Slashdot Mirror
The Scoop on the Xbox 360's Embedded OS?
An anonymous reader writes "When the Xbox 360 was launched two weeks ago amid much brouhaha over its custom-designed IBM PowerPC-based CPU with 3 symmetrical cores running at 3.2GHz each, WindowsForDevices.com wondered aloud, 'What OS runs inside the Xbox 360?' Now, the website thinks it has found the answer to its question. No, it's not Linux or BSD, nor a derivative of Longhorn or Windows CE."
It's Windows 2000. What a shock, who would've guessed, I'm so exci..... ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Will this compromise hackability?
DOS
What's next? Next thing you know Apple will start using Intel chips instead. Strange days. :)
Apple (Mac OS X) runs on PowerPC chips from IBM. But now they are planning to Intel platform. PC (windows) runs on Intel platform, but XBox 360 uses PowerPC. My question is simple. WHY???
fuvoo: watch something
How can they run an XBox on Windows 3.11?? I just don't get it... Will we be required to add TCP/IP on our own if we wish to play over the network?
I can go buy it in stores? I think you mean debuted.
All that fuss to say it's a simple derivative of NT, in its second generation of console-ness.
That was certainly a surprise. Oh wait, no it wasn't.
They are making the PowerPC for the Xbox and the Cell for the new Playstation. It seems like they will be the real winner in the next round of game wars.
Madre de Dios! Es El Pollo Diablo! -- Captain Blondebeard
The OS any machine runs is become irrelevant. I want a base OS that can run virtual machines and whatever runs on top as a Virtual OS doesn't really really matter. Similar to how Mac and OSX runs but without any legacy core that can interfere. With MS, they have the Virtual Machine on top of Windows yet if they made the Virtual Machine the OS and the run windows or whatever that would be the best of both worlds. Don't like Windows great it will run Linux, Symbian, Palm whatever and who cares lets just get the Virtual Machine running. Hm Sounds like Sun needs to extend Java to run Virtual Machines rather than running on an OS and that could complete a Virtual Machine.
I think it's interesting because, if W2K is good enough for the 360, the latest and greatest console in the world, it's still good enough for everyone else.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
My guess is faeries. They captured a whole mess of them and have chained them to tiny little switchboards in the machine. I was going to say leprachauns, but the extra gold they carry around would make the machines too heavy.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
I was hoping it'd be something incredible and barely believable, like OS X or BeOS or Plan 9. But no, it's just a derivative of the original XBox OS. Weak. All that suspense for almost nothing. This story is worse than the ending of Citizen Kane, when "Rosebud" turned out to be his sled.
Another one bites the dust
Seeing how the DevKits were G5 boxes, wouldn't it be a good idea to look at the OS they were running?
From a hackability POV, it's the BIOS that really matters. The original xbox had the BIOS hidden in the VGA chip (or was it the Southbridge? Can't remember) but once Bunnie Huang scoped the buses everything was lost. I think we can expect to see some fairly high grade encryption at work in both the POST and code signing arenas.
The Slashdot Paradox: "100% Overrated"
As anyone with a passion for other and more esoteric platforms will (or should) know.
Windows NT existed on a number of different architectures other than Intel x86, Including MIPS, Alpha, and PowerPC, in versions 3.5 3.51 and 4.0.
The final point to make is that when the work began on Windows 2000, the entire OS was done. The full NT5 beta available from the MSDN when it was released. Did indeed include a PowerPC version as well as the others. ( at least one beta did as far as i can confirm from my discourses with other "wisened veterans" (no mater what their age) of the MS oses. )
The effort involved in MS porting the NT 5 kernel and other systems to the Xbox 360 would have been totaly comparable to the effort needed to strip and optimise the nt 5 core for the Xbox. Which is in fact a very impressive degree of refinement over the original os when you examine the finer details.
( My other boxes are FreeBSD and Solaris so dont dare call me a MS fan, XP is for my games only case wine isnt good enough and i pray it catches up sooner. )
XML - A clever joke would be here if
That's right, the OS is actually MS's old friend OS/2 WARP.
Didn't MS and billg say that stripping down the OS like this was impossible due to integration issues in a court of law? Did someone mislead the court? Or am I mistaken?
Anyway, this is just one more project branch to maintain. They now have Win2K, WinXP Home Edition, WinXP Pro, Win2003 server, WinCE and now another version for the XBox. For the server editions they need to support standard, enterprise and data center versions. And I think there is a version for the tablet PC, or is it just WinCE? No wonder MS wants cheaper code monkeys, keeping all the versions maintained and in synch has got to be a labor intensive nightmare.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
First off, it was pretty obvious that MS were going to use existing code on the original XBOX, if only because it was to all intents and puropses a PC. So at the time MS had the choice between using a Win 9X codebase, a CE codebase or NT/2000 codebase.
.NET or Avalon.
Windows 9X compatibility wasn't a requirement so could be ignored, CE was optimised for lower power CPUs and had been a less than a stellar success in the Dreamcast, whilst the NT/2000 codebase was optimised for higher end processors x86/PPC/MIPS/Alpha. It would seem that the choice was obvious. I dare say that MS stripped it down so that it's just the kernel of 2000 with thin wrappers of DirectX on top of the drivers together with a the minimum requirements of Win32 to keep DirectX and OpenGL running.
If we jump ahead to now, it seems obvious that MS would carry on using the same platform - just this time using the PPC branch of 2000, build new drivers and probably add more Win32 stuff to support the XNA architecture. If anything it seems unthinkable that they would use anything but an NT kernel.
I would be more interested to know if Win360 (I know this is Slashdot and Microsoft is only interesting when it's monopolising the cure for cancer etc - but just allow me to wonder a moment!) supports
$2B OR NOT $2B = $FF
> Who, except for /. crowd, expects Microsoft adopts Linux for one of their strategic pieces?
> Windows has the HAL that can absorb hardware differences, so there's no room for Linux and the
> like.
When the Mac came out in '84, M$ told the DOS heads that using their keyboard macros was so much faster than using a mouse that using the mouse and gui will never make it into mainstream business. They published statistics to prove it. Then Windows came out, and M$ told them how great the mouse and gui was, and they switched over in droves, their past biases completely removed from their memory banks.
When the web started taking off in the early '90s, M$ told the faithful that the web was a waste of time. It was run by Universities and will never be applicable to the modern business world. Hell, you had to jump through hoops to even get windows running TCP/IP back then. Then M$ came out with IE, and told everyone that it is the business app of the future. All of the windows heads developed mass amnesia, and told us all how M$ runs the internet.
History says that if M$ changed their stance and started pushing Linux, embrased and extended into proprietary hell, of course, then all the current Linux haters will tell you how great M$ Linux is, and forget they ever bashed it.
M$s main power is brainwashing. They coddle the non-free-thinking masses and give them a sense of community in their M$ness. They will blindly follow whatever Redmond tells them, as long as they have Linux and Apple or whoever to despise. Hated is the easiest way to bind any community.
jfs
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
Just because MS doesn't have a monopoly in every single market (yet), doesn't mean they don't have a monopoly. The problem with the xbox is that they are using the billions of dollars they made from their OS monopoly to push their way into other markets.
I'm not sure about that. The introduction of an XBox Live Silver tier (read: free) service is so that they can get hoards of gamers gaming online.
Modding your X-Box going forward isn't going to be much of an issue for Microsoft. You can't use X-Box Live with a modded XBox and Microsoft wants to ensure that everyone is online. So all their games with be Live enabled. Microsoft is going to use Live to distribute levels and authenticate games, even if you're not playing online at the time. Modding your XBox to pirate games will make it useless. Media-Center mods? Well, Microsoft already supports that for XB1. To that end, there's no need to dissuade would-be modders. Ancillary mods, like upgrades to video cards, etc.. will most likely be supported by Microsoft, and they'll benefit from the secondary market that arises because of it. There's just no need for obfuscation as far as an OS is concerned.
By the time XBox 720 debuts, we won't be buying discs anymore. We'll be downloading our games onto our 2TB hard drives. Oh, the Xbox 720 will have nine cores instead of the three it has now, and the extra cores will run the thin clients and tablets on the local network. It will be backwards compatible with all previous XBox games, but since there likely won't be a media drive, you'll need the "Classic" subscription (several tiers, of course) in order to play them. Oh yeah, and they would have nicely sidestepped the death of the PC in the first world.
If you think they're evil now... *shrugs*
I'm gonna buy a Nintendo Revolution.
un burrito me trampeó.
No, my post said that using the money from their monopoly in the OS market to sell a product at a loss in another market is the problem. Read it, that really is what it says, and everyone who can read english can see this, including you.
Being too fucking dense to read what you are replying to is bad enough, but being so arrogant as to pretend you are being ignored because you aren't participating in group think is beyond rediculous. Wake up, nobody wants to try to converse with someone who will only ignore what they say and continue arguing with straw men and red herrings.
You decided based on your own twisted view of the world that I am some anti-MS crusader. This is obvious from you complaining about "people like me" using a dollar sign in MS, despite me not doing that, and telling me to complain about Sony, when Sony isn't doing what MS is.
And just so you know, I hate Sony. They have a hidden control panel in their monitors (at least some models) that you can only access using a special cable and special software, which of course only sony authorized repair centers can get. So if there is a power surge and your monitors contrast gets set WAY too high (above what you can even set with the user control panel) then you have to pay $250 for some overpaid fuckstick to plug in a cable and press "reset to factory settings" on this gay software. While I am not a huge fan of MS, because of this monitor scam I outright despise Sony.
But that doesn't change the fact that MS is a convicted monopolist using money from a monopoly that has held PC technology back for years to push their way into a new market with a product that loses money. Why would you expect everyone to be complaining about Sony when they aren't doing this, and MS is?