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New Xbox 360 Dev Kits Shipped Out

Posted by Zonk on from the develop-faster dept.

GamesIndustry.biz is reporting that Microsoft has sent out new versions of the beta development kit for the Xbox 360, replacing the Apple platforms used up to this point. From the article: "Prior to E3, developers reported that a very small number of these more advanced kits had been manufactured, but it's only in recent weeks that they have begun shipping to Microsoft's development partners on a wide scale."

4 of 48 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I do this for a living by ZephyrXero · · Score: 4, Informative

    You may test, but apparently you've never developed for a console. Sending alpha and beta development kits is pretty standard and people have been doing it for years without much problem.

    Now, some developers may not fully take advantage of the final hardware because of the lack of time spent with it before launch, but it's pretty common for the first gen titles to suck anyway :P

    --
    "A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
  2. I wonder? by Dewrf · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Does anyone know what happens to the old dev kits from the old consoles?

    I mean the snes and megadrive kits and others from time past.

    I mean I know you needed certin hardware to run your games on when you made them but can they not be emulated?

    Any information on what happens to the old kits would be appreciated.

    -Jason

    1. Re:I wonder? by Zangief · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I do not know, but since a couple of old dev kits have surfaced on ebay, I guess not all of them are returned to Nintendo/Sony/Sega/Whatever.

  3. PS: I should actually make a point. by Corngood · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Sort of off topic...

    I haven't yet worked on any next-gen titles, but I have experience on current-gen Xbox, PS2, and PC games. Our game logic has a lot of branchy code, really branchy, spaghetti code, with lots of indirect branches, etc. This code represents the majority of the actual volume of our source, but in practice only takes something like 3-10% of CPU time. Everything else in the game is suited to parallelisation.

    So we have this 10/90 split (at worst) of time spent excecuting the wacky code vs. the pure number crunching. Why on earth would I want a processor that is better at doing the 10, when I could have one that is better at the rest?