Slashdot Mirror
The Xbox 360 Unveiled
You may or may not have caught the Xbox 360 unveiling on MTV Thursday night, but the internet will provide. A plethora of sites have photos, videos, commentary, specifications, and interviews about the new system. Your fellow readers have pulled together to provide links to: 1up.com, Joystiq, Gamespot, The BBC, CNN, NYT, Gamespy, Team Xbox, Voodoo Extreme, Anandtech, and eToyChest. The official Xbox 360 site opened last night as well for word straight from the source. For more official images Ourcolony.net has been 'solved', and now features an OurColony specific video preview. Finally, for commentary on the event, the Video Game Ombudsman provides an alternative to the press releases. From the post: "Kyle Orland (9:28:42 PM): The future of gaming is a girl in a blue dress?
Dan Dormer (9:28:47 PM): The future of gaming is a girl with a bag?
Kyle Orland (9:28:57 PM): She's the Xbox! OMG!"
Bear is Driving!
How can that be (first post)?
Seriously, I would really love to see Tux scream on this thing!
Maybe this is why Apple wasn't able to sell machines with a CPU
faster than 3.0 Ghz. Microsoft had made a deal with IBM to buy them, leaving
Apple to wait? Can anyone confirm or deny this? How "custom" were these
CPUs? Were they so custom that they did not effect the supply of G5's to Apple?
The following is being offered free of charge to all those who feel the need to troll the Slashdot Games section. Please print out a copy and keep it with you at all times. If you follow these simple steps, you trolling is guaranteed to improve.
1. If a game is currently on PS2 and there are plans to bring it out on the Xbox, make sure to claim that no one will want to play that game by the time it gets to the Xbox. For example, by the time Virtua Fighter 4/GTA3 comes to the Xbox, we'll all be playing something new.
2. Use the reverse logic if it is a game only on the Xbox that may be ported to other systems/PC later. Case in point, Halo. Say something to the effect of "I'll wait for the true version of Halo on the PC". "It will be much better than the Xbox version".
3. Constantly complain about FPS on consoles ACCEPT for Goldeneye.
4. Always use Bill Gates name. Act as if he is the one making the games.
By all means, if you run out of clever or interesting things to troll about, just bring up Mr Gates. Lots of people hate him and will be glad to agree with you.
5. Complain about the XBox controller. Even if you have never seen or used it, it won't matter. People will believe you when you say it's big. Be sure and try to provide a testimonial about your wife or girlfriend or kid who complains about the size of it. Also claiming to be injured by the controller can be the foundation of a great troll post.
6. When referring to the Xbox, try to scew the name a bit. Xblox, eggs bocks, the stupider the name, the more favorable of a response you will get.
7. Be sure and mention Japanese and European sales numbers. If you aren't sure what those sales numbers are, go ahead and make something up. Estimate low, most people will believe you.
8. Although Xbox owners seem to enjoy there games, make sure to comment on Xbox not having any games with good gameplay. Although the Xbox does share some ports with PS2 and Gamecube, it's okay to assume that the Xbox version of those ports has poor gameplay as well.
9. Since the Xbox has nice graphics, be sure and find a way to put a negative spin on this. Using the age old formula that states if a game has nice graphics, it must have terrible gameplay, you can convince people that Xbox games are all tech demos.
10. Defective Xbox stories are excellent to use in trolling. The best part is that they require no proof. I find that "the screen just froze up" works great. Occasionally you can use something really bizarre like "My friend bought an Xbox and it caught on fire and burned down there house. Now they are homeless. F*** Bill Gates."
11. When all else fails, lie. There are lots of people who will agree with you just because they hate MS
Jeez, a 30 minutes show, and no information at all, (except its uglyness and stupid name...)
... oh wait... its MTV what else could you expect?
If Microsoft was mass, stupidity would be gravity.
Maybe the US version is more elaborate but the Dutch site sports some pictures of the XBox 360 amd its controller plus an invitation to become a member of the XBox 360 community.
Once every now and then the Slashdot writeup is actually more informative than TFA. This is one of those times.
No where is it written that the next XBox will play current XBox games.
According to the title the Xbox 360 will play current XBox games. No where does the article provide any supporting evidence to this claim, and in fact largely runs counter to it. Nvidia says all but no, an unknown independent analyst agrees, ATI says that it is statistically possible, and some other unknown agrees with them. Microsoft says... Nothing. According to other sources Microsoft is "not guaranteeing" backwards compatibility, and if they decide not to include a hard drive such compatibility may not be possible at all.
nVidia may very well be playing to the press, but that doesn't mean such a thing wouldn't be difficult or expensive. Most systems achieve backwards compatibility by finding uses for the extra hardware. Software emulation for compatibility has never been attempted professionally in the console arena, but amature software emulation tends to lag two systems behind. You can push an XBox to do a meaningful SNES, but Dreamcast emulation is right out. With the right software the SNES could emulate the 2600, but not the NES.
Personally, I don't see why they don't just include a detachable Xbox chipset as a free add-on with an overpriced "premium" system with two controllers, and sell a regular setup with one controller for 100 dollars less.
But, as I mentioned before, no such thing has been announced yet.
Here's a torrent link for the OurColony video: XBOX360Vid.wmv.torrent
Still no CONFIRMED lauch date, price, confirmation of HD DVD or Blu-Ray (Tell a lie, I think they said NO Next Gen Drive), backwards compatability, region coding, Video connectors - i.e HDMI, DVI, VGA , if a HDD is *standard* on all the consoles or optional, summaries on the various models that are supposedly going to be released, AND number of units on launch for each reigion (USA, Europe, Japan Etc).
But we got lots of pretty pictures and infomation that we can change the facia of the console... Whoopie doo!
Visit London Scalextric Club
I like the fact that M$ hasn't listen to anyone in the design, and kept the controller the size of a small nation...
Nothing like 6 months to a year of lead-time to make yourself the next Dreamcast.
The specs look amazing but I have to ask:
Why is Microsoft making it difficult to write games that run on both PC (Windows XP) and XBox 360?
One of the primary reasons I use Windows is for games. If game developers stop writing for Windows because they move to XBox 360, then it'll make it even easier for me to go all FreeBSD or Linux or Mac OSX.
Wouldn't it have been easier for XBox 360 to have a Windows XP or Windows Mobile 2005 foundation with just a custom explorer interface to make it look less-PC?
Whatever happened to Pentium? Dude, I think I am getting an Apple. [Not siriously I think I am]
Sleek, curvaceous, white exterior with no messy wires?
They should have called it "iBox".
Unfortunately, I am not Wil Wheaton
What's with the XBOX black becoming iPod white? Aren't there enough other choices?
Aside from that, if the BBC site is correct, it seems that device is not a digital media hub at all. It seems rather stupid (to say the least) that they didn't think to make the thing a PVR. The last generation of boxes had the excuse, but a PVR / media station is almost an expectation of something which expects to occupy a permenant space by the TV.
Still, it'll be interesting to see what Sony produce. If they have sense, they will make it a PVR, and a media jukebox, and a kickass console with backwards compatibility. If it can do all those things when the XBox can't then I don't see they have much to worry about. Better yet if they make it hackable - not so hackable that people can easily pirate games but just enough that people can play around with the box and produce cool things for it.
so if someone writes an xbox 360 emulator for the PC and i'm running it though Virtual PC on Mac how much slower can i expect it to be?
An informercial made to look like MTV. Note that there were no disclaimers stating this was advertising. It was not microsoft present xbox, it was MTV presents xbox.
On a different note, congratulations to the xbox 360 marketing team, who pulled out all the stops: constant "leaks" heading up to the launch, the first next-gen console shown off, launched on TV, by a pop show, and by celeberities! Not to mention the whole colony buisness. Full marks Microsoft marketing team.
What I want to know is, if we can get Linux to run on it, can we get Mac OSX to run on it using Mac-on-Linux? Obviously Mac OSX isn't going to run by itself, but Linux can surely be made to run on the Xbox 360's PowerPC processors, and then allow Mac OSX to run on that, kinda like how that one person loded Debian on an m68k and then got Mac OSX running on top of that.
This could be called "PC Next" - see this review of the XBox 360 for some notes I hope PC Gaming prices drop
http://www.llamasoft.co.uk/neon-screenshots.php
:)
Jeff Minter code in millions of households soon
The XBOX special provided almost no new information about the XBOX. They still haven't announced a release date, they still haven't confirmed or denied backwards compatability, and there's still no mention of the price. Why couldn't they give us information instead of a stupid Gen-X hype machine?
Dear diary: Today I stuffed some dolls full of dead rats I put in the blender.
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So far, the specs look pretty good. MS is probably allowing it to be a DVD player out of the box without the annoying "remote control must be there". Surprisingly, it still looks pretty modible - you know that people will be dying to make it into a Linux box first chance they get (and with a removable hard drive, even easier to switch between systems and use those USB peripherals), so we'll have to see what anti-mod abilities it includes.
The #1 question still is: backwards compatibility. At these specs, there's no reason why a hardware emulator couldn't emulate an older Xbox. And with the Xbox 1 only 4 years old, I believe that backwards compatibility will be a big deal - if not a bigger deal than the other systems. It's the price between $300 - $400 with some games on launch day (of which, if history is a judge from the PS2, Xbox 1, and Gamecube launch, one of those games is worth having, and 6 months afterwards the other "killer apps" show up), or having a good library including the all important Halo 1 and 2.
Enough to make me buy on launch day? No (but then again, with the current 3 consoles I own plus the GBA and PSP, I have too many games anyway), but we'll have to see how it does the next time out. They've fixed a lot of my previous annoyances with the Xbox 1 (the USB system should let me plug in a keyboard to enter in my own music track information - a pain and a half with the Xbox 1 using a controller, and the free basic Live will bring in people who, like myself, are too damn cheap to pay the $60 or so a year to get onto Live, especially considering how little I play online these days. Three kids, wife, blah, blah, blah.)
But it's a good showing. I'll be curious to see how the PS3 and Nintendo Revolution respond. (Psst: Nintendo, DVD movies play out of the box. It's reason #1 why you're tied in second place worldwide with the Xbox.)
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
The entire premise of MTV is to show informercials (aka music videos).
Was I the only one who was completely underwhelmed by the 30 minute commercial with commercials? Every new generation of consoles prior to this has been a big leap forward from the previous one. There was hardly any in-game footage shown, but what I saw looked more evolutionary than revolutionary. What did Perfect Dark Zero have that you can't get on Halo 2 with the HD cables for the Xbox? "Fully destructable objects"? (did anyone else catch that? wtf?)
I have a feeling that Microsoft has screwed up pretty bad with this not being backward compatible- unless they're going to have dual-sytem games, it's going to split their userbase and the developers will not know which unit to design for. People were still releasing games for the PS1 long after the PS2 came out, but they could get away with it because the PS2 was backward compatible.
Here's hoping it's an abysmal flop.
Well, it seems it the Xbox 360 is the Family All In One multimedia station MS promised it will be...
Unfrotunately, if every game is Live aware, I am affraid developers will tend to concentrate in the Live gameplay while leaving us the poor unfortunate guys that do not have high speed internet or WiFi (does it comes with an ethernet adaptor?) with 1/3 of the "experience"...
I certainly will wait until Nintendo and Playstation release their consoles to make a choice... (as I do not have the money to buy the 3 of them... or even 2)
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Well lets face it IBM. If XBox 360 wins (anyone noticed that you do 360 to end up back in the same place?) then its IBM processors at the core. If its PS3, then its... IBM processors at the core.
All those box numbers, all that volume, all those cheap servers.
XBox or PS3, doesn't matter as Intel lose.
(But please let it be PS3 that wins as its actually innovative rather than a re-hash of off the shelf stuff and (as ever with MS) no R&D).
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
They hope to sell the box before christmas... It is still quite possible that you will be able to buy machines with CPU's faster than 3.0 GHz from Apple before you can buy them from Microsoft.
From the BBC:
- CPU with three IBM PowerPC 3.2Ghz cores
- ATI 500MHz graphics processor
- 48 billion shader operations per second
- 512Mb GDDR3 RAM of memory
- Removable and upgradeable 20Gb hard drive
- Three USB ports
- Windows Media Extender built-in
- Support for DVD-video, DVD-ROM, DVD-R, DVD+R, CD-DA, CD-R, WMA CD, MP3 CD, Jpeg photo CD
Unfortunately, I am not Wil Wheaton
A nice commercial DVD about the Xbox from MS (btw he's the webmaster of an Xbox site here in Belgium) and just to make sure that he can play the DVD... MS kindly provided a Samung portable DVD player... and after that we'll all wonder why the Xbox gets good reviews...
Its got some sweet specs (better than my PC.) But I wonder about the compatibility with an x86 architecture.
(Then again, maybe M$ will escape the x86 arch. [Haaaa!!!!])
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
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Whoa! I actually felt the 30 Minutes of my life pull from my body after watching that. I don't know which is worse, That Show, The VGA's or G4.
The 360 definetly looks a little better when there's people standing next to it so you can get a idea what the size of it is. I'm also intreged by the Phantom sounding Marketplace that they talked little about. That's about all you got out of the "Pimp My Crap band and gamers you never heard of with Frodo Baggins and oh. Here's the Xbox 360 show"
Perfect Dark Zero better be in an alpha state, because I've seen Better Graphics in Quake II. And the frame rate it appeared to be getting in the "competition" was worse than what the N64 Perfect Dark used to get. It had to be somewhere around 2-5FPS (which is probably why they kept the camera's off the screens as much as possible). The other previews for games looked promising. Specificially the Project Gotham and the game that kinda had beefed up Doom III Graphics (missed the name).
The Ourcolony.net preview in five minutes gave more infomation about the XBox 360 then the entire 30 minutes on MTV. Frankly the power that is in this thing, especially considering it's size, is staggering. 1TFLOPS of processing power (if that number is true) is nothing to sneeze at. Especially when you start imagining a Beowulf Cluster of these and just 100 of them have a good chance of getting you ranked in the top500 list.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
The official detailed info and specs for the xbox 360 can be found at http://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox360/factsheet.htm/ and http://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox360/peripheralsfacts heet.htm/
They didn't even get into any details of the Xbox 360. Most likely they have good reason. So far it looks like another disappointment by Microsoft. I can't wait to get my hands on the PS3.
Bill Gates said he would bring down Apple's iPod one way or the other. I just don't know whether making it larger and providing less hard disk space is the way to go about it!
I was just browsing through the xbox360 games on 1up, and apparently duke nukem forever is going to be released on it...
http://www.1up.com/do/gameOverview?cId=3140411
Me too - you not buying one will make it easier for me to buy 3 of them the day they come out :)
I associate the number 360 with some clunky old IBM mainframes. The CPU is from IBM, but that is hardly the intended association.
:)
It could be 360 degree vision. Does the console have souround video
Now when microsoft has made an OS that runs on the power5 cpu, the next step should be to make Longhorn run on the g5, so all the B/RSOD-hungry mac users can scrap OSX tiger :)
The music visualiser in the Xbox 360 is being done by Jeff Minter, as a massively enhanced version of the engine that was going to drive Unity. ;)
arent electronics supposed to be getting smaller ?
I'll give a crisp British £5 note to the fine gentleman who gets a virus onto this infernal machine first.
We've had enough of this American crap over here lads, I tell you, and enough's enough. Grandfather wouldn't have stood for it and neither will I.
The monumental ballyhooness of it all!
Playstation 3 made by the Japs you say? Ye Gods Man! Back to the trusty Psion it is then!
Xbox 360? Isn't that kinda like saying we turned our new product completely around (figuratively speaking) so we could send it in same direction as the old one? Talk about a vote for uncreativity :p Yes, I did hear it was a nod to the skateboarding community. Why? And if so why not just call it the Xbox 180? It would make more sense. Go figure.
... and not in a 'good huge' way, but definitely in a 'this was designed by a fat American slob in Arkansas' kind of way.
fer sure i won't be getting one.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
But seriiously since when have any game consoles looked that great. Buy for functionality not looks. Buy it for the games.
The XBox Homepage doesn't work correctly with Mozilla (1.04) and looks darn ugly even with Internet Explorer...
Georg
A front-page article ought to at least say something about what an "Xbox 360" is. Sort of drags down the whole front page when I read the first article and haven't got any idea what you're trying to present me with. If it's only for the gamers, leave it on the section page.
Isn't that what it was? A lot of "hey this is how it looks and this is how you can change its look".
:P
Not much on specs. So what, they're selling looks now? Could this be the begining of tech. fashion show?
Will there be a miss USB contest?
It's not the destination that matters, but rather the journey.
All for $300?
Take a look at this (no, I'm not an Apple fanboy):
http://www.apple.com/powermac/
It costs an arm and a leg, and requires some seriously powerful cooling. Now compare to the XBox 360. How the hell are they going to get that lot into a case that small, and cool it properly?
... and we all know that gamers are statistically savvy about things like home decor.
Lol, I don't think you'll have a problem. Bring enough cash and you'll probably be able to be able to buy them all, and make stocking them actually worth it for the store. Here's for another designated Microsoft crapshoot.
I'm somehow reminded of the golgafrinchams, who had problems with the invention of the wheel because they couldn't decide what colour it should be...
Actually, I think this console looks quite good, and I'm pretty sure that it will sell very well, as it has the specs to offer some fantastic performance.
What I do wonder though, with Microsoft's switch to PPC in the console and pushing the XBox Live system, is whether Microsoft is planning to sometime start offering online versions of its Office, Browser and IM suites. I know that Microsoft was trying to offer online versions of Office to Internet Cafes back in 2000 but dropped the plans when nobody was interested, and I also know that Microsoft NEVER drops an idea, but simply keeps it in revision to offer in some future version or in another shape in the future.
Considering that Microsoft would love to lock in users with an online subscription fee, i.e. one can't use the browser, IM or office if one isn't forking over those monthly dollars to the company, and that the XBox 360 offers Microsoft the opportunity to control the whole platform, from the hardware to the software to the OS to the content in one package for the first time in Microsoft's history.
Expect a Microsoft keyboard and mouse for this console and Microsoft will be up and running, without any 3rd party OEMs to have to worry about, and with total control over what 3rd party content goes into the machine.
Welcome to a Microsoft world.
I heard they sent Thomson dvd players to the PS2 sites.
~kalinga
They already mentioned the "watercooling" that the powermac uses. I'm curious how much of a loss the xbox360 will be sold for.
What what Microsoft has done to reduce the ease of modding? That's a big reason that a lot of people bought the XBOX.
[%] Cingular Ringtones
the presentation was rather lame and the gaming scenes looked darm pre-recorded. anyone can publish some specs without showing the actual product in action. also, if the PS3 has just half as great as Sony claims it will still outperform the Xbox 360 several times.
How do you think its "now much in graphics"?
The 10MB is EDRAM, (just call it cache:) ), and the gpu also has the 20GB/s access to the 512MB main memory.
Plus it has 48 Shader pipelines (although not comparable with cureent GPU numbers because this are unified shaders), so it should be al least GF6800 level.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Well, I guess the good news is... we can expect dual 3Ghz Powermac from Apple this summer!
Toronto Star (some soul sucking required). In the dead tree version it was on page A3 with a mention on the front page.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Discounted versions of the 360 (codenamed 180s ) are expected to be on sale later this year.
Smile.
This design does not exude coolness. I would've thought it'd have a much cooler appearance -- this physical box alone will not be enough to entice buyers. Better be a good gaming platform.
Sam
The first movie I downloaded (Tomb Raider) look pretty much last-generation, as did some of the screenshots I saw, so initially I was quite unimpressed by the graphics, luckily enough, NFS seems to make a better impression. Just wondering why these other games look so crappy as NFS proves the XBox 360 is obviously capable of a lot more.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
as someone pointed out in another story the case is a complete rip-off of a Dell XPS (or some other three letter acronym).
would you buy a Dell? of course not.
if this is the Xbox 360 ,then What hapend to #'s 2-359
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Did anyone else notice that the video-out port on the Xbox is blacked out on the pictures on xbox360.com? I would really love to know what kind of connection(s) it will have.
If so, it'll be more powerful than the faster PowerMac, be around the same price and size as the MacMini, and have more USB ports to boot :D
My 3D Texturing Skinning work (under construction)
They should have made it so that you can press a button to buy a song or TV show that you're watching on TV! And advertisers could sell products that way too.
See my longer comment further up :) I believe the three PowerPC cores are stripped-down ones, not "for real" like in the Macs (and not as good as "for real" ones either). The graphics chip is pretty much "for real" though, although expect a bit of slowdown because of contention for the main memory (nice to see GDDR used for that). I'd estimate the GPU to be somewhat better than current 6800s and somewhat less good than the forthcoming Nvidia G70, with the exception of the eDRAM which, AFAIK, basically just buys them multisampled FSAA for free (no room for much more than a full colour 720p framebuffer in there). (So for an entire machine that costs about as much as one high end GPU for a PC, it's a damn good deal...)
Doesn't matter if it's watercooled or not. You still have to move the heat elsewhere. You can't just 'get rid of it'.
You mean the chips that were supposed to ship in Summer 2004, according to Steve Jobs?
Not much of a GPU? it has 10MB of EDRAM, and it has 256GB/sec of bandwidth in to it! That's ALOT of bandwidth. No, it's fucking HUGE amount of bandwidth! And in addition, it has the regural GDDR3 at it's disposal as well.
And it has 48 pipelines running at 500Mhz. Current top of the line PC-GPU's have 16 pipelines running at around 500Mhz. So I think it's pretty safe to say that the GPU on this this is a real monster!
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
It feels like they're moving away from the OS. There are a lot of businesses out there, but there are a lot more consumers. If they can dominate the consumer market in some big way they can start subtracting focus from all the other stuff they've been quagmired in.
Look at what Apple did with the iPod. It saved them in a lot of ways.
So yeah, if they come out with the best gaming box ever, why do I need my hyper powerful PC? I'll just get a more powerful Mac instead.
And that's the thing. Now you're buying a Mac or switching to Linux (BSD, etc, whathaveyou), which you might do anyway out of disguist when Longhorn comes out, but you're also buying in to Microsoft's new X-Box also.
You're still giving MS money. All this talk about mobile devices, and convergence. It's almost like they're letting Linux and Apple have the desktop, because they want the people now and not the businesses that employ those people.
I don't think I can call this a bad thing, I've always considered XP the best gaming OS out there. So what we have is a situation where if you're doing any serious computing, you can use Apple, or a Linux, and if you're playing games you can go sit on the couch with your Microsoft product, with your Microsoft phone near by.
Personally the idea is starting to grow on me.
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
The grass in Tiger Woods '06 looked like a 3DFX Voodoo 1 texture blur-mess. Another game that they showed, and I don't know which, was running at about 15fps. This is what 3 * 3.2ghz) gets us?
Also, is it possible that this new box is even LARGER than the first?
--falz
I'm very happy about 16:9 widescreen and 1080i. I know I bought that 52" HDTV for some reason. Yeah, some X-Box games do, but not enough, and the difference is very noticiable on a TV this size, especially when you get used to HDTV. My PS2 looks like absolute crap on it, I ended up moving it into another room and hooking it up to a 17" LCD.
rm -rf
They realised that Sony's Playstation was using consecutive integer versioning and so they jumped RIGHT up to the high numbers. There's more numbers so it must be better, right?
Some how I'm reminded of The Simpsons where Bart asks his mum for the 256 bit version of a console as an upgrade to his 254 bit version.
I've never used a console before, but since I'm now a Mac user (I love my Mac), I've been thinking more and more about getting a console so I can play some of the games that I can't get for my Mac (HL2 for instance).
I'm a longtime PC gamer and am very used to the keyboard+mouse combo for FPS in particular. I don't see how the Xbox controller can compare. It has far fewer buttons for one, and I don't like using my thumbs for movement.
Can you hookup a keyboard+mouse or some kind of third party controller to consoles like Xbox?
What have other people found when switching from PC gaming to consoles?
The problem with the PC platform is that software is designed to run on 'most' PCs out there. If you've got some bleeding edge number cruncher, then you can probably stick up the resolution, have nicer textures and all manner of extra little bits of gilding - but the basic game running underneath it is still constrained by the weakest PC in their target market.
The 'nice' thing about consoles (and there are many nice things) is that code can be optimized for the hardware (compare a game running on an Xbox with the PC version running on a machine of the same spec) and that everybody has the same base. For example the Xbox360 appears to be able to support a massive chunk of simple raw processing - you can have a game that has complex physics as an integral part - you know it'll run on all machines. If you tried it on low spec PC it just wouldn't run (and I suspect a high-spec PC isn't going to be showing up the 360 any time soon).
If you ask me ...
... just like your favoirite cell phone. ... and were trying to be positive about the customizeable face plate thingy. ... whatever ... maybe they should have called it xBox.NET ;)
The MTV special was a complete waste of time.
It didn't show off anything other then the exterior of the console. And the fact that you can change the face plate
Thank GOD I have TiVo and could skip the 20 min. of commercials.
At points it seemed like the commentators were disappointed w/ what they were seeing. I'm sure they wanted to play some games
The only thing I know about the xBox 2 is that it's called the xBox 360
Later,
-- The Dude
... I recall reading that the reason they're calling it "Xbox 360" is because "Xbox 2" would sound less sophisticated than the Playstation 3. Since these two consoles will be duking it out for a while, M$ didn't want to give Sony any advantage. Well that's all well and good, but here's my question: What are they going to call the next iteration of Xbox? They'll always be faced with the dilemma of being one step behind the Playstation. Xbox 3 vs. PS4, you get the idea. How are the going to solve that problem? "Xbox 720," anyone?
10100111001
Everyone can squawk about hardware specs, looks, controllers (which are nothing new at all, ooh wireless!), Media capabilities... NO MENTION OF GAMES ANYWHERE! Anyone notice this? Give me a B.S. vision of the games to come that will be totally amazing, which will never actually release anyhow, as consoles USED to do to promote a freakin GAMING console!
Nothing can be said for the games at all and this is supposed to be a gaming console. Sony and MS have missed the mark by miles with these "next gen" efforts. No real gamer cares one bit about processors or a stupid video camera attachment or even a hard drive really... notice how well the eye toy and PS2 hard drive sold? What makes anyone think people are willing to pay through the nose for a console that supports technology people have no interest in? If there is no interest today, nothing is going to change by next year, in fact there will be less enthusiasm by then.
This will not sell 100 million as is stated by MS, I don't believe the PS3 will even sell 100 million... people are turning away from this rush to produce expensive hardware with no new games and ideas to back them and short life cycles, note the PSP and DS not exactly selling like hotcakes. I can't wait to laugh at the massive losses incurred this round in consoles, Nintendo will also be laughing all the way to the bank by not taking huge losses on hardware and focusing on ease of use and innovative content.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
While the 10MB of DRAM may not seem like a lot, it is being said that it is only used for rendering 1 frame in hi definition. Clearly they could add more, but they must have figured out that is all anyone would ever need.
Think about the amount of time game developers would have to spend just to take full advantage of the graphics (forgetting about gameplay).
No kiddin'. It was years before PS1 games were taking full advantage of the hardware. Same with PS2 games; compare R&C Up Your Aresenal to Rayman or any of the other early PS2 games, or event the first R&C. Big, big difference. The good thing is, it keeps the console fresh.
The XBox wasn't that big of deal because it was essentially a PC. The difference between Halo and Halo 2 wasn't really that great. With the XBox 360 being a different beast, there might be a huge difference between the first run games and the later games, as people learn to take advantage of the hardware.
Maybe.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
I find it hard to believe that it would be so difficult to add PVR functionality to this machine, while the DVD-R wars are raging. The advantage of this machine is access to the TV, so why not take the next step?
I am not a PS3 fan boy by any stretch of the imagination. Hell, I've owned every console BUT the N64 and Gamecube (I'm a little tired of Nintendo's kid centric approach to their systems).
That being said, I was, to say the least, very underwhelmed. Ghost Recon 3 looked interesting, and the Sports games looked good (even though I hate sports games). Nothing else looked particularly impressive and some of the games looked worse than existing current generation games.
Microsoft is pulling the trigger way to early. The current systems have at least another good solid year in them, and a year of additional development can make a helluva difference in quality for the new systems.
As it is, it looked more like the transition from Sega Genesis to Sega 32x than from Sega Genesis to the PlayStation/2, and that's not a good thing.
Here's to hoping they can pull off a miracle in 6 months, but I'm skeptical.
Bryan
Here's a few thoughts and questions.
1) I'm not liking this trend in the console space. By "trend" I mean the tendency to come out with new systems faster and faster. In the old days, the Nintendo Entertainment system had a (I'm guessing) eight year or so lifespan. And nobody really ever saw that as a bad thing. It had a nice library of games, and people still remember it fondly.
Now we get maybe two or three years before the upgrade cycle begins anew. I'm in favor of longevity and building a nice library of games rather than always trying to do something new, at least in the console space. For computers, well I don't mind that so much.
2) Because it's based on the PowerPC architecture, what's the likelihood we'll see Macs able to emulate the games made for it? Assuming Apple gets its ass in gear with the GhZ gap that this'll present. If not emulation, how about porting? It seems that it'll be made vastly more easy to port games to the Mac now.
In which case, one wonders what Microsoft was thinking. You don't make it easier to move games to your most visible competitor without some reason behind it. Contracts and licenses I guess will secure that.
3) Again, noting the PowerPC based architecture and the fact that the other two console vendors are also expected to be using some variant of it, is there a chance we could see a drop in price in all PPC products (namely Macs)? I'd hope so.
+1 Double entendre
I have been wondering about this for quite some time ....
Does this mean that Microsoft has the Windows Kernel running on a Power architecture? Isn't XBox based on DX10?
I am wondering why this isn't more significant than the XBox itself? Maybe I am wrong, please correct me!
Life is just a conviction.
Personally, I'm curious if we will have any flaming xboxen.
I saw in the infomercial there are a helluva lot of huge fans and the HD unit in this thing is on the side, but what I want to see is the CPU board and such. Anyone got pictures of those things? It would be useful to look at the architecture of this unit in comparison to PS3/XBOX as they are planned for today/are today.
Wheel of Time: Book by Book and Sumview (summary review) Bigdady92 style: http://bigdady92.blogspot.com/
I'd like to see an opera about the business relationship between IBM and Microsoft.
In the first act, IBM is big and indestructible, Big Blue in all its chess king stomping hubris.
In the second act, blinded by arrogance, IBM casually gives Microsoft the key to over throwing it, first with DOS and then with Windows (which was originally supposed to be a little sister product to OS/2).
In the third act, IBM goes almost to the edge of bankruptcy. Only at the last second does it pull itself back from the edge by focusing on servers and services.
In the fourth act, things go crazy! First, IBM (IBM of all companies!) throws its weight behind Linux, in a desperate bid to kill Microsoft. Then IBM teams with Apple to make chips for it (well, OK, this was foreshadowed before, but yeah). Now IBM is once again at the top of the heap, and what do they do?
Benevolently give Microsoft the chip it will need to take over the video game world!!
Unless of course they have more of the same production problems they had with the G5. In that case, they'll probably drag MS down with them as they choke each other to death...
Seriously, who can believe the crazy history these companies have?
its 3 (Yes three) cores on a single PowerPC chip (with each core running at 3.2 GHz.
bloody fast, but not as fast as 3 (Yes three) seperate processors.
Plus its 'custom' so its probably not as fast as a 3.2GHz G5 would be (although it may be faster, but im guessing not)
According to www.xbox.com, this machine has 512 MB of 700 Mhz DDR which is unified, meaning that games may partition it at will between the game code and the video hardware. This is how the original XBox worked.
Aha! Another person to pour cold water onto!
I very much doubt the 48 figure refers to pipelines as seen in current PC GPUs -- if it did, the GPU would have something like 700 million transistors, that's just improbable!
I believe ATI's new R5x0 architecture uses "unified shaders" or something (re-uses the same units for pixel and vertex operations). That 48 figure is probably a shader unit count or something. It's better than the current generation, but unlikely to make it 3x faster: perhaps 2x faster, at the outside.
The Nvidia G70 (to be announced Real Soon Now(TM)) is rumoured to have 2x the performance of the current 6800 series, as well...
Boy! That's just what us gamers wanted to hear! A new gaming console, but it's not just for games! wiippeee! Yahooo! Yehawww!
An XBOX as entertainment centre can be done today using the XBOX Media Centre. It can play pictures, movies, music, start games, XLink access, karaoke, manage your hard drive. As far as I know, It cannot yet function as DVR.
If this is what you want, you can do this today with $200.
When XBOX 360 comes out, check to see if the XBMC is good enough for what you need before paying $500-$800 (guesstimate). I would also wait to see what GameCube 2.0 and PlayStation 3 have to offer before buying an XBOX 360.
If you are a pirate. You have to use XLink to play games because XBOX Live detects modded xboxes. Currently, on PS2, there is no Play Station Live. Every company has its own servers, and they are not as draconian.
You can't play this WMV in VLC.
I'm just hoping that this internet business is not overdone. I would hate to see blinking icons telling me updates are ready. And once the update is downloaded it asks me to reboot. As a gamer I am very impatient and cannot take loading time (My main annoyance with games like Half-life 2). So if I have to wait not only for game loading but for downloading updates and such I might just get annoyed. Let's just wait and see.
There are so many good and allright games released for the PS2, GameCube, and even possibly the Xbox, that I can't for the life of me think of a single good reason to spend wads of cash on a next generation system. PS3, Revolution, Xbox, what have you.
There are already more games in the used section of my local Gamestop for GameCube and PS2 alone than I'd ever be able to finish if I did nothing but play video games for the rest of my life. And even after that I can buy a original Xbox and spend another half a lifetime with those old games.
I'm getting out of this rat race right now. Check please?
Screenshots and movies of the built in lightsynth from llamasoft are at http://www.llamasoft.co.uk/neon.php
Three words, "economics of volume".
Does it run Linux?
All kidding aside, it's a tri-core PowerPC computer. We got PowerPC distros. Just mod the kernel, and porting should be eazy.
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
They had to color it white, because its the spitting image of the Dell:
l ex%20GX260.jpg
http://www.bestbuyjamaica.com/images/Dell%20Optip
From 1up.com from page 4, under a picture:
"Two fans means more power!"
If only they had put 4 fans in this puppy. Ah well, I guess we'll have to wait for Xbox 720....
--- What?
How in the hell is this box supposed to sell for less than $500, even after Microsoft's subsidy? I mean, holy crap. I think either of these things is going on:
- Those aren't your father's IBM 970s. How much they bear in relation to the 64bit PPCs shipping in Macs I think remains to be seen.
- Microsoft is going to untold lengths to subsidize these boxes, in the expectation that they'll make it up with Live subscriptions and game licensing. Like cellphone providers.
- Microsoft could have seriously missed the market. I'm sure they've done extensive market research; they're known for that. Even so, I have hard time believing that anyone is going to pay >$500 for a console. Maybe they know that the the Sony PS3 is going to be $500 too, so they feel safe in developing this kinda thing? Anyways, if it it's more than $150 more than the PS3, I think we can kiss it goodbye, no matter how much it rules.
If this ships with three real CPUs that are mostly similar to the ones that Apple uses, for less than $500, lots of Apple fanbois, myself included, are going to wonder wtf is up with that, and why Apple can't do the same. I think there is still a lot that remains to be seen.--
$tar -xvf
I can't see why they would bother, XBox wasn't a big success, and the games that were sold for the XBox are the same ones being sold for the new one.
Call of Duty *2*
Quake *4*
Tiger Woods PGA Tour *06*
NBA *2K6*
Project Gotham Racing *3*
Anal sluts *9*
I reckon they just can't admit it, without killing off sales of the XBox so they talk vague.
Whose going to support the XBox if its an end of line product like the Dreamcast?
or XBOX Shaved, a much better name :D
Nintendo is also using PowerPC, I believe they're using 4x 2.5 GHz
from http://money.cnn.com/2005/05/12/technology/persona ltech/xbox360/index.htm?cnn=yes: "But the real multimedia functionality ties in with the 360's wireless capabilities. The machine will automatically connect and stream digital media -- including video and digital pictures -- stored on any PC running Windows XP."
And this differs from what can be done with regular wired ethernet... how? Thanks for regurgitating MS's press release, fucktards.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
XBox games don't use a full 3D abstraction layer, like many DirectX or OpenGL games do. They are directly targeted (and optimized) for the Nvidia GPU, and the firmware and GPU compiler technology for the first XBox's graphics system probably belongs to Nvidia.
After such a big embarassing loss to ATI on the X360, it is highly unlikely that Nvidia would agree to license their technology for inclusion in a software emulator on the new platform.
Interestingly enough, MSFT has made some acquisitions over the last couple of years that point to building such emulation (VirtualPC, JIT scode conversion technologies), but it might be for naught if there is a legal barrier on the graphics chip.
I know, sucks.
The polygon performance of the Xbox 360 is as high as 500 million triangles per second, which means the Xbox 360 can process aproximately 1.2 billion vertices per second. In comparison, the GeForce 6800 Ultra can process 600 million vertices per second. Want more numbers? The Xbox 360 has a pixel fillrate of 16 gigasamples per second using 4X multisampling anti-aliasing (MSAA) and a shader performance of 48 billion shader operations per second.
Quote is from teamxbox.xom. Personally, I don't call twice as fast as a 6800 Ultra "not much for graphics". This thing is going to fly.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
http://www.xenatera.com/bunnie/proj/anatak/xboxnex t_security.pdf
But the current Xbox has been emulating the previous generation: PSX and N64 for years now! I don't think there is a Dreamcast emulator, but technically, the Dreamcast is in the same generation as the Xbox... remember, Sega wanted to jump into the next generation really early?
So you are wrong. I bet the new Xbox could use software emulation to support old games. However, I doubt there will be an official software emulator.
I choked when I saw Duke Nukem Forever listed as one of the titles.
I was reading about PPU in a magazine the other day... It's a separate PCI card that handles physics in video games (to be utilized more and more).
Does the XBOX 360 or PS3 have any special hardware to handle *just* the in-game physics?
"hey, could you pass me a paper towel? er.. I mean... DEPLOY ABSORBTION PANEL!"
And the shining new Microsoft games console will blend smartly with... your Apple hardware?
Is it me or have MS decided to help Apple with their lack of gaming by providing them with a matching games console?
Who knows, maybe they reckond the iPod was a blast cus it was white and shiny.
Either way, if you're a fasion concious Mac user, you now have some gaming power to go with it
I don't know. If the onboard CPU cooler is efficient enough it shouldn't matter.
Take a closer look at the video and some of the pictures that have been floating around. There is a Dell-style hood that encloses the CPU/Cooler and a fan at the back of the unit. I'd say the heat is totally managable.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
They're expecting us to take 5 days away from gaming each year?
tone
I bet we are going to have to pay extra for MS Virus protection on the box!
There are already pleanty of games out there for the PS2, and not many that are available solely for XBox. I mean, there's Halo 2, but who would want to play that? There really aren't any good games out there for the XBox, and FPSs just SUCK on consoles. (3,8) It's so obvious that PS2 is better then XBox. I mean, they only sold like 40 XBoxen (6) in Europe and Japan. (7)
/.)
/.) but the best game erer was pong. Since they've started adding bettter graphics, the playability has just suffered. (8, 9)
Besides, Bill Gates is evil. He spends too much time talking about products and graphics and stuff, and he's really rich. That asshole! (10) Microsoft can't even make an operating system that works! And they're EVIL! They use slave labor to build their rice box. (6, 11) In Soviet Russia, you own M$. (11, standard
The biggest problem on the XBox is the graphics. I mean, IANAL, (standard
Oh, and my Sweedish super model internet girlfriend was supposed to come to prom with me, but they wouldn't let her get on the plane because she had her XBox and they've had trouble with them exploding on airplanes. True story. (10, 11)
Note: It would have beeen helpful if I could have said something like "I, for one, welcome our new XBox 360 overlords." Also mentioning the terms Mircosoft and FUD would be helpful. OH! And we totally forgot to attack it from the Apple angle too! It's got PowerPC chips in it, and we all know that PowerPC chips are used in Macs, and Macs suck at gaming!
--
I'm sorry for wasting your time, but hey, you are reading slashdot.
externally this new xbox is really ugly.
you would think by now that Microsoft would have
learned a lesson from Apple that design does matter.
external as well as internal.
too ugly for my house.
pass on this one.
Crucially, there's a liquid cooling system to keep all this stuff from melting.
Liquid cooling for computers finally hitting the main-stream!
Quake 4 was previewed on it last night
Previewed? Given its Q4 release date I assume that it will not be available at time of launch (summer in US?)
What a lame "unveiling" that was.
Here's a rundown:
MTV: Look, a live performance by The Killers.
Me: Who? What does this have to do with the Xbox 360?
MTV: Look at how the Monster Garage guys modded an original Xbox!
Me: What does this have to do with the Xbox 360?
MTV: Look, here's some pro gamers getting a tour of a game studio, and trying out some motion capture stuff.
Me: What does this have to do with the Xbox 360? Oh, they're playing a game on it. Wow, those graphics and gameplay look just like stuff I've seen on PS2 and Xbox 2 years ago.
MTV: Look, here's the gamers having a deathmatch competition.
Me: WTF MTV? I don't care what the gamers look like while they're playing, show me the game!
MTV: Well, that's it, now that you know everything about the Xbox 360, here's another live performance by The Killers!
Me: Did I blink and miss the Xbox 360?
or the new GameCube
No real games to speak of, other than the existing Fable.
Sorry, just not that interesting from my viewpoint. If I wanted to play football, I'd go outside and play it here at the UW.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The real question is whether someone will hack it to run Mac OS X? It's a (custom) PowerPC. Perhaps this is a stealth anti-mac move by MS.
Wow!
An IBM '360' that fits on top of my TV.
Now I can dust of that old JCL book from Gary DeWard Brown and run some IEFBR14's to test it out.
Does anyone know if this comes with a copy of MVS or OS/360?
People always said MS would beat IBM one day, now they're up to the mid '70s of IBM technology. It should only take about 30 more years for them to be on par with big blue :)
For the sarcastically impared, this post is a joke.
"There are already more games in the used section of my local Gamestop for GameCube and PS2 alone than I'd ever be able to finish if I did nothing but play video games for the rest of my life." Maybe you should stick to what you're good at.
Yeah, its a pathetic plug for my own site, but the images are original (as is the commentary) http://media-geeks.com/?content=showarticle&articl eID=854
Who is more foolish? The fool, or the fool who follows?
The plural of XBox is XBoxen. Brilliant!!!
I think it's time to purchase some cans of Krylon in preparation for the release :) Maybe something to spray on the underside, for some neato "nonskid grip"
:)
Besides, the first thing you want to do is void the warranty
Look behind you...
I just watched the Ourcolony video
The marketspeak is unbelievable. Apparently the Xbox 360 has a "very distinctive iconic gesture". And a button that, when you press it and "this whole new world of opportunity opens up"
Well damn, THAT sounds pretty amazing. Whazzit do, like, open a wormhole in the spacetime continuum or something?
Nope. just takes you to the media centre. Oh well.
Oh. And they want us, the users to "Take the XBox 360 and make it ours", they want us to do stuff they never dreamed of with it, to customise, and create.
Really? Then why are you locking it down and DRMing it to hell and back?
If you really want me to create stuff, leave it unlocked. Or at least let me install a modchip.
If they were a bit more honest, they'd have said
"I'm a slightly lonely middle aged man with absolutely no connection to todays youth. Sometimes I ride my Segway up and down the corridors for hours at a time. Then I go home and cry myself to sleep."
"Hey. I'm female and blonde. I didn't have anything to do with the development of this console but we're gonna pretend I'm a hardcore gamer for the sake of widespread appeal"
Then, of course, there's the M4d tr3ndy d00d. The less said about him the better, I think though.
Still, looks like a pretty neat console. The hardware is impressive enough, and I might get the console when it comes out.. but I'll pass on the Xbox 360 Paradigim Shift Life Gaming Experience (TM), thanks
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
Graphics on par with current titles, Tiger Woods seemed poor in the grass textures, Kameo looks poor (this was the one game I was looking forward to since it was supposed to release for the Gamecube.) cartoony, blocky, current gen graphics, the only addition was "bloom" effect which most people hate anyhow. Pathetic.
3 3.2GHz procs, big gpu specs, big price, and the rest... what's it get you? Not too much more than you get now from an Xbox, PS2, or PC. Better have more than Perfect Dark Zero to pull this off... and they don't besides Condemned which isn't a mass appeal title. Thumbs Down.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
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First the PS(/)2, now the 360... what's with gaming consoles being named after older IBM hardware?
If the Nintendo's next console ends up being branded the "Nintendo AS400", I'm gonna VARY OFF and not come back.
from the anandtech article:
the new Xbox 360 offers "more than one teraflop of system-floating point performance" driven by a "three-core PowerPC-based CPU."
Is this a typo, or am I missing something? I thought teraflops were still pretty firmly in the range of supercomputers.
All I gotta say is that I *LOVE* my HD games! They do look a lot different in HD than those that do not support it. I won't buy a game that isn't 1080i. When you're kicking much ass in Unreal Championship - you can see the robot pieces smoking and flying off, as well as every missle that shoots you in the HEED!!!!! *skipping rockets off your head!!* Look for me on XBL baby!! I support you on quitting smoking!!!
Sorry man... the Internet pooped on me.
(XBox) 360 > (Playstation) 3
--R.J.
Electric-Escape.net
Yikes! Living in an apartment where everything folds or slides into everything else would be like living inside a Chinese puzzle or Pinhead's box or "The Cube". I'd hate having to remember the right sequence of moves to find my front door.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
The real reason it's "XBox 360" - XBox's 2 through 359 were scrapped in beta testing.
This is my favorite quote from Gary Whitta:
"If I was Bill Gates I would have called a meeting of all senior Xbox staff some time ago and said "Right, so tell me all about the Halo title we're releasing at launch."
And when they had nothing to say I would have fired the fucking lot of them. "
7. Be sure and mention Japanese and European sales numbers. If you aren't sure what those sales numbers are, go ahead and make something up. Estimate low, most people will believe you.
;)
According to this http://game-science.com/news/001076.html/ article, the XBOX sold a whopping 169 units in Japan last week, and 6,529 for the whole year. At the other end of the spectrum, the Nintendo DS sold 67,863 units last week. Clearly the XBOX is not doing very well in Japan.
*** Disclaimer - I own a xb0KZzzz
It is interesting, isn't it, that nobody is now using Intel who is not locked into it by a commitment to legacy code? All 3 new game machines are using PowerPC processors.
And I wouldn't be surprised if the OS of XBox360 is based on Windows. Perhaps Microsoft will follow Apple's example with the 68K to PowerPC transition and release a PowerPC based Windows PC that runs old applications in emulation.
After all, they already own VirtualPC...
The 601 was first generation or "G1", and ran from 1994-1995. The 603e and 604e were the second generation or "G2" and ran from 1995 to 1997.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
I think you're right. They're probably trying to get it to work, but aren't promising it just in case they can't. They did, however, buy Connectix, the makers of Virtual PC. This was likely because they wanted people who had experience with both PPC and x86, but wether that was merely for the Xbox 360 or for reverse compatibility is anyone's guess. Perhaps if they can't get it working on the first release of the Xbox 360 they'll release an application whenever they get it working and let people download it from that new 360 button guide thingy that is supposed to let you do everything.
Does this mean it's got three processors? What does triple core mean? I dunno - I'm asking.
For that they'd have to copy a dislcaimer from Apple too: Do not eat iBox.
. . . of the Killers! They were awesome and completely off the hook! I can't wait until their good album comes out!
Even if it is backwards compatible...how am I supposed to get my DOA:Extreme Vollyball saved games ported to the new system?
When he said "and now the future of gaming" and that hot blonde walked by I thought "she's the future of gaming? SWEET!"
Apparently every person on the planet who saw that was thinking the same thing as per Zonk's post. If you also thought that then respond to this post.
Does God treat us as servants or friends? Check my homepage.
This reminds me of comparing cars. Let's say an Xbox is a ford and PS3 a BMW.
Ford released a new model in competition to BMW. It's got a much bigger engine, the same leathery luxury, it goes faster and handles better. Some people will buy it because it's value for money.
Others will think "Hey, it's still a ford" No matter how good it is, it's just not a BMW.
And then BMW releases their new model.And it's beautiful and fast. And people buy it just because it's a BMW. So, I'm sorry.Yes, the specs are very good and it looks like value for money, but it still has that Microsoft badge. I'll wait for the BMW.
Disclaimer: Please replace "BMW" with whatever is your preferred luxury car brand.
And "Ford" with whatever is your lesser, not quite as good brand.
"I used to have that really cool,funny sig
However nothing is said ANYWHERE about if this guy will be backwards compatible to the current model. I'm going to guess it won't be, since it has different processor etc.
Executive ability is deciding quickly and getting someone else to do the work. --John G. Pollard
It's typical MS. The PS2 can stand on it's side, that must be what gamers want! And then simply outdo them on specs.
It looks like a fat PS2 made by Apple wannabes.
Oh come on...that is at best "raw power". No game will seriously use that power. They aren't telling us the real numbers...the "useful polygon" count. I bet you its not so high as the numbers they are praising.
Besides...what good is a system with all that power if it will be a long time before developers are able to even make use of that power?
Its the games that matter - not the system. I will wait to see what the games are like before I proclaim the Xbox 360 as God's next gift to mankind (the first apparently having been Halo to many people).
This isn't a troll guide, it speaks the truth.
Like #10, my xbox is giving me a lot of "This disk can not be read, blah blah insert a real xbox disk" errors, you think this is made up? There isn't a fucking scratch on that Halo disk or any other game, yet it frequently gives this error.
Just goes to show, don't get a first generation system. I will especially not get one from Microsoft.
The ITMS is never going to be Apple's primary revenue stream. It's just barely holding at the break-even point. It's being held afloat by iPod revenue, which is itself still dwarfed by Apple's computer business.
That's exactly what I was going to say...
Along those lines, it would make perfect sense for MS to allow your Xbox 360 to have it's Live subscription tied in with a subscription music service which would sync to a Rio or whatever, as well as let you play songs through your stereo and possibly in games. It would essentially give them a subscription based alternative to the ITMS, and on top of that it already has a large client base who are already paying a monthly subscription fee. I can see the labels eating this one up because it's just tacking on a subtle fee for the end user and diverting some of the cash flow. And, I can see how Xbox users would love the service. It ties music selection into a device which they feel very comfortable using.
ACCEPT that your grammar is wrong fool!
Did anyone catch the commercial for Kotex tampons and pads during the xbox360 show? How appropriate since that is exactly what the xbox360 looks like.
Does God treat us as servants or friends? Check my homepage.
Means it's got a single CPU "Chip" which contains three actual CPU cores.
In a very general sense, you could look at it as having three separate CPUs. However, depending on how those CPUs are architected, they may have to fight over memory bandwidth and other system resources (a-la Intel). Or they may use a much more efficent design, like AMD's HyperTransport.
Regardless, it's still a crapload of processing power. Hopefully the CPU design isn't crippled by the rest of the hardware.
Your Sig Here ($10)
thoz arnt trolls, ther real. I spend enuf time on my xbox and the intrnet to be an expert. Yr just one of them scoolboys that trys to look good an cover up that yr just a wonkr for m$. Spend less time in the library and more in the intrnet lik me. Shure you wont be getting Az anymore but then yull not sound so stupid to us.
what percentage of people playes PS1 games on their PS2? If you upgrade from your existing console, why not keep your old console around?
Consoles break, and the makers eventually stop production. Once your PS1 bites the big one, you still have a PS2 to play your existing library of PS1 games (except possibly for Tomba! and about a dozen others that Sony couldn't get 100 percent working). Or where can I buy a new Super NES?
And if you're new to the console, why would you buy old games?
Unlike the Final Fantasy compilations, not all classic games are re-released for all consoles. Where can I buy, say, Tecmo Bowl for GameCube?
Of course, Apple and Sony could band together.
If Apple and Sony BMG were to enter an agreement with any level of exclusivity, then EMI, Universal, and Warner would feel left out.
look at how the gamecube suffered because it refused to consider the implications of the future, i.e. dvd playback.
The Nintendo GameCube video game console is sold at the price of one of the other consoles minus the price of an entry-level DVD player. This lets you buy a DVD Video player separately from your console so that you can use them on two separate screens, which is useful if you want to play while someone else in the house is watching a 12 hour Meg Ryan marathon.
[In GTA San Andreas,] if you drive super fast you're going faster than the CD can access/load the data [seems odd]. Thus the game engine just renders transparent surfaces.
Then why couldn't the game engine render plain Gouraud shaded surfaces like PS1 and N64 games did for objects whose textures hadn't loaded?
It's not actual "water cooling" it is a heat pipe which has water in it, it also has amonia in it.
http://hardocp.com/ Check the announcement.
This is just marketing for PC ricers who think watercooling is "leet".
Or the next Genesis. Or Playstation.
But will the DVD playback upconvert to 720p and 1080i??? What about the Video and Audio out specs?? HDMI? DVI? Component? Will XBOX (1) HD component cables plug into the 360, or is the interface completely new?
It means that the single processor chip has three processing cores.
This is akin to current POWER PC chips like in the P Series hardwareline that each physical processor has two cores. The system reports that it has 2 processors from a physical hardware standpoint, but when running any software that counts the number of processors they see twice as many. For example a two processor machine shows up as having four cpus when running topas or nmon.
Well I've wrestled with reality for thirty five years doctor, and I'm happy to say I finally won out over it.
I'm going to buy four, just so I can sex with three of them at once.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
But.. you just need one to have sex with three, cause there are three cores. Unless you want to have sex with twelve, then go ahead and buy four. l-eight-r! /Kafka
Yes, it's a tactic called "Leading By Example" that is meant to stir up morale among the trolls. He's very good at it, to be sure. Several times I was tempted to hit the reply link and flame his dereliction of elementary grammar and spelling. Alas, if i'd been foolish enough to do so he'd have won. They'd all have won. In fact, the very act of wasting precious time pining over these subtle aggravations is a sign that the trolls may already be winning a cold war.
The presentation was on the lame side and the specs of the Xbox 360 look pretty bad given all the hype Microsoft has been creating.
I can't wait to see the final specs of the PS3 which will beat the Xbox 360 in terms of performance several times. In fact, any serious gamer will wait a couple more months and get the PS3.
It's still six or seven months (minimum) before Xbox 360 ships. In that time, you can expect speed bumps for the PowerMac line. You may see dual-core chips, or dual-threaded chips, or both. Microsoft had to preannounce the specs of Xbox 360 so developers would know the performance targets. Apple doesn't preannounce much of anything about hardware specs.
The name must be a reference to the old IBM System 360 mainframe. The 360 stood for "the full circle of computing". Microsoft is trying to imply that they will be as important in the console market as IBM was in the mainframe market. This is a huge claim to make, given their second place status so far. See http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?IbmSystemThreeSixty for details.
I play the excel spreadsheet game everyday. It comes in a number of varients...how much would you like the number to be? How can I use excel for a database? How many subtle bugs can I find (or leave) in spreadsheet? How slow can a make it recalculate?
Excel is a great tool for looking busy without doing anything productive.
Actually...correctly used excel is one of the best business applications ever.
> The entire premise of MTV is to show informercials (aka music videos).
MTV doesn't play music videos, oddly enough. MTV2 used to, but they seem to be stopping now.
Videos were a fad. Many bands simply don't make them anymore.
What happened to the other 358 versions?
Seriously though, folks, this name is very telling. As there are 360 degrees in a circle (no doubt how they chose the name), it means that Microsoft is simply going round and round in circles. A downward spiral, you might call it...
I just read a story that MS was using a G5 to demo some games.
If MS is subsudizing the new XBOX, and if apple was to makes OS X avaible for the XBOX, imagine the losses that MS can rack up!
The cost of any gaming console system is far LESS than the production cost. This is because the real money in this industry is in licensing. This means people who buy and re-purpose a console are effectively getting more hardware than they paid for. (Using Big Media's warped logic, I'm "stealing" from the console manufacturer because I could have dumped tons of money on games to help reimburse them).
I would easily pay $400 for a triple-core proccessor at 3.2GHz with super-fast HDTV graphics. Only needs more RAM (GDDR3 is customized for graphics; where's the normal kind?) and disk space (assuming the hard drive is SATA or IDE, that's a hundred bucks for a 160+GB drive). Still costs nothing.
The only problem here is that, as evidenced by the 3dO, a console that costs big bucks flops. Microsoft is pulling out of the gaming industry if this costs $400 when others are $300 or less. If it's not popular enough, I may never see GNU/Linux on it. What a shame.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
We've been waiting for years for Apple to push past 2 GHz and meanwhile there's been a 3.2 GHz core just sitting around?
What's the killer app for Windows? It's games. Heck, plenty of Mac users own a PC just to play games on. I upgrade my PCs (which are pretty much only used for games) more often than my Mac (which I use for work).
... so it will be easier to port games to Macs.
Next, folks who write games for XBox 360 will be learning to optimize code for PowerPC hardware, and it's not exactly obvious how easy it will be to develop for PC and XBox 360 at once
Next, whether XBox 360 or PS3 wins, the PowerPC market is going to expand hugely, making volumes bigger, performance better, and unit prices lower.
So Macs get cheaper and fast, people have less reason to buy or upgrade PCs, and game developers will be learning to code for the PowerPC.
I don't think that anyone is going to argue that the three 3.2GHz core PowerPC based CPU is one that can supply almost unlimited power in terms of today's and tomorrow's games. Add in the fact that there are 2 threads per core and that should allow for game developers to stay busy for quite some time. I have discussed parrellism and programming for game content with developers and the biggest problem from them is figuring out to use all the current CPU power that is present. The CPU is in the Xbox 360 is going to give the device longevity probably never before seen in a game console.
There really has not been much information shared on the Graphic Processing Unit and I would not expect more precise details till E3 next week. At that time, look to ATI to open up and discuss their role in the Xbox 360 and the technology they designed in a much more open fashion. Issues as to how the shader engine works, what exactly 3D logic on the embedded DRAM does to offload the GPU, and exactly how the memory bus works will all hopefully come to light.
If you compare the current ATI X850 XT PE to the Xbox 360 GPU, you will find that while the Xbox GPU is a bit slower in fill rate, it is a good bit faster in shader operations in seconds. No doubt this points to what is more important in Xbox 360 game design.
I think what is most important to remember when thinking about console hardware is the lack of diversity when compared to PC hardware. Game developers that program for the PC have to deal with literally thousands if not tens of thousands of hardware configurations. Now consider a game content team developing for Xbox 360. They know exactly what hardware they will have in place to execute their game flawlessly and are now able to program to fully exploit their base of hardware without worrying about compatibility issues. This allows the developer to add features to a console that simply would not be possible to implement across all PC platforms and configurations. Considering the multithreading aspect of the Xbox 360, I still have some questions as to how this is going to impact porting native Xbox 360 games to the PC. Time will tell.
As far as cooling goes, I know that the cooling I saw on a non-working motherboard did not look to be sufficient for cooling either the CPU or the GPU, but they did stress that their cooling would be sufficient and it would be as quiet if not quieter than the original Xbox. I think we are just going to have to wait and see what comes out in production.
The removable and upgradeable hard drive will be a great feature for those of you that found huge save game files to be a hindrance when trying to store your games or take your games with you. Of course downloadable data will also be stored on the hard drive as well. The removable hard drive can be seen on the very top of the Xbox 360 when it is in a vertical orientation and is in a type of cassette casing. Obviously this will be proprietary and I would expect to see all sorts of deep security in order to make sure that downloadable content does not get easily distributed.
Also a very cool feature of the controllers is that they can all power on the Xbox 360 at the touch of a button.
Software & Gaming
The Xbox 360 Gamer Guide and System Guide interfaces are svelte works of art. They are seamless and smooth and look exceptionally easy to master and utilize. This is of course is what Microsoft realizes is a holy grail in the console market if they want to dominate.
It has been voiced to us from more than one source that Xbox 360 gaming is going to be a leap across a generational gaming gap if not two. We will undoubtedly know more next week.
One "uber-cool" feature that was discussed by Jay Allard was the introduction of episodic games and game pilots. Think of these in terms of what we see now on TV. This could not only be a boon for the gamer but also work to keep production costs down on game titles that are rejected by the community. In this model, the Xbox Live gamer co
The problem is that emulation is not something that can easily exploit parallelism. So while we have three 3.2 GHz PowerPC chips in Xbox 360, each of which supports some form of hardware multithreading (each chip supposedly capable of supporting two simultaneous threads in hardware, according to what I've read elsewhere -- I'm guessing it's probably some sort of HyperThreading implementation, and not true dual-core capability), emulating the 800 MHz P3 of the original Xbox might only be able to leverage a single CPU in the Xbox 360.
To boil this down to a snappy quote: You can't take nine women and make them have a single baby in one month.
The problem is worse than this, though. The original Xbox used an nVidia video solution; the Xbox 360 uses an ATI solution. While it's true that game developers wrote to Microsoft's API when developing games for the Xbox, it's also true that many of these developers tweaked the shader programs in their 3D games to specifically optimize them for the nVidia hardware. Translating shader programs from one rendering architecture to another is non-trivial, and to do so on-the-fly is a daunting task. I suppose one of the PowerPC chips in the Xbox 360 could be tasked with translating shader programs, leaving another PowerPC to emulate the x86 instruction set and intelligently code-translate the original games. API calls should map directly, more or less, with some data massaging (e.g., big vs. little endian issues).
Maybe the ATI chip was designed with a compatibility mode to run original Xbox shader programs? Doubtful, as nVidia owns a lot of the intellectual property embedded in their chips and drivers.
Even if you ignore the fact that emulation usually can't exploit parallelism, you do have one final fact to deal with: Emulation works best when the chip doing the emulation is at least an order of magnitude faster than the chip that is being emulated. A single 3.2 GHz PowerPC processor is maybe a factor of 3 or 4 faster than an 800 MHz Pentium 3, not a factor of 10 or more. And multiprocessing doesn't give you an automatic multiplier -- two CPUs in parallel are not twice as fast as a single CPU, because of memory bandwidth limits and synchronization overhead.
Yeah, I watched the MTV special, but besides the fact that it had wireless controllers I didn't learn much. It's going to have Madden? Project Gotham Racing? A FPS? You don't say?
Most importantly, I didn't really hear any killer features or see any killer games. They were trying to make HD their killer feature, but it seems a little high end(of course, broadband was pretty high end a few years ago). Customization via micropayments? If it costs money, I don't think gamers will do it(and it still won't make the games any better).
What I really wanted to know was:
- is it backward compatible? My guess is it isn't considering they never mentioned it during the broadcast
- how much is it going to cost?
I own an Xbox and a PS2 right now, and I didn't see anything I'd want to give up those systems for. My gut says Microsoft might have a real problem on its hands if people decide the current generation is "good enough" and/or want to wait for Sony to respond with their feature set.
(insert witty/esoteric/dumb quote here)
I don't think these are dual-core processors. More likely is that they are similar to Intel's HyperThreaded P4 designs. The IGN specs published today seem to back this up; they talk about three CPU cores with two hardware threads per core. "Two hardware threads" is not the same as dual cores.
the parent comment needs to be modded up.
Because of the DVD? ... Oh, you mean the player I guess?!?
Time flies like an arrow;
Fruit flies like a bananna
And if they don't, you can bet the moddded XBMC360 will include USB2 PVR support.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
While liquid in a confined area cannot drop overall heat at much of a faster rate, it CAN help with the issue of hotspotting. With three main cores, portions of this chip are going to be hotter than others. Fluid moving about inside the main sink will help even the heat out. You don't even need an external pump, capilary action would work.
Sigs? We don't need no stinking sigs!
Probably the best review, and site with pictures would be at tomshardware, http://www.tomshardware.com/game/200505121/index.h tml
some of the features of the new xbox are amazing, as well as insights
as of the origins of the new x-box. Apparantly the old xbox was just
marketing to get this thing on the market. The most imressive thing
about the new xbox though isn't its cool design, but the fact that it
was designed entirely for the ease of the user. At its unveiling (at
which reporters from tomshardware were present) representitives
plugged in a RIO mp3 player and played streaming music, then also
plugged in a PSP, yes a competitors product and it worked over the
xbox. Also it runs series of custom Power PC processors. A total of
six separate threads are in the base unit, providing for 6 seperate
applications to be running at once (like enemy AI, friendly AI, music,
etc.) These are just some of its great features, and there are many
more. (btw if you haven't guessed yet I am a huge xbox fan)
Xb0z cant make bike shadows!1 2113.JPG?0.07669504960150098
http://img.engadget.com/common/images/21168928135
This strategy really helps Microsoft. Game developers like EA who make PC games and console games could more easily/cheaply port from one to another, giving them more incentive to support Microsoft versus, say, Sony. And since most PC games are made for Windows (evil monopoly, etc.), this is even more interesting a plan.
Parent is right. They said Fable was "live aware", but all it does is keeps the friends list active while you're playing. Otherwise it's completely single player.
Remember when the talk was all about the PS3 being the greatest thing ever because of its 1 teraflop (if it had enough cell chips, or something)? Microsoft is citing this to be the speed of the Xbox 360.
The PS3 is not, at this rate, going to "widely overpower" the Xbox 360. It'll likely still "widely outsell" it, as the less powerful PS2 did to the Xbox, but a big fanboy arguement is sort of dieing.
Not much of a GPU? it has 10MB of EDRAM, and it has 256GB/sec of bandwidth in to it! That's ALOT of bandwidth. No, it's fucking HUGE amount of bandwidth!
It's a huge amount of bandwidth, but it's just 10MB. It's a texture cache, that's all. Especially with them hoping to push its HD capabilities, 10MB is actually a fairly small cache. It'll need to dig into the main memory quite often.
The bandwidth of something to its cache isn't exactly all that impressive. Of course it has to be that high - the damn graphics core is running at 500 MHz.
And in addition, it has the regural GDDR3 at it's disposal as well.
Shared with the processors.
6 front ends. Plus 1 graphics card.
Yup. That's seven users splitting that pipe to the GDDR3. Which is not low latency memory. Which means a huge amount of bandwidth will be lost if all 6 threads are doing anything significant.
This isn't as impressive as it looks. It's about as impressive as any new console looks at its release.
Well, several months before its release, at least.