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Xbox To Use Region-Locked Peripherals
Cutriss writes "This newspost over at National Console Supply Exchange seems to leave all the potential Xbox controller-importers in the dust. Apparently the US Xbox will only allow peripherals with a specific USB ID to connect to the console, thus locking out the use of Japanese controllers, which will have different USB IDs."
Update this doesn't mean all peripherals
will be region encoded. Apparently Joypads will
work on both sides of the pond.
* Addendum at 02:28PM EST *
A lot of e-mails have poured in from other sources and developers these past few hours. A call from an Microsoft employee also came in. The Japanese X-Box joypad should work with USA consoles. We'll confirm this tonight once our suppliers test the joypad with some USA games we shipped them earlier this week. If all is well, then our shipments of Japanese X-Box joypads won't go to waste after all.
First hand account. Japanese controller works with US Xbox.
QTools allows you to modify the ID of USB devices. This has been used for a while to get non-3Com USB ethernet devices to work with the 3Com Audreys that 3Com created and dropped last year. http://www.klsi.com/drivers/index.htm - look for qttoolsinstall.exe
USB vendor/product ID has nothing at all to do with "US" USB settings, in fact the only country-specific part of the USB spec is the String (descriptors) which have a lang id.
If the X-Box is discriminating based on USB IDs, it is locking out certain Vendors or certain Vendor's products. Most likely they are locking out certain vendors, as the product ID is really up to the Vendor; the Vendor ID is assigned by the USB-IF.
* Addendum at 02:28PM EST *
A lot of e-mails have poured in from other sources and developers these past few hours. A call from an Microsoft employee also came in. The Japanese X-Box joypad should work with USA consoles. We'll confirm this tonight once our suppliers test the joypad with some USA games we shipped them earlier this week. If all is well, then our shipments of Japanese X-Box joypads won't go to waste after all.
> but is there a SANE reason for not allowing the use of these imported controllers?
Only for suitable definitions of sane. The idea of all region locks is that you can charge what each individual market will bear for a product, without worrying that import from a lower-priced region will force you to drop your prices in a more rich region. Classic example, India is poor so DVDs are sold with a much lower markup there, but DVD/CCA/MPAA can't have people importing cheap Indian DVDs and reselling them in the US where the markup is much, much higher. So, they make them incompatible.
In case this sounds ridiculous, it might help to know that it's also illegal in many parts of the world. Australia and the EU are both invsestigating DVD region codes. Google for 'price discrimination', 'market segmentation', or 'price fixing' for all the info you care to absorb.
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> Update: this doesn't mean all peripherals will be
> region encoded. Apparently Joypads will work on
> both sides of the pond.
I'm sorry, I thought "the pond" generally was understood to mean the Atlantic, as in, "Tea at 5? Sure, I'll just jump in my Concorde and jump 'cross the pond." So do you mean joypads (or are "Joypads" and "joypads" different pond-jumping beasts?) can be imported to the US from the UK and the rest of the EU but not Japan? Horribly confusing.
And yes, for your crazy peeps down under, the subject meant to say "Isn't the pond on our left?"
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
The UID is proprietary information (similar to a password) and reverse engeneering it is against the law according to the DMCA.
Hold it. The letter of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act specifically permits acts of circumvention that are part of legitimate reverse-engineering for interoperability. From 17 USC 1201(f)(2):
Judge Kaplan made an idiotic mistake in completely ignoring this paragraph.
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