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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."
hmmm wounder how long before the mac zelots turn the xbox 2 into a OS X compatible computer ;P
come comment on the madness at http://slashdot.org/~phreak03/journal/
Blue screens faster than ever.
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
I think the use of the Apple G5 systems with a funny NT kernel running indicate that the XBox2 is going to have a lot more in common with the Apple G5 than the common PC. Afterall, there just aren't a lot of PC motherboards in circulation built for the IBM PowerPC chips.
Clearly, the final specs for the XBox2 aren't set in stone. So, since they can't deliver any XBox2 motherboards because they're not exactly fully designed yet, Apple's a reasonable place to turn for successful implementation of the IBM processor chips. It's likely that the Apple logo within the software was part of the price Microsoft had to pay for Apple's assitance in supplying a little help in writing that NT-on-PowerPC kernel...
Why would it mean anything. It seems its just a development environment for the Xbox, and considering that it seems the Xbox 2 will have no backwards compatibility why would this environment help in porting, when they have turned their back on intel architecture for the platform. Just because it has a NT kernel doesn't mean anything, remember NT ran on PPC as well as Alpha and Intel when NT was actually called NT.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
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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I'm really not surprised. I mean, Apple has no stake in the videogame market, so why not help out someone (even Microsoft) and get a little bit of extra money? Microsoft would find a way to do it eventually, so its not like if Apple didn't help it would be any sort of blow against MS.
...that will never be ported to the computer you're running them on.
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
Where's the .torrent?!
On a more practical note this doesn't hold out much hope for XBOX-1 game compatibility, does it?
Holy Jesus, you people are misinformed.
August 6, 1997- Microsoft agreed to purchase $150 million in non-voting Apple preferred stock. Note that it was NON-VOTING stock-- so essentially this was just a goodwill investment in Apple. Microsoft was required to hold the stock for at least 3 years before selling. Another clause of this investment was that Microsoft was to continue to produce Macintosh products, including all new versions of the Microsoft Office product, for a period of five years. In exchange, Apple would make Internet Explorer the default web browser on Macs, and not sue the living hell out of Microsoft.* Microsoft has since sold all of this stock, at a nice profit, I might add. This agreement expired in August 2002, and since then MS has occasionally made noise about discontinuing Mac Office. Apple is also no longer bound to the terms of this agreement, so expect to see IE vanish from new Macs as soon as Apple's Safari browser goes 1.0.
* Strong rumors from several sources indicate that the 1997 deal was the public portion of a settlement made after Apple discovered substantial patent and/or copyright infringment by MS in Windows. Word is that there was a meeting between senior Apple and MS officials where Apple laid out the evidence and an ultimatum. Personally, I think there is some credibility to this, as Microsoft rarely if ever does anything that could be deemed 'nice,' especially to a competitor. There is, however, another school of thought that says Microsoft was only acting in their own self-interest, propping up Apple so they would have a competitor to point to when the antitrust thing really built up some steam. I question the use of the term 'propping up,' as Apple had a few billion in the bank at the time and did not need the $150M, and the government would have realized that.
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'd guess they made the choice for heat production reasons. The XBox is quite large for a game console and it still has heat problems. Using a smaller, cooler chip would help make this more of a real console. Intel is still having problems with its Prescott processor and is also currently trying to reposition itself with respect to the 64-bit transition. AMD doesn't have a low-heat CPU available either, though they're otherwise better positioned in the marketplace.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out, though. Getting Windows to run on a new architecture will likely take more than a new kernel.
Blue screen different.
The World's Worst Webcomic!
It's called a rumor. You need to temper what you hear in the wind with what you actually know for sure. The XBox2 will be a game console and will be released at a similar price-point as the original XBox. Thus, we can safely assume that the cost of its components will be appreciable to the costs of the components in the current XBox.
Whatever you read on the internet more than a year before a product's release is most likely baloney.
How about this rumor. Every XBox2 will have a miniaturized human inside. This will give the X2 far superior natural language handling capabilities. As an even greater benefit, thousands of lonely dorks all over the country will finally be able to strike up friendships with their game console.
I place the previous paragraph in the public domain. Please feel free to spread that rumor wherever.
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
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.
Let's see here:
For Nintendo:
SNES: Success, not backward compatible with NES.
N64: Success, not backward compatible with SNES or NES.
Gamecube: Success, not backward compatible with N64, SNES, or NES.
For Sega:
Genesis: Success, not backward compatible with SMS.
Saturn: Failure, because of lack of 3d. The Saturn was designed to be the ultimate 2d console, which it was. 3d was an afterthought, and never worked well.
For Sony:
Playstation: Success, not compatible with ANY other system, being their first.
So it looks to me like backwards compatibility is a nice feature, nothing more. Nintendo, being the oldest company, is the most shining example. NONE of their consoles have been compatible. They thought about it with the SNES, hence the use of the 65C816 (which has a compatibility mode for 6502 code) but didn't end up doing it. The rest of the consoles aren't even remotely compatible. None the less, each has been a success.
What makes a console succede? Two main things:
1) Having flashy graphics to attract people, and the marketing to let people know about them. You may not, but most people gravitate towards pretty graphics.
2) More importantly: Good games. This is REALLY what makes or breaks a console. If your system has the games people want to play, they'll buy it. If it doesn't they won't. This is also a positive feedback loop since the more good games you have the more you sell and the more consolse you sell the more developers that will want to release for your console.
That's why Sony succeded, despite being new to the market. They released the games people wanted to play, and had stunning graphics for the time. Combine that with good marketing, you've got a winner.
Wouldn't XP be Windows NT 6.0? I though Win2k was 5.0
Windows 2K is NT 5.0 and Windows XP is NT 5.1. Server 2003 is NT 5.2. These are the official version strings from Microsoft.
There is very little under-the-hood change between Windows 2000 (NT 5.0) and Windows XP (NT 5.1) aside from GUI modifications. From an application's point of view (or even a power user who makes all of his settings via the registry) there is not much different between the two. A lot of little things have been refined and updated, yes, but nothing huge.
And really... Win2K (NT 5.0) isn't a whole lot more than NT 4.0 SP4/SP5 + modern version of Direct X + modern drivers + light GUI polish. When NT 4 first shipped it did not come with Internet Explorer... later versions included a standalone version of IE... and still later versions included the deeply-rooted IE that we know and hate today.
NT 3.x was pretty archaic *looking* (Windows 3.x GUI, ugh!!) but still had most of the guts that NT 4 later used....
Call it what you will, but NT was the best thing Microsoft has ever done. We could all be using a heavily patched version of Win95 running atop DOS 7. "Win98 Seventh Edition!"
Actually, the new G5 tower has a completely different system architecture which uses HyperTransport technology co-designed with AMD. Each processor has it's own point to point bus to the system controller.
http://www.apple.com/powermac/architecture.html
I believe that only AMD Opteron systems have a similar architecture.
While both PCs and Macs support the PCI, USB and Firewire standards, the connections between the chips that implement these standards is quite different.
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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