, and even worse, like anything else I'd
play once on the PC and move on to something else. I'm not feeling the
"Must-Keep-Playing" I get with Metal Gear Solid (1 or 2), or the "My
god!" of Devil May Cry, or even the "Damn!" from playing Rogue Squadron.
I played Halo - and could put it down. I played Metal Gear Solid 2 - and I couldn't put it down. I got finished playing Super Monkey Ball, and I'm already wanting to go back.
Microsoft needs to get those killer apps - and fast. Right now they're
playing catch up, and while history has proven that MS can play catch up
as well as anyone by throwing money at it, they have to remember that
they're up against opponents with brand names, exclusive deals (Pokemon,
Final Fantasy, etc), and, in the case of Sony, a company with more than
enough cash to take the long haul - and enough at stake that they'll
fight tooth, claw and nail to keep it.
So here's the ultimate deal. If someone were to ask me, right now, if I'd recommend they buy an Xbox for Christmas, I'd say no. Between the 3 systems, it's in last place, and unless we see something impossibly cool (like Panzer Dragon Saga II, Sakura Taisen, or something we'd all have to buy), it'll stay there.
Of course, this is all my opinion - I could be wrong.
That metaphor if freedom
by
StrawberryFrog
·
· Score: 4, Informative
unless the creators finally see that its power is not something to be feared, but something to be celebrated in, and to let the rider use that power for what they see fit would be the greatest use of this powerful animal.
It's business, not fear - if you could do anything with it, MS would have to stop selling the hardware at a loss to subsidise the software that they want you to buy for it.
I'm sure that there'll be a linux port, filesystem decoders and all kinds of hardware hacks anyway.
--
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Re:The other way round
by
dasunt
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Weavus writes:
Apart from that, i'm sure Microsoft have put in plenty of other measures to stop people emulating the Xbox on a PC. BIOS checks, DirectX differences, Stripped OS etc...
Sorry. There is only one console that I know of that's a bitch to emulate on the PC, and that's the lowly NES. Not the N64, not the SNES, but the original 8 bit NES, and that was due to mapper support. No NES emulator that I know of has full mapper support, bioNES, fwNES, and NESticle were the best when I was in the emulation scene. Arcade games also tend to be a pain, due to anti-piracy measures implimented in a few of the games, and the relative scarcity of arcade games when compared to most console games. The Atari Jaguar has also been slow to be emulated, although I don't know if this was due to technical difficulties or a lack of interest.
That being said, the following have been successfully emulated on the lowly PC (running DOS/Win for the most part): Arcade (which is technically many different platforms, even if the systems are JAMMA compliant, they have different hardware. MAME roms alone list over 3000 games (including clones, and there are other multi-arcade emulators out there). The NeoGeo (some games that have been successfully emulated by MAME) adds a hundred or two more. Looking at old school stuff, the C64, Amiga, and Apple II have all been emulated, according to Zophar, as well as the Trash-80's and Tandy's. For consoles, we have Atari, ColecoVision, Dreamcast, SMS/Gamegear, Intellivision, NES, SNES, N64, Dreamcast, Playstation, Saturn, Turbo Grafix 16, and the Vectrex, among others. The Gameboy, and the NeoGeo pocket has also been emulated (as well as the aforementioned Game Gear, which is really a SMS with better graphics). We also have both HP and TI calculators emulated.
With all of this emulated, I don't suspect that Xbox will be that much of a problem, especially with the demand for an emulator that we will see.
I understand if only the XBox dev kit would run this software, but where does the law come in? Is it the licensing of the dev kit? Does this mean that you're required to pay MS to write software for this platform?
The law comes in, and I absolutely shit you not when I say this, in this capacity:
If you release software for the X-Box without Microsoft's approval, they will come after you with the DMCA, whether or not it will legitimately hold up in court, and they will appeal any rulings against them endlessly until they either win or deplete your assets with court fees until you are bankrupt.
That's exactly what it comes down to. Some states in the DOJ case actually settled just to recoup their legal assets from the multi-year battle against Microsoft. If Joe Average tries to release unapproved software for the X-Box, Microsoft will use the DMCA to either intimidate them into shutting down their software distribution or, barring that, go into a court case with them that could last almost infinitely (because Microsoft has an almost infinite amount of money), and definitely bankrupt the person that released the software. Most likely, though, intimidation would work pretty well, because after all, these guys outlasted the US government. Joe Average doesn't stand a chance.
(I am not anti-Microsoft, but their intention to use the DMCA against people that relese unapproved software for the X-Box and their unbelievably large cash flow are FACTS, not the usual Slashdot visitor anti-MS bias.)
Slashdot Mirror
The last time this page was reported on slashdot was back in August. The story is here
Paranoia isn't an infectious condition, it's a way of life
Looking at this story I have to agree with Otaku - the XBox would be an ideal choice for a MAME cabinet, as it uses a standard TV out, has a HD, comes with controllers etc. Now how can we get the ported application? Can MAME be ported to the XBox without using the MS developers bundle? Will this allow XBox MAME to be released? Anyone have any ideas?
It's noticable that about 1 year after the same guy ported MAME to the PS2, there is still no way (I'm aware of) I can get MAME on my PS2 at home.
We ARE the peat bog soldiers.
There seems to be a common misconception that the Xbox is just a pc console. Every slashdot story about the Xbox has numerous posts abotu this. The Xbox may have some standard pc components inside it (x86 cpu, hard disk, geforce etc) but there is a lot that is different.
The biggest difference between the two is that the Xbox uses unified memory. This means the cpu/graphics/sound all use the same memory and dont have to contend with the pc memory bottleneck of getting stuff to the graphics card. Emulating that is going to take a lot of time/effort and cpu power.
Apart from that, i'm sure Microsoft have put in plenty of other measures to stop people emulating the Xbox on a PC. BIOS checks, DirectX differences, Stripped OS etc...
Dont expect a game playing xbox emulator for a long time.
Weavus
kids across America see this, complain about the xbox's crappy graphics, and buy a gamecube.
daed si luap
This is dated July 20th, 2001; it was, needless to say, done on a development box. Anyone know the difficulties between running it on a dev box vs running it on the actual consumer box?
Thought this paragraph was interesting:
So I've found the computer I want to put in the M.A.M.E. cabinet I am still trying to find time to construct, it's going to be an XBox, it's got a built-in hard drive, Ethernet connection, and supports analogue & digital controlllers, and only costs a few hundred American dollars, plus it already supports a standard TV signal so I can wire up any decent TV instead of an expensive Wells Gardner monitor.
What I'm curious to know is how many other people will find applications like this? Hook up a USB keyboard and mouse, you could have a $300 linux box, or a $300 quake server, or a $300 mail server, or a $300 SETI@home bean counter. Point is, the potential for the XBOX BEYOND its original purpose is pretty big, if only people can get around Microsoft's software.
~Aaron.
student of animation and the fine arts
For those who don't have an Xbox, here's my own notes on this system. I want to apologize, as this is very long, but it's everything I've discovered about it after playing with it since Thursday night.
First, there's no USB ports. The Ethernet controller doesn't work yet (more on that in a second).
Now, let me get to the meat of the Xbox.
The Xbox is like a hobbled warhorse. You can see how big, how powerful it is, the sleek, black muscles with the power to crush anything else around it. You can feel its energy, its need to break out and use that power.
But the creators, fearing its power to much, fearing those that rode it might use it for what they wanted instead of what the creators wanted, have attached thick, iron chains to its back legs, so matter how fast or how powerful it is, it will never reach that ability - unless the creators finally see that its power is not something to be feared, but something to be celebrated in, and to let the rider use that power for what they see fit would be the greatest use of this powerful animal.
The Xbox is truly one big box. It's made to stand up one way - with it's bottom on the surface. You're not going to stand it on its side at all, and to do so would be folly.
It feels powerful, solid. Everything about it says its solid and strong, from the weight (almost 10 pounds), to the hard, black plastic on the outside, and even the wires. The RCA plugs are thick and meaty, and the ends are covered in thick, black plastic except for the colored ends. On top is the gigantic black X with the rounded circle stating that this is the Xbox.
It's also brutally simple. On the back there are three slots - one for power, one for media output, and the Ethernet port. Let's leave the Ethernet port alone for now - we'll come to that in a moment.
In the front we've got 4 input controller slots, the eject button, and the off button. That's it. No USB, FireWire, or otherwise. I can understand why there's no USB, and it's going to be a recurring theme. With USB, Microsoft might have given keyboard/mouse access to the Xbox, and above all that, they can't have that happening, because that would encourage hacking, and above all else, Microsoft cannot allow that to happen.
Why no hacking? Well, because this is as close to a computer that plugs into your TV as most people will get without building their own - and for $300 dollars, the idea is temping. It has an Intel 733 processor. An Nvidia graphics/chipset controller. 64 MB RAM. A 8 MB Seagate HDD (Hard Disk Drive). After finding the screws so I could get the pictures inside, I want to find the tools to dig deeper, to unplug the hard drive and find out how its partitioned, how to make it do what I want it to do.
But we'll get to that in a little bit.
When I first turn it on, I can hear the hard drive crunch for a moment, and it's obvious as I move around the settings and listen close that the operating system is probably stores on the HDD. (Again, if somebody figures out how to hack this thing open and start messing around, we might see something like LILO or Partition Magic in the works for dual-booting).
The menu system is very green, not "Daikatana annoying green" but more cool and high tech green. Looks very nice and I could find what I wanted in a few moments. The text was clear - perhaps the clearest text I've seen from a computer anything on screen.
First, let's hit the settings. Sound (mono, stereo, Dolby), video (normal, wide, etc) - then the DVD and Game rating section. You can use a parental lockout for both the movies or games, which for parents can at least offer some help to make sure they aren't going to find their copy of La Blue Girl in the machine while they're away for the night.
But there is one thing that absolutely kills me. I refer to Page 15 of the Xbox Instruction Manual:
That's right, the Ethernet controller is like my gall bladder - it's useless. It does nothing. There is no reason for its existence. I was actually interested in plugging this into my home network (I use DSL and have a Linux box providing NAT) and going online for...well, some reason. After all the crowing the Xbox guys did at E3, I was expecting to do something on the Internet with the damned thing.
Now I know that's not going to happen until - when? Summer 2002? What's the problem here? Last I checked, Microsoft had a TCP/IP stack. They couldn't put some simple FTP/Telnet/SMB protocols on the box? DHCP can't be that hard - let me get this guy doing something. Multiplayer for Halo? Not over the Internet - which, at least in my head, was going to be one of the cool things about the game. How about Metal Gear Solid 2 X and finding out how well I did online instantly? Nope - not gonna happen.
But I know the reason why, and it comes down to hacking. Once they open this thing on a network, it's going to become a mini-PC, and down goes the $$$ from game selling. Folks are already working on MAME (an arcade game emulator) and SNES (Super Nintendo) emulators for the Xbox. If that becomes a reality, you've got yourself a $300 PC that runs all the games you want, and with a Ethernet IP connection - well, you can put the pieces together. For those who can't, that means that Microsoft could be losing money every time they sell an Xbox.
Personally, I think they can capitalize on that. I think they should say to themselves "It's going to happen, one way or the other. So we'll hope that people do buy the Xbox for reasons we don't want them to - because they're also going to want to play the games that are coming for it, and if they've already got an Xbox, no matter what the reason, they'll come around to the games - and we'll make out money once we get that Killer Application, the one game nobody can live without. And from that one game we can make more, and eventually win."
For now, I'm wondering about that Ethernet port. How is the broadband going to look come Summer 2002? Are we going to be forced to play MSN (Microsoft Network), or are we going to be allowed to use our own local systems for Internet capacity? We'll just have to wait and see what happens, but for now, I'm disappointed. After all the hype about the 100 MB Ethernet port - and it turns out its as useful to me as my gall bladder. You could take it from my body, and everything would work just the same.
The music system alone is almost worth the purchase. A good MP3 player is around $300, and the Xbox could compete with them, thanks to Mr. Hard Drive.
When you stick in a music CD, you can listen like normal. Or...you can copy it to the hard drive. I tried Phantom of the Opera out. Waited about 23 minutes and 20 seconds before it was done. It took long enough that the screen saver kicked in (well, it just turned the screen blank), but it was about as long as converting the CD to MP3 would have been.
Any bets that its in WMA (Windows Media Audio) format instead of MP3? (Someone at Xbox tech support said it was, but since they weren't an official company rep, I'm holding out on that one.) But once again, just as I start thinking something about the Xbox is cool, something else gets in my way. Remember that useless Ethernet controller? Well, already this could have been useful. By plugging it into the Internet, I could have used a CDDB (CD Database) to pull the CD's name, the name of all of the tracks, and had the Xbox store that automatically.
As it is, I'm forced to do it with the controller. Now, I might not have minded that, except that if we're talking, say, Phantom of the Opera, we've got 4 CD's with 15-17 tracks apiece, and I'm going to t-y-p-e-i-n-e-a-c-h-l-e-t-t-e-r-o-n-e-b-y-o-n-e - well, you can already see how annoying that is.
The first CD I used was Disk 1 of "The Phantom of the Opera". The disk contains 475 MB of musical data, and by the time it was done, the Xbox reported that it used up 3209 blocks. If you figure that each block is 16.3 kilobytes (calculated by the 8 MB memory module being 503 blocks), then it's been reduced down to 53 MB.
Sound difference? I played Phantom of the Opera through the same speakers on my computer (a pair of flat-screens with a sub-woofer), one with the PC, one with the Xbox copied. Sounded the same.
So I decided to take the test an extra step further, and plug it into the stereo system. speakers are 3" infinity. I still couldn't hear the difference, and I've had 7 years of band, so I'm pretty sure I know what I'm hearing.
Once on the hard drive, you can make up your own playlists, copy tracks around, and so on. It's still clunky with just the controller instead of using a mouse, but the capacity is there. Of course, you can't just copy the MP3's you've already got on your hard drive, unless you converted them back into WAV format, copied them into a CD-RW (seems the Xbox doesn't accept CDR's, but CD-RW is fair game), then had then re-encoded on the Xbox.
Still, the potential for having a great digital music player, with all of your CD's on the Xbox plugged into your stereo system is a temping one. I'm already considering it as I look over all of my Final Fantasy Music Collections on CD.
You know the whole thing about having to purchase a DVD remote controller to watch DVD movies on the Xbox? It's true. I stuck in a DVD movie to see what happens, as was politely told "Nope - you need that DVD remote controller". I'm assuming that MS is making folks buy the remote to pay for the DVD license, and to avoid Sony's initial problem (folks in Japan buying the PS2 for a DVD player rather than a game system).
I don't get this part. Maybe they can claim that since folks can't watch movies they don't need to pay the DVD license, and by making people buy the remote (then using that money to pay the DVD licensing) they can make sure they don't pay for it - but it's still annoying. I know it's another $20 Microsoft would have to pay out, but, dang, it's still annoying.
Like the box itself, the controllers feels like you could take a hammer to it, and it would come back for more. The cord is interesting. First, it looks like a FireWire cord, which if it is would mean you put put a lot of bandwidth down the pipe. Then the controller can have the end plugged in - perhaps the idea is that you leave one part plugged into the Xbox, and if you want to plug in a new controller or a different one (keyboard, mouse, steering wheel) you don't have to pull the jack from the Xbox itself.
The controls are obviously inspired by the Dreamcast line. The memory cards go in there (not that you really need them, which now that I know I could have saved myself $35 at Toys R Us, unless you want to copy things to the memory card and from there to someone else's Xbox system).
And yes, damn it, the controllers are too big. The controller runs like this:
At this moment, I'm looking at the controller for the GameCube, and it's almost the same - 2 analog sticks, one D pad, 4 buttons, and three finger triggers along the back - but I can get to every single button without having to stretch.
The black and white are too far from the analog sticks (assuming you've got both thumb on an analog stick) to be able to reach without physically moving my hands. My hands can span 1.5 octaves on a computer, so I'm no small dandy man - but I would have preferred either two more thumb controllers for black/white, or they be moved to the left instead of up.
And...the big green X on the controller. Get rid of it! I know it's an Xbox, and the useless, gigantic center spot does nothing but take up real estate. Make it a tiny little green X if you must, but then you'll have room on the controller for something important, like...my thumbs.
Here's a short gut level review of the 3 games I've been playing with the system. The scores are not final, may change, but these are my "gut" feelings after spending some time with them.
First, each game takes a long time to load. Some games, like Dead or Alive 3, mask this by having cut scenes/messages, and by the time that's done, the game is done loading up. (The initial "copy this software and we'll break your head" message is just perfect for this). Others just say "loading" as you wait, and wait, then get up, walk to the bathroom, "take care of business", and by then it's ready. Then again, once it's done loading, you usually don't see any delays until the next time it has to load. What's going on here?
Well, that hard drive is what's going on, which is both a crutch and a blessing. DVD seek times (the amount of time it takes the DVD to find a specific area of memory on the disk and read from it) is around 150-200 milliseconds. Hard Drive seeks are around 10. So if you copy the information to the HDD (that's Hard Disk Drive), you can quickly access it during gameplay for better performance.
But that means you're spent waiting for the game to start as the developers have decided to copy all that information to the hard drive instead of jumping right to the game. Compare this to Metal Gear Solid 2 - looks great, and I wait 3 seconds for a scene change, and there's no hard drive. Or Soul Reaver, which even on a simpler system (like the Dreamcast) had practically no load times at all. So I can't say the HDD is really giving any benefit, except in the fact that you don't have to shell out for memory cards all the time.
So, without any further ado, here's the games:
Dead or Alive 3:
It's Dead or Alive 2...with better graphics. Same controls (different controller), same gameplay, same nonsensical "stories" that are really characters saying things to each other for some reason - but it always leads to somebody's ass getting kicked. But let's face it - the women are incredibly hot, and that reason alone makes me keep them in the ring.
Except the last boss. For some reason, they felt the need to change the camera angle for some dumb ass reason, so it was harder to figure out what I was trying to do. Then again, I usually don't like fighting games except for Dead or Alive 2: Hardcore, so I'll have to keep playing and see if it grabs me.
Gut score: 7-8
Halo
First person action that reminds of Half-Life, looks like Half-Life after the high resolution pack. Actually, it looks pretty damn good. Until you reach the planets surface, then I was truly impressed by how beautiful this game could be. Surrounded by the hills, the waterfalls, looking at the sky above me - granted, a rather static one with the Halo running up into the sky - but still, for the first time I've placed my hands on the Xbox, all I could say was "Damn! That's just pretty.".
I have that "new babe" feeling in the beginning - here you are, dropped into the middle of a situation, learning on the fly what's happening as fast as you can while learning the controls (but it's in a good way, since it gets that fear feeling from the start without actually putting you in risk). The controls are interesting. Left analog stick moves you forward/backwards/left shift/right shift. Right analog button "looks" about. Thumb triggers fire weapons.
The game itself feels like it's going to be pretty cool and fun, with Bungie's own sense of style working for it. But I still find myself reaching for the keyboard/mouse to get that precision that I need. (Note to game makers for consoles: if the console allows you to use a keyboard/mouse with the system, and you don't program your game to take advantage of that, I will come over and teabag your keyboard.
Gut Score: 8-9
Munch's Oddysee:
Munch's Oddysee: I've spent the least time with this one, and that's something I plan to fix. First, the humor is already there (the Almighty Raisin got lots of kicks from my co-workers). Abe and his world are rendered smoothly, and it looks good.
Then again, I'm wondering if this is just the previous Abe games in 3D. Oddworld has time to prove otherwise, and I'm willing to give them that chance.
Gut Score: 8-9.
So far? I have to say that based on the games, the system, and everything else, I'm underwhelmed. The graphics are good, but the only thing that impresses me is the lack of jaggies and the clearness of the text. Maybe its because I don't think visually (ask me about that sometime and I'll explain it to you), but I'm not impressed by the graphics.
It's like looking at a good Dreamcast game, or worse, like a game I'd play on the PC. The music thing is cool, but the games themselves are - well, like anything else I'd see, and even worse, like anything else I'd play once on the PC and move on to something else. I'm not feeling the "Must-Keep-Playing" I get with Metal Gear Solid (1 or 2), or the "My god!" of Devil May Cry, or even the "Damn!" from playing Rogue Squadron.
I played Halo - and could put it down. I played Metal Gear Solid 2 - and I couldn't put it down. I got finished playing Super Monkey Ball, and I'm already wanting to go back.
Microsoft needs to get those killer apps - and fast. Right now they're playing catch up, and while history has proven that MS can play catch up as well as anyone by throwing money at it, they have to remember that they're up against opponents with brand names, exclusive deals (Pokemon, Final Fantasy, etc), and, in the case of Sony, a company with more than enough cash to take the long haul - and enough at stake that they'll fight tooth, claw and nail to keep it.
So here's the ultimate deal. If someone were to ask me, right now, if I'd recommend they buy an Xbox for Christmas, I'd say no. Between the 3 systems, it's in last place, and unless we see something impossibly cool (like Panzer Dragon Saga II, Sakura Taisen, or something we'd all have to buy), it'll stay there.
Of course, this is all my opinion - I could be wrong.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
It's business, not fear - if you could do anything with it, MS would have to stop selling the hardware at a loss to subsidise the software that they want you to buy for it.
I'm sure that there'll be a linux port, filesystem decoders and all kinds of hardware hacks anyway.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Weavus writes:
Apart from that, i'm sure Microsoft have put in plenty of other measures to stop people emulating the Xbox on a PC. BIOS checks, DirectX differences, Stripped OS etc...
Sorry. There is only one console that I know of that's a bitch to emulate on the PC, and that's the lowly NES. Not the N64, not the SNES, but the original 8 bit NES, and that was due to mapper support. No NES emulator that I know of has full mapper support, bioNES, fwNES, and NESticle were the best when I was in the emulation scene. Arcade games also tend to be a pain, due to anti-piracy measures implimented in a few of the games, and the relative scarcity of arcade games when compared to most console games. The Atari Jaguar has also been slow to be emulated, although I don't know if this was due to technical difficulties or a lack of interest.
That being said, the following have been successfully emulated on the lowly PC (running DOS/Win for the most part): Arcade (which is technically many different platforms, even if the systems are JAMMA compliant, they have different hardware. MAME roms alone list over 3000 games (including clones, and there are other multi-arcade emulators out there). The NeoGeo (some games that have been successfully emulated by MAME) adds a hundred or two more. Looking at old school stuff, the C64, Amiga, and Apple II have all been emulated, according to Zophar, as well as the Trash-80's and Tandy's. For consoles, we have Atari, ColecoVision, Dreamcast, SMS/Gamegear, Intellivision, NES, SNES, N64, Dreamcast, Playstation, Saturn, Turbo Grafix 16, and the Vectrex, among others. The Gameboy, and the NeoGeo pocket has also been emulated (as well as the aforementioned Game Gear, which is really a SMS with better graphics). We also have both HP and TI calculators emulated.
With all of this emulated, I don't suspect that Xbox will be that much of a problem, especially with the demand for an emulator that we will see.
The law comes in, and I absolutely shit you not when I say this, in this capacity:
If you release software for the X-Box without Microsoft's approval, they will come after you with the DMCA, whether or not it will legitimately hold up in court, and they will appeal any rulings against them endlessly until they either win or deplete your assets with court fees until you are bankrupt.
That's exactly what it comes down to. Some states in the DOJ case actually settled just to recoup their legal assets from the multi-year battle against Microsoft. If Joe Average tries to release unapproved software for the X-Box, Microsoft will use the DMCA to either intimidate them into shutting down their software distribution or, barring that, go into a court case with them that could last almost infinitely (because Microsoft has an almost infinite amount of money), and definitely bankrupt the person that released the software. Most likely, though, intimidation would work pretty well, because after all, these guys outlasted the US government. Joe Average doesn't stand a chance.
(I am not anti-Microsoft, but their intention to use the DMCA against people that relese unapproved software for the X-Box and their unbelievably large cash flow are FACTS, not the usual Slashdot visitor anti-MS bias.)