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Xbox 360 to have HD-DVD, Eventually
thebaboon writes "Bill Gates announced that the Xbox 360 will have an HD-DVD drive, just not for launch. From the article: "According
to the statements made by Bill Gates in Japan, Xbox 360, the new gaming console, will include HD-DVD drives. Considering that such a decision would postpone the launching date, Microsoft will equip the initial models with classic DVD drives, and only after the new HD-DVD are ready, the Xbox will incorporate them."
Wha! Slashdot did it again. http://news.softpedia.com/news/The-Microsoft-Toshi ba-HD-DVD-Alliance-Changes-Xbox-360-3902.shtml
This article was posted on 28th of June 2005, 16:45 GMT ... juNE juNE juNE.
On a 2nd note ... softpedia is wrong too.
Bill Gates said it (over 1 month ago):
``The initial shipments of Xbox 360 will be based on today's DVD format,'' Gates said. ``We are looking at whether future versions of Xbox will incorporate an additional capability of an HD DVD player or something else.''
It's not confirmed what-so-ever!
see:
http://news.teamxbox.com/xbox/8591/Xbox-360-Might- Incorporate-HD-DVD-Drive/
or
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000101&si d=aIoj6W6mNl_M&refer=japan
I've written this before, but there are a million ways to fill a HD-DVD. You could, for example, render out a version of all of your textures with time-of-day effects, and swap between them mid-game. You could add modifiers to all of your audio streams to get audio for various locations. You could pregen background or in-game assets, like applying a movie to a wall texture to make it appear that it has more depth than it does. You could pregenerate a thousand different havok crash animations, and randomly select between them. You can use a slow algorithm to populate a forest, make a few large-scale, adjustments, and save out the results as a sectionally loaded world the size of montana.
When the transition was made between CD and DVD games, it was said that a DVD would never be filled. Well, they're filled. And BTW, nobody would accept a Dual-Sided DVD. Do you know how annoying it would be to be told every few minutes to flip your disk over?
The question, really, is will anyone release games on HD-DVD instead of DVD? I'm betting so, as there will be blue-ray games getting ported from the PS3. And when that happens, whoever bought the DVD version of the Xbox will be screwed out of playing the lastest Final Fantasy, or Gran Turismo 5, or Fable 2.
As a HD-DVD player I could care less. But as a game console that is supposed to play HD-DVD games, this will anger a lot of suddenly ex-customers.
The ______ Agenda
No, HD-DVDs actually have more space (30GB) than regular DVDs (8.5GB).