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!"
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?
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.
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.
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
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'
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...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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 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. ;)
In what way is the PS3 inovative? I haven't heard anything but cell processor this, cell processor that... let me guess, it can finally render toy-story quality graphics right?
I don't know what they've done technically. But the biggest issue is the increased emphasis on Xbox Live. If modding your Xbox means you can't use live it's not going to be a very attractive prospect to most gamers.
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).
... 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
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?
Windows NT originally had a kernel that ran on PPC, so this really isn't a huge jump for them.
.Net CLR.
PPC can switch big/little endian, and since the low-level bootstrapping and HAL code already existed, it probably wasn't a huge deal to build XNA (this is their new XBox/Win gaming dev platform) compilers for x86, PPC, x64, and maybe even
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.