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Xbox 2 SDK Released On Mac G5?
Espectr0 writes "The Inquirer reports rumors, courtesy anonymous sources, that Microsoft has released the Xbox 2 SDK to select videogame developers, and they are using 'dual Apple Power Mac G5 systems running a custom Windows NT Kernel.' This ties up with earlier rumors which mention that the XBox 2 will be powered by the IBM chip, and ATI will be providing the video chip." The report also notes: "Interestingly, the SDK apparently also features an Apple logo on a side bar within the application."
the SDK apparently also features an Apple logo on a side bar within the application
Does anyone have a screenshot? I would like to see what size M$ put the logo.
Cheers,
RoadkillBunny
Interesting. I wonder if we'll ever see an Xbox2 emu for the Macintosh? If memory serves, wasnt the first commercial Playstation emulator for the Mac? The other good thing about this, is that the more chips business IBM gets the more incentive they have to make (more/better/faster) PPC chips - which bodes well for us Mac users. This is good news, but I'm curious if anyone knows what Intel did to piss microsoft off so much that they turn to IBM?
-_-
I guess that answers the question of the X-Box 2's processer. I wonder why Microsoft made this move though, considering the classic WinTel alliance. It doesn't seem like a normal thing from them. Wether or not one companies top chip is faster than the other, does it really matter which one you use? It seems like by the time games start maxing out the processer, a new console has already come out. I mean look at all the other consoles. The Play Station used a relatively slow processer for the time. Same with the X-Box (733 mhz). Possibly price, but then wouldn't they go with AMD? I mean, why break compatibilty and go non x86 when x86 chips are farely cheap?
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Good way to make sure people won't be able to run Xbox2 games on PCs.
I'd say the most interesting result of this is that it appears microsoft made windows run on a mac. If their custom NT kernal is siimilar to what is on the X-box then it is quite a feat. The x-box ran a slightly modified directX which is the part of the windows OS that Wine is having a really hard time emulating. If microsoft could port that over to a G5 mac then i they could easily port a full Windows operating system over. Not that they would. It doesn't make a lot of sense for them to do it economically, but its still interesting that they could. ~Ian
Firstly, they bought only something like $150 million worth of some specialized non-voting shares
Secondly, they sold it a few years ago
It was only intended as "good faith" money to help demonstrate Microsoft's commitment to keep supporting Office on the Mac
On a more practical note this doesn't hold out much hope for XBOX-1 game compatibility, does it?
Yep! Anyone with an NT4.0 CD should be able to find a PPC tree, along with the Alpha, MIPS, I386 trees.
...film at 11.
Seriously, how much is this thing gonna *cost*? The rumor I'm hearing everywhere is that the box will have three G5's and video superior to the current Radeon 9800. Dual G5's with a Radeon 9600 in an Apple wrapper costs nearly three grand! I mean, even if you drop the hard drive, you're knocking maybe $50 off of the cost to MS of this thing. Since Apple's hardware margins (once you take into account marketing, R&D, etc. - gross margins are higher) run about 4%, we're still talking about MS having north of $2500 in each of these units, unless component prices really drop by launch date.
I don't care how many launch titles it has, I'm not going to pay much more than $300 for a videogame system. I can't imagine anyone else will either. I don't see Microsoft being willing to lose $2200 on a console, then wait for me to buy 44 $50 games to make their money back.
What gives?
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Reason for Atari 5200's failure - lack of backward compatibility for Atari 2600
Reason for Sega Saturn's failure - lack of backward compatibility for Sega CD
Reason for Playstation 2's overwhelming success - presence of backward compatiblity for Playstation 1
Reason for X-Box 2's eventual failure - do I need to spell it out for you?
Well, I'm sure everyone is going to be happy to throw away their X-Box's, with its DX8 graphics, and resolution higher than most TV sets, and huge software library to buy a new X-Box 2, with its only slightly better graphics, at the same resolution without the ubergeek hacking potential.
Bill's short list of utter failures:
1990: MS-DOS 4
1995: Microsoft Bob
1999: Windows ME
2005: X-Box 2
But, hey, Microsoft is so big, that a huge failure can only mean one thing: Government Bailout!
I dont give this argument much thought normally, as I dont have any desire at the moment beyond x86-64 to learn the nuances of a new proccesing architecture, even though I am a sparc fan, should say was before they started laggin behind,
BUT What I thought was interesting want the article iself but rather a link to this article Xbox2 is Microsoft's attempt to replace PC
I have looked at, or should I say drooled at some of the IBM big iron running the PPC architecture but never gave it much more thought, With IBM now cranking out some nice PPC silicon and MS Jumping on the PPC bandwagon albeit limited, I think I might have to look a little more
Any reccomendations on cheap, well reasonable used IBM PPC systems that are still of the same basic architecture of what is being sold now, like what will run RHEL 3 AS ?
Apple doesn't have a presence in the video game market, and if Microsoft uses something resembling the PPC 970 in the X2, that can only serve to [a] pay back IBM's investment in the 970 and [b] subsidize further development without Apple having to pick up the tab. Volume goes up, prices go down.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Microsoft used the powerpc in little endian mode. But the PPC 970 apparently lacks a little endian mode.
But unless they make some changes from the X-box 1 it won't be trivial. People have been working on X-box 1 emus for the PC. Should be easy right? I mean an X-box has a slow P3 and a graphics chip that is the equivalant of a GeForce 4 4400. Well thing is, the system is different. A major difference is that the CPU and GPU share one memory space, where they are totally seperate in a PC (and Mac). Also programs have pretty much free run over all the memory on an X-box, where they are restricted on a PC (and Mac).
So instead of just being a matter of emulating BIOS and then running the game, you have to emulate the environment, and translate things that can't be executed directly.
It's akin to DOS emulators like DOSBox on NT. You can't just run DOS programs straight, they try and do things that aren't allowed by NT security. So you have to emulate an environment. Some things you pass straight through, and just execute natively, like most Ring 3 code. Some things, you have to go and emulate or fake or translate.
Now on a Mac it gets even harder since the X-box speaks DirectX and so probably will the X-box 2. I mean it's an MS system, they are going to use their API. Well that means that whereas on a PC you could at least pass some of that on as is, or with minor translations, you have to translate the whole thing to an API the Mac speaks.
So it certianly is possible, and something we'll probably see in time, but not something that will be trivially easy.
So will that matter? It SAVED the PS2 early on, but who knows if it will be needed for the X-Box 2. I would REALLY love it to have the compatability (which they could still do through emulation, I suppose) but if they don't have it they could really shoot themselves in the foot. Videogamers have had that abaility for years on the GameBoy, and the PS2 has it now. This could be a real big deal, depending on what they decide. It's not like the X-Box has a huge library of major titles though (the PS1 did), so it might not be worth the effort.
As for some of the other decisions they have made, I'm not suprised. Intel was dumped both because they didn't have a 64 bit CPU (which doing all the stuff in games could be handy) and I'm guessing because of the heat problems (which have only gotten worse, and would make for one LOUD console). As for nVidia, many people believe that they lost the lead in the 3D race with this last generation (although new rumors over the next GeForce look amazing!), and if you combine that with when they asked for more money publicly and had a little tiff with MS over that, I'm not suprised that they're gone.
All and all, it should be very interesting to see this next generation. Between the X-Box 2, the PS3 (will it run PS1/2 games? What's up with cell?), and the Game Cube's successor (should also be interesting) we should be in for some interesting developments (not to say anything about Nintendo's DS, the GBA's eventual successor, the PSP, and the persistant rumors of MS looking at portables). Video game fans, get ready for some cool stuff!
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
I'm already drooling at the thought of a $200 modded xbox running osx. That would make an awesome terminal to put in every room of my house, especially when they've been out a few years and you can get them used.
1)x-box games
2)shared playlists with itunes
3)web browsing with safari (I like it better than firefox)
4)RSS with net news wire
5)ichat has good quality video conferencing, and it auto-configures finding everyone on the local network
Let's not forget that the speculation is that this will be a dual processor console.
The Sega Saturn was a console with multiple processors, and to this day there is no decent Saturn emulator. The hardware set-up of the Saturn made it one of the most difficult to emulate systems thus far, this has long been known/commented on/talked about.
Just because something runs on X processor, does not mean that even a computer with the same processor, or even 2-3 times the processing power can emulate it. The N64 had a 93.75MHz processor, and 3d hardware archaic by todays standards, but most PC N64 emulators list 1ghz+ processors in their requirements.
I wonder how will Apple react to a machine using very similar hardware to its G5 line under 600$ that plays video games better and has a more advanced processor (Xbox2 PPC is supposed to be dual core if I recall correctly...).
Isn't the Microsoft Mac business based in SF rather than Redmond though?
I don't see how! The G5 itself is a very powerful computing system... two of those!? Highly doubtful! That's like a supercomputer! Besides, even if it was true, there is no reason for one console to wheld that much power. I doubt we'll be seeing any games that can actually live up to the spectations of the console anytime soon... it's usually the other way around. Ha, and despite the sheer power of that console, it's running a Windows kernal. That power means nothing if it stand its ground.
Maybe it's all true. Maybe I'm being too hard on Microsoft... but to me, it's like religion. Without proof, I won't believe anything. Not even if I can "feel" it coming. I try to trust my sense of feeling a lot though, but it usually turns out to be just gas.
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
well it will probably lack some of the chips and stuff to run OS X, but maybe Yellow Dog Linux will have a jump on turning these new Xboxs into something for more than games. They already have it running well on G5 Macs and their own hardware that uses 970 Chips (as well as G3 and G4 chips).
everyone knows Xbox and PS2 and all those game systems are sold at a loss, and they make up for it when users by software and maybe accessories. So the fact that someone will be selling hardware with a G5 for $600 won't matter too much. By the time the Xbox ships they may have 970/G5 chips in eMacs and they run about $1000 anyway.
Like how do you mean? They use a DDR SDRAM memory bus (implemented on a chip made by Intel it might intrest you to know) and a PCI system bus. This would be the same thing that PCs use.
Really, the difference is in the CPU and more importantly in the OS. The hardware is nothing special. They use harddrives from manufacutrers like Western Digital and Maxtor, graphics cards from nVidia and ATi, and so on. There isn't an underpants gnome in there that makes it a Mac or anything.
my experience has been that most game emulators only work really well with some software (i.e. the popular games) not all. my question is: would a possible scenario be that microsoft would only extend backwards compatability to some software, not their entire catalog?
I really would only feel gipped if I couldn't play games like Halo, KOTOR, or Sega's hockey and football games, which happen to be some of their most popular games. I really wouldn't care if I couldn't play Robotech or Jet Set Radio.
I'm guessing IBM makes a lot more money off gamecube sales then G5 sales. Think about it, there have been around 14 million gamecubes sold (if you trust this source) and how many macs sold? I doubt 14 million. Even if the profit margin on the game cube processors is lower, IBM could still be making more money.
Now if IBM doesn't have to make significant changes for the X-box 2, and it can expect similar sales as the original X-box, then they can expect a huge profit while keeping the costs low.
Also, no matter which console wins, IBM wins. The article states that they are making the processor for the X-box 2, the new gamecube, and the PS3. So they benifit the most when people to buy multiple consoles, instead of just one, but they have also insulated themselves incase any one of the three makes huge profits and the other two bomb. As long as overall unit sales are as high as they expected, they win. (On a side note, 10 years ago who'd of thought IBM would ever be so integrated into gaming?)
In other words, I think it is a money making move, and a good one too. If they wanted publicity they wouldn't want something where they need to produce (most likely) over 30 million processors (2 per system, with similar sales as the current X-box worldwide over it's life), since they only have so much foundry space and they would probably rather use that space for the jobs they get from the publicity.
But then again, this is all speculation. Few people know the true motives behind large corps.
I'd much rather have OSX on x86 than Windows on PPC. Too bad it'll happen the other way first.
jred
I'm not a mechanic but I play one in my garage...
Good point.
0 4/01-07eHomeCES2004PR.asp
If that is the case (no HD in Xbox2), I bet a Windows MCE computer will be required, to act as the server for your house. You can then have various Xbox2 systems as "clients" in each room in your house. http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2004/Jan
OR
Your data is stored on MS servers. You pay a monthly fee, like Xbox Live, and can stream your data for playback when needed.
Could this be the REAL purpose of the VirtualPC aquisition? That was my first thought after reading the MS is considering basing xbox around a PPC CPU. They could have possibly decided to switch to PPC when the IBM 970 was anounced but needed to consider backward compatibility and figured buying outside technology (and maybe developers??? i don't know if the deal included transfer of VirtualPC developers/engineers) instead of rolling their own x86 emulation software would be a safer bet, give them a head start, and possibly be easier and cheaper as well.
I use a powerbook with Mac OS X. I've played with VirtualPC and it's not too bad for most things. It's definately not a substitute for a physical x86 machine for any really hairy apps like Oracle or say Pro/Engineer or heavy Photoshop usage(it's just for the sake of argument. I know, why use Windows Photoshop when there is a native mac version) Terminal Services/Remote Desktop is much better for that purpose. If the release of Xbox 2 is still a year or two off. I'm sure IBM will have ramped up the speed even more. possibly by that time a G5 would easily be able to emulate a PIII 500 or 733 or what ever lower end PIII the xbox was using thus solving the possible backward compatiblity problem
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What is pirate software? Software for inventory of stolen treasure?
I just don't see why we here even care what the hardware is in these boxes. In general, the user experience between all 3 of the current consoles is nearly identical. The Xbox is more geared toward online gaming than the others, but that's about it. I first played this one game on PS2 a couple months ago, and even though I am new to owning a console, I knew that I most likely would be able to get the exact same game for my GameCube and it would look and feel the same. Sure enough, I picked it up for the same price and it was essentially the same game. Considering the GameCube media has maybe a third of the storage capacity of the full DVD media found in the other 2 consoles, this is kind of surprising, but shows that games still aren't that huge on the most part.
What I am really trying to get at here is we can admire and debate the specs of these consoles, but these specs have little to do with the fact that there hasn't really been any innovation since the first game console, unless you consider 3D and vibrating controllers amazing innovations (no, I'm not discrediting these ideas, but little has been done to make games more enjoyable to play, they're only more enjoyable to look at).
I am feeling fat and sassy
I believe the option that solves this problem is a company-wide directive stating that programmers must avoid dangerous operations such as casting char pointers to int pointers. Your code demonstrates why this is dangerous -- its result is implementation specific.
IF someone leaks that "custom Win NT kernel" AND IF this kernel is complete enough to run legacy Windows apps (or at least the XBox games created on it), THEN the mac will be the most polyvalent platform ever. Imagine triple-booting MacOS X, Linux, and Windows NT.
(No, I didn't RTFA, I just woke up. Flame on.)
Hello! I'm a disaster waiting to happen!
The only way you can consider the N64 a failure is by defining success as selling more consoles than anyone else.
The N64 outsold the PlayStation significantly during the first half of that generation. In the second half, N64 sales died off and PlayStation sales soared. In the end, altho the PlayStation outsold the N64, the N64's sales were about equal to that of the SNES, which is nothing to complain about. Throughout the entire generation, Nintendo's 1st and 2nd party games sold extremely well, resulting in Nintendo's profits being higher than Sony (games division) and Sega's combined.
The GameCube is not falling behind the Xbox - it's always been ahead in the global picture, and has been gaining ground rapidly in the US for the past several months. All console manufacturers are constantly changing the amount of consoles they produce, it's just usually not announced. And anyway, the GameCube is still very profitable, which is all Nintendo cares about. They don't see a need to go all out to be #1 if they can make a nice amount of money as #2.
I actually ran Windows NT 4.0 PPC version about a month ago. I had an RS/6000 system based on PReP (the Power PC Reference Platform) and figured 'what the hell' and installed NT on it.
There is nothing, absolutely nothing, to run on NT/PPC except what comes on the Microsoft CD itself. I browsed the web, best as I could, using the IE 2.0 that everybody remembers less-than-fondly from their NT 4.0 install years back.
Then I formatted the drive, installed AIX on the box, and sold it on eBay.
PReP boxes like that RS/6000 box are extremely similar to PC's. It had built in S3-trio64 graphics, IDE and SCSI ports, PCI and ISA slots for regular expansion cards, used PS/2 keyboard and mouse, etc.
It's worth noting that Apple has moved closer and closer to the Commodity PC hardware scheme themselves. They use IDE drives now, based on the good old IBM PC-AT. They use the same memory technology as PCs. Not much in a modern Mac isn't commodity PC stuff, same chips and parts as any cloner puts on a motherboard.
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Well there is even an earlier example... The Amiga. While an original amiga only runs at 7.14Mhz (PAL) it takes a PC with at least 300-400Mhz to emulate it to a point that most stuff work.
Ofcourse the earlier game systems were programmed more directly, ie hardware hitting & making use of strict timing tricks.. with the newer systems XBox, XBox2 that isn't the case anymore. They use the API that is present, never hit the hardware direct.
That's why making a next gen console compatible with it's earlier gen is 'easier' than in the past.
Nah, Microsoft didn't have to do that. They simply acquired VirtualPC, the software which allows you to run Windows software on the Mac. Then they tap those developers' insight for porting a stripped down Windows OS to the PPC architecture.
Who moved my sig?
Apple is pretty good when it comes to the family licence pack.
I think they've looked at it from the point of view of the consumer.
You buy one copy of OS X for $129 but your wife and child also have a Mac each (not uncommon nowadays). Sure, you've paid for one licence, but it looks awfully tempting to install it on all three machines.
What makes it easier is that OS x has no serial codes, no activation and no network checking during install or any other time - it just installs and runs.
Apple have thus decided to charge just a little bit more to give people like that a legal alternative. They know that many people will install their one copy on multiple machines, but by making the 5 user licence affordable they'll encourage more people to buy it than making 5 licences cost 5x more than one.
Apple's pro software does have serials and checks - if you try and run two copies of Final Cut Pro (or any of its subsidiary apps) on two different machines that are on the same LAN, the second copy will refuse to start.
Yes, we did discover this by breaking the licence - we needed two edit suites for a very rush job. We bought Final Cut Express 2 to put on the other machine to make us legal again. Please don't hunt us down and kill us Apple!
Actually, it wasn't so easy. Still to this day the Linux/XBox project isn't finished; you still need a modchip.
Everyone in the world uses PCs, and the software was easily ported, and the hardware easily understood. Microsoft will _not_ make the same mistake again.
Wrong again. Microsoft tried a new Xbox release with a tougher hardware configuration to break, and, lo and behold, it was immediately broken by the Linux on Xbox team.
You have to remember that the PPC only has about 1% of the global computing marketshare.
Man, can you get ANY of your facts straight? The current marketshare for Macs is 3% worldwide. However, since Mac users hang onto their expensive hardware longer, the real number of Mac users is very likely to be a couple of percentage points higher.
It is a platform that is always the _last_ to get any homebrew apps, like ports of utilities to transfer or unpack xbox isos for instance.
Yeah, that's definitely the software I had in mind as the standard of a homebrew app which everyone wants. Name ONE technology and/or application which is really useful or necessary, and I will show you a Mac implementation of it. Oracle? Oracle9i exists for the Mac. A good music player? How about iTunes. Linux software? I can run it all on the Mac thanks to X11 and the FINK project. Games? More than enough, although I will venture to say that if it's lots of games you want, get a Playstation II. Rapid development of apps with distributed compiling? Try xcode and CodeWarrior. Web Browsers? Safari beats the pants off of Internet Explorer in speed, stability, tabbed browsing, googling, and many other features. Email? Apple Mail far outdoes Outlook, but you can also run Outlook on the Mac (hint: they named it Entourage). Office? It exists on the Mac, along with all of the open source competitors OpenOffice, AbiWord, etc. Firewall? Built-in. Stability? I reboot my Mac every three months. Web,FTP, and Windows file server? Built-in. VNC and VPN? Also there.
There just arent enough people on Mac. If you take the 1-2% of the global computer base, then take the fraction of a percent of that which are people capable of writing programs, and then the fraction of them who have time to make a mac app to interface a game console etc.. I think you're left with 3 people, and from what I'm told, they live in Sweden.
Hmmm, since there are over 20,000 applications written by Mac developers since I checked last year, those 3 Swedish guys must be exhausted!
As if switching to a virtually unknown hardware platform wasn't enough...
Perhaps it is unknown to you... I think you failed to notice that the Linux on Xbox team is moving their work to the GameCube, most notably because it also runs on PPC. This wasn't an easy task since the Gamecube has such limited options for transferring data. If Microsoft really wants to keep the XBOX2 from being appealing to modders, they will learn from Nintendo, which did an excellent job at keeping the modders away.
Who moved my sig?
Yup, in multiple languages. Check it (scroll down - it wasn't pretty before 10.1).
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
The underlying structure of the NT microkernel and hardware abstraction layer was not changed. They just moved parts of User and GDI into kernel space.
NT remains largely architecture independant.
"Taligent is still pure vapor. Maybe they'll be the last who jumps up on Openstep... "