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Memory Deal Bolsters Xbox 2 HD Removal Rumors
friedknut writes "According to a CNET News article: 'Flash memory maker M-Systems announced on Wednesday that it has signed a contract to provide storage products for future versions of the Xbox, bolstering speculation that Microsoft may ditch the game console's hard drive', since the flash-based memory devices will 'be of significantly higher capacity than the 8MB Xbox memory units Microsoft currently sells to save game and user data.' But of course, Microsoft representatives declined to comment on the company's plan for next-generation Xbox hardware."
Well, now we know where the next Xbox hack is going to be launched from.
Bootable USB through a buggy game backdoor anyone?
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
It doesn't look so brilliant to me. What will happen to downloadable content, swap space for games, huge savegames (I'm thinking about Morrowind) and so on? Moreover, even if they manage to fit that into some 512 Mb of Flash RAM, that memory would be very difficult to upgrade (I'm speaking about orders of magnitude here, maybe someone could manage to solder a 1 Gb module or so but that would still not enough), and that means no more ripping games and saving them into an ordinary IDE HD. Yes, stopping piracy is the thing that M$ wants, but (as they've taught us with Windows) before thinking about piracy you should own the Greatest and Only Marketshare, which they still don't.
As long as they don't remove the internal storage I don't care too much about what kind of technology they use. I always thought the harddrive was one of the bigger advantages for the Xbox. It allows for game caching (virtually eliminates loading times, though far from all games take advantage of this) and other cool stuff like realtime recording of game data, like in Blinx, where you can reverse time. Neat.
Martin
Not true. At all.
Almost certainly, this feature will be kept, but simply moved onto your network instead. You will instead rip MP3s or WMAs onto your Windows PC and then share the folders over your wired or wireless LAN. Your X-Box will access your music files over the network.
And, it turns out, this makes considerably more sense than the current hard drive solution: What is the point of keeping separate MP3 collections on your PC and on your X-Box?
It's hard for thee to kick against the pricks.
The thing is, the primary purpose of the HDD in the XBox isn't saving games; it's caching of data from the DVD. Doing this allows the XBox to get around the latency issues that are associated with using an optical drive for program/data storage.
Granted, having the system able to run programs off the HDD makes it somewhat easier for pirates; a modded XBox with a hacked BIOS allows you to copy an arbitrary number of games to the HDD and play directly off it, but I can't see them crippling the performance of the machine in such a significant manner (and we can rule out using flash memory as a cache, since that would result in heavily used XBoxen flat-out dying after a few years).
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
Please forgive my ignorance, I've rarely played with an Xbox, but it appeared to me that games such as Halo use the Xbox HD to create swap files for faster loading of big arenas (my suspect comes from occasional slowdowns).
Is it the case? Could it be a problem for game manufacturers if the HD is replaced by some sort of Flash memory (which has limited rewrite capability and AFAIK is not indicated to host swap files/partitions)?
Signatures are for stupids.
Damn you! I had just gotten over the loss of the DreamCast ... I really need to mod one out sometime.
Anyway, I'm not so sure that they'd double up like that. Seems particularly cost inefficient. And most normal X-Box users just play the games, and don't to all sorts of "special features," like adding music, or "uber-hacking," like changing HDs, on it, so they'll buy what ever MS shoves down their throats.
Xbox reviews.. We think they're funny.
This will perhaps make this kind of hack more difficult. Though I am fairly sure the x-box 2 will also be modded fairly easy.
A compactflash card in TrueIDE mode behaves nearly the same as a real IDE disk. The timings are a bit different, and the IDE disk requires more power (external source needed?). Other than that, a simple adapter would do the trick.
Furthermore, it creates great excuses to force people to use WMP... letting WMP playlists be seen by the XBox, allowing downloaded secure WMA files to be played (while iTunes AACs are out of luck), etc.
one of the reasons that the xbox has been a success is the ability to rip your music onto it and play it in your favorite games
I call BULLSHIT!
Halo doesn't let you play ripped music.
Crimson Skies doesn't let you play ripped music.
These are the first two top-rated games that came to mind - and they don't let you play ripped music. I have never ripped music to my Xbox, I saw it as a minor novelty that I lost interest in 5 seconds after I saw it.
remember that no console has removed major hardware functionality
I call BULLSHIT!
NES->SNES->N64
Somewhere along the line they removed the "power switch interlock" so you could now pull carts out of the machine while the power was on.
N64->GC
The GC moved to optical disks. No more carts. No more instant load times. And the GC controllers are all fucked up compared to the N64 ones (which were strange to begin with).
GBA->GBA-SP
They removed the headphone socket. You now have to buy a separate adapter before you can plug your headphones in.
PS1->PS2
They removed the serial port. They removed the connectors that were right on the back of the unit (version 1 of the PS1 had hookups like you'd expect on a VCR, you didn't have to use a special cable). And the "reset" and the "power" buttons were merged into one with the PS2 (tap it or hold it down).
So I don't think you have a leg to stand on when it comes to your sweeping comments about "Microsoft not removing features from the Xbox for the Xbox 2".
The Xbox 2 won't even use a frickin' Intel CPU! It's rumoured to be running a PowerPC! Microsoft have learned their lessons about what works and what doesn't. Good for them if they decided to start from scratch and remove features that weren't that useful anyway - like the hard drive. Game developers had to write their games so that they'd run on the hard-drive-less Playstation 2 anyway, so there really was no need to require a hard drive except for downloadable content. And I don't see you having a couple of megabytes of that at most.
Maybe, but given how cheap DVD burners have become, copying of DVD based game is rife. Only the Gamecube with its mini-discs has escaped so far. Unless, that is, unless MS is planning on making the X-Box 2 games available on demand only, downloaded from a central server when you want to play them.
It's a step in the right direction for Microsoft. As many of you know, Microsoft continues to loose a marginal amount of money on every Xbox system sold. A lot of the problem is the hard drive along with a lot of individual components that can only be bought or provided by a single vendor ( the Nforce video chip and Celron CPU for example).
When Microsoft designed the Xbox they looked at the usual cost drop trends of game systems in the past. Usually console makers take a small loss on systems and then within a few years are able to make a profit on hardware. Unfortunately for Microsoft because of the complex nature of the Xbox this hasn't been the case. Costs for the Nforce GPU haven't changed and in fact Nviia sued trying to get out of their contract as they were loosing money producing the chips. The hard drives are also a big expense for Microsoft.
While Microsoft did not expect to be making money on the current generation of the Xbox, the system has greatly surpassed loss expectations thus far and if the Xbox 2 is not a financial success it may cause serious questions about the companies long term chances in the console race. Their plan was to get their foot in the door take some losses during the first generation and generate some support for their second generation system. Thus far many of the all important Japanese third party licensees are still disinterested and several have dropped Xbox support altogether after initially being "onboard". The system is a miserable failure in Japan and Asia in general and is in third place worldwide a ways back from the Nintendo Game Cube.
Microsoft needs to turn the ship around in generation 2 or else it may already be too late. By taking out the hard drive as widely rumored beforehand it will greatly reduce the manufacturing costs of the system. I see it as a positive move by Microsoft.
I wonder why 3rd party vendors haven't gone ahead and manufactured flash cards for the X-Box system already... It seems logical for someone to do a Game-Genie type of thing by circumventing ms.
I agree with others that this analyst is doing his job, meaning talking out his ass.
The xbox2 may or may not have a hard drive. I believe that it will, for numerous reasons. But this is so obviously a deal to line up memory card tech that it's ridiculous. The analyst's description of what the hard drive is used for is absolutely naive and ill-informed.
Fact is, a lot of games use the hard drive. All don't but a lot do. Some you may have heard of, like Halo. I'd expect that the developers will continue to push for the ability to cache and stream off of the HD.
And lest we forget, the idea of backward compatibility goes straight out the window with no HD. We're not talking about obscure titles; we're talking Halo, DOA3, etc. Backward compatibility may or may not happen, but an analyst with any intelligence would have hit on this, and maybe started speculating out his ass about that. This guy wasn't even that clever.
Oh, and Live, the jewel in the crown of microsoft's console gaming experience so far, is extremely reliant on the hard drive. The downloads, the levels, etc., these are all huge selling points, great features, and they're just getting started. I believe that MS will try to make its major innovation push in the online arena, and the hard drive enables a lot. Without it, options are much more limited. I especially love the analysts who predict that online storage will replace the Hard drive. Do they have some insight into an unprecedented rollout of broadband technology that will make this actually reliable? Have they ever downloaded a level on Live, and thought about what it would be like to go through that every time you wanted to play the level? Obviously not.
And these people affect the flow of capital. Sheesh.
Hunting briefly around the 'net, I can find a 40gb Seagate IDE HD for about $55. Official memory cards for an X-Box cost $25. I have two cards for my PS2, so lets assume that's about the right number. So, for $5 more, I get over 2500 times the space, and much higher access speed.
So here's what I'm hoping Microsoft do. They sell two models of X-Box 2, one with HD, one without. The one with costs $50 extra, but you can probably save that in memory cards.
On a seperate note, am I the only one here who didn't chip their X-Box? Everyone is complaining they won't be able to use it as their file server, or at least not copy games to the HD?
This means that XB2 won't play XB1 games unless MS writes an emulation layer. This would either be at hardware level (slow, awkward but possibly more reliable for some games) or API level (faster to execute, easier to write, some games may not follow the API properly and hence break).
Either way, the XBox1 game isn't being played on an XBox - it's being played on a simulated XBox. Why not simulate the hard drive at the same time as the CPU?
A few hundred megs of storage memory and you've basically eliminated the need for memory cards for the average game player
Without a memory card, your savegame is tied to one console. If it dies, your savegames die with it. You can't take the savegame to somebody else's house unless you lug the whole console, and given the size of the first Xbox...
If you claim that Microsoft will rely on a broadband connection for moving savegames from one newbox to another, remember that not every town in the United States has access to MSN DSL, or any other form of low-latency broadband for that matter, and that sales of the newbox will suffer in areas that aren't "lit" yet.
It seems likely that this deal involves replacing the memory CARD that plugs into the Xbox controller, not the HDD. Hard drive space is cheaper than flash for lots of storage, so, uh, I'd say this story is a magnificent misapplication of the facts, especially as the Xbox HDD is 8 GIGS not 8 MB.
The question is not whether they should include harddisk into Xbox but how large the size it should be (look at PSX). Considering the volume of music, movies, games and application files (or just multimedia in the most general and broadest sense), it is a good idea to have at least one version with at least 20GB and another 100+. And to make the whole system fault-tolerant (because of the high value of intangible assets on the drive), a third version with 2 harddisks. This is one decision that can cost Microsoft's investors billions or make them billions. It's not just the games, stupid.
apart from the playstation 2, what other consoles have bothered with backwards compatibility?
it was one thing to have a ps one inside a ps2, but slapping the hardware needed to make an xbox2 support xbox 1 games would be very expensive.. unless they basically just scaled up the xbox - which they wont.
Xbox 2 will have a hard drive or MS is stupid. They will want to keep X box close as possible to PC architecture so games are easily ported to Xbox. More importanly the future of the console is a multipurpose media center. It will be your PC, TIVO, game machine, jukebox and DVD player. This will certainly require a big hard drive. I doubt Microsoft will miss this boat. Windows Media Center shows that they are thinking in this direction. My 2 cents.
I like traffic lights
Couple of thoughts on flash here. First in it's favor it would be quiter, have reduced heat load, power requirements and certainly faster. It would also be easier to implement DRM stuff and you could remotely flash someone's flash when they get online and wipe out any linux distros that got on their. More to the point they can DMCA the software on the flash especially if they mount the BIOS in the flash. It would also be nice to see from the standpoint of what it would do to flash memory prices. Remember the effect Windows 95 had on stagnant memory prices of $100 a meg (used to sell computers).
e .h tm
Now, that being said there is a serious problem with flash that prevents this from being used as a boot or swap partition of any kind. It has limited write capacity before it fails (10,000 writes or so).
http://www.esacademy.com/faq/docs/flash/lifetim
Unless they can somehow develop new technology to get around this limitation, this could quickly become a very serious problem. For storing game saves and the like, 10,000 writes is plenty, but if your going to be constantly writing to the thing like a swap file would, you'll get about two weeks use before it's fried.
Possible solution; hybrid. Use a small microdrive from Hitachi similiar to what landed in the new mini ipod. Cheap, meant to be embedded, and hitachi will use a proprietary interface if you your big enough. Proprietary interface cuts down on hacks and helps make it a closed system. On top of this you put in a newcard (PCMCIA replacement) slot for a flash memory module that is used to store games. This would also allow you to run all kinds of other adapters. Keep in mind just like the usb slots in the current xbox, it doesn't have to be shaped like newcard to act like new card.
I think MS is trying to create two consoles. One for the American/European Markets and one for the Asian. The American console would still have the HD because the games we play (think Halo 2 and Marrowind) use it for multiple purposes including game caching and downloadable content. The Asian console wouldn't have an HD because they tend to prefer other types of games, like fighting games, which don't require such features. This would also allow the Asian console to be lighter, smaller, quieter as the Japanese have shown to have a huge preference for such machines.
If MS did this they could do very well in both markets unlike now .
I agree Lanugo, now what if the Hard Drive stays and the giant Flash Memory is just so that you can move downloaded content, music, and video from one X-Box to another. That would be cool.
Onward to the Aether Sphere!
Microsoft can have their cake and eat it too if they just make the base xbox have usb 2.0 or firewire, and have the capability to mount a separately purchased hard-drive. This makes the base unit cheaper, and forces those that want backwards compatibility or media-center capabilities, or whatever to pay for it. They won't loose money this way. It would be nice if they made it so that you could use ANY firewire or USB drive, as many people already have those laying around.
Just a thought that I hadn't seen posted here yet.
oh indeed. i mean, why doesnt MS just release ALL the design specs while they are at it. or perhaps you would prefer them to just admit its a PC, and ship it in a beige set-top case with all standard connections and upgradeable parts? recruiting linus for the next development team? or RMS?
please. like MS would hand over the keys to the kingdom that easily.
turn up the jukebox and tell me a lie
Really? I was suprised at how quiet my XBOX runs. I expected it to be sort of loud, but it just hums a bit. It is most definately quieter than my PS2, probably louder than the GCN though.
"Windows Me offers tremendous reliability and stability improvements..." -- Paul Thurott
I wsa just sitting here thinking about all the people that are worried that Backwards compatability will be removed if the Xbox2 doesn't have a hard drive.
Why couldn't they use a ram drive to fix that issue. Not flash ram.
Think about it the current Xbox only has 64 megs of ram, all the games thar are out there can't use more, but the xbox2 will almost definately have close to 512 megs of ram, why couldn't they just create a 448 meg ram drive to cache all of the data that used to be cached to the hard drive.. this would be EXTREMELY fast compared to ANY hard drive.
I'd also think the HD is the component that has the highest rate of failure.
I'm pretty sure that would be the optical drive. Every Xbox failure I've ever heard of or read about is a failure of the DVD drive. The hard drives seem to do just fine -- as they should, since a console is only run maybe two hours most days while lots of PCs are on year-round.
Your "removed major hardware functionality" list also seems suspect to me -- what about removing zero-load times of carts when nintendo moved to optical discs? Or having to buy memory cards when consoles dropped carts? Or getting scanlines when video games went to raster displays? And I still miss the Atari paddle controllers...
My point it, it seems like a matter of perspective. MS will just make you use a network share for content. In three years you'll be listing that as a "feature" and wondering why they ever threw money away on a hard drive for XB1.