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!"
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.
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
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?
Sleek, curvaceous, white exterior with no messy wires?
They should have called it "iBox".
Unfortunately, I am not Wil Wheaton
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.
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'
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
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. ;)
Microsoft can garuntee that it will buy x amount of these processors for this thing over the course of its life. Apple can garuntee that it can buy y amount of these processors and constantly stop buying as much as they move up to higher and higher specs as time passes. Now the kicker, Microsoft's x is bigger than Apple's y. Much bigger.
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WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
I would go out on a limb and suggest these PowerPC cores are very different from -- and very stripped-down compared to -- the PowerPC 970 series used in the Mac G5s. They probably closely resemble the general purpose core within the Cell, and are probably in-order execution only. Otherwise the CPU would be too big to make it economical to manufacture: for instance, the dual core AMD64 chips recently announced have >200 million transistors and the cheapest ones are likely to cost about as much each as the launch price of the Xbox360 console, imagine the cost of a chip with three of those cores on it.
:)
The Xbox360 CPU will probably be very fast performing well-defined number cruching tasks with little branching and logic (e.g. physics processing), but bad at game logic (e.g. AI), compared to current general purpose PPC or AMD64 hardware.
I expect the Xbox360 will look very nice as a gaming platform to begin with, but will be quickly outstripped by next generation gaming PCs with dual/multi core CPUs (the same game engines that take advantage of the multi core Xbox360 chip will take advantage of these) and dedicated physics processing units. Which, given the extra cost of the PC platform, is exactly as it should be.
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?
That would still be a lot of heat to dissipate from such a small box if the Xbox360's CPU really was equivalent to three G5s as seen in the high end Power Macs. Remember, liquid cooling isn't a "magic wand", connecting a radiator with an 80mm fan (say) to a liquid cooling circuit with the CPU on doesn't give you any benefit if you can attach the same size radiator directly to the CPU, the benefit comes from taking the heat away from the CPU and dissipating it through a much bigger radiator elsewhere (of which there is no sign on the Xbox360 enclosure).
No, these are stripped-down CPU cores.
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).
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
The really funny part is that the XBox PowerPC buy goes to further the research and manufacturing of the core chip technology driving Apple Hardware.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/13/technology/13xbo x.html
Sounds crazy to me, but there it is...