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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
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.
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.
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.