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Xbox 360 Very Unstable
fmwap writes "There have been several postings over at Xbox-scene complaining of crashing Xbox's on new games, with default settings on single player. Crashes on Xbox Live and on startup have been reported too, and Project Gotham Racing 3 crashes before finishing the first lap. Screenshots and Video are available showing the crash."
These guys have a fairly big list going too.
8==8 Bones 8==8
Sony has had problems with the PS2... the first batch had a significant amount of CD/DVD drive failures; I had one, but sony eventually replaced it for free.
In fact, there has been a class action over the issue:
http://www.ps2settlement.com/
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
I waited up all night in front of a Best Buy to get mine. I also purchased Project Gotham Racing 3 and Kameo. With both games, I've spent most of my time playing PGR3. I have not had one crash, and the only trace I've seen of it is on Kotaku.
As a note, the system is very thermally unstalbe. I have mine vertical, and every vent is needed. If you were to block any of the airholes for any reason, or to trap the air exiting via the rear of the sytsem, the system potentially could overheat. The exhaust was very high temperature when I checked it after an hour or two of PGR3.
My rig (for reference) was running at 720P for part of it, 1080i for the other part (to compare whose transcoder was better, my TV or the XBOX). I'm on XBOX live, and upon boot, the system updated itself and restarted. This could have been a critical update that fixed the problem that people are talking about.
All and all, I'm quite impressed with the hardware. The emulation works better with some XBOX games than others. For instance, Forza motorsport runs sluggishly on the 360, yet Dead or Alive 3 runs flawlessly.
The live marketplace is impressive. They have HD downloads available, such as music videos and trailers. In addition, you can download new games such as bejewled from Microsoft. There are also themes that can be purchased via live, and as Penny Arcade themes are available, many people should be able to get their themes for sale on Live.
If I see crashes, I'll repost. However, so far, after 10+ hours of operation, most of which with PGR3, I have no crashes or errors to report.
turning it upside down?
/worked on the old PS
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
XviD AVI3 60/motherboard/3260052289.xvid.avi
http://69.93.36.237.nyud.net:8090/xbox-scene/xbox
My XB360 crashed multiple times playing Quake 4. Personally, I think its an over heating issue.
Since the machine is pretty loud I put it in my home-entairtainment cabinet, which it shares with a receiver, DVD player, and an old VHS. While the cabinet is relatively large, when I close the glass door and play the XB360 it gets very hot in there after playing (and I've been playing alot).
Quake 4 seems to really stress the XB360 out since there is an aggrevating amount of slow down in the game. Several times when Quake 4 got too hectic my XB360 froze up on me. After I felt how hot it is I took it out of the cabinet and so far (being since last night) I haven't had any problems with crahes so far.
The information at some of the links indicates it might be a problem with the power supply brick - one poster had three 360s (his and two friends')... one had a very different (color, size, prong size) power cord. That power cord, whichever xbox it was plugged into, wouldn't have a problem.
Sounds like its likely a combination of out-of-spec power conditioning and overheating. The two can reinforce each other AND combine to contribute instability... parts that are hot are less likely to be tolerant to poor power conditioning, and parts that are experiencing power fluctuations tend to produce more heat on the surge cycles.
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
Opening xbox not only voids your warranty, but also probably makes things worse. The cooling has special ducts directing the airflow, and if you pluck those out, it'll overheat even easier.
We're taking components and cramming them in spaces with insufficient free air delivery and we're surprised when they crash and burn.
I've lost many hard drives and three computers (one Linux, one Mac and one Windows,) to "heat prostration". Sometimes the cases are not really capable of handling everything we can shove in there.
I hate the monolith in Redmond as much as the next guy but... heat is the enemy here.
I bet NOBODY who lives in a frozen food section at Safeway is reporting a crash.
>>First off, my other consumer electronic devices (including my 600W receiver) have absolutely no problems with over-heating. As do, I'm assuming, most electronic devices made today.
>>Secondly, as mentioned in my first post the cabinet is relatively large, and my VHS and DVD are obviously turned off when playing my XB360; there is ample space and ventilation in the cabinet, I put it on the shelf where my old Xbox used to sit.
>>Thirdly, MS should obviously design their "home entertainment" device to be put in, well, a "home-enteirtainment" cabinet. Its unresonable to expect every person to use their XB360 in "frozen food section at Safeway" .
It should also be mentioned that even outside the cabinet it's incredible hot. When I eject the DVD to the machine I can feel the heat of radiating from it, and the game is suprising hot to the touch. I've never had this problem with my original Xbox (that sat in the same cabinet), which I also bought on lauch day, and has been incredibly reliable since the day I got it. Personally, I think MS caved into the critism of the size of the original Xbox and stuffed the hardware into too small a place relative to heat disapation.
This is a myth.
This article has responses from a few game devs stating that their launch titles are multi-threaded and a M$ threading person said: "Six months ago, we had only looked at a handful of games. Most of those games were single-threaded. Today, we've evaluated most launch titles and the majority are using multiple threads."
Everybody knows that Jesus 'rode into town' on a Harley Davidson. Stop trying to spread your revisionist theories on history.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
Maybe that's because you spelled 'pedophile' wrong?
Anyway, try this search.
IBM's PPC970 is known to produce vast quantities of heat, particularly with three cores. And ATI's modern GPUs are hot potatoes as well - particularly when you consider that the ATI GPU in the XBOX is also serving as the northbridge.
By all accounts, the system produces ~180W of heat while playing games. That's a lot to handle with only two 60mm fans.
Microsoft is not alone with this problem - the PS3 has an NVIDIA GeForce 7800GTX derivitive that is clocked very high; it will produce at least 80W, and Cell will likely produce ~80W. More problematic for Sony is the fact that the current PS3 case has very few vent holes.
Make no mistake - heat is an issue that will be problematic for all next generation consoles. The days of 25W desktop CPUs are over, as are the days of 30W performance GPUs.
I'm just surprised that no one was smart enough to put a bloody Sempron in one of these consoles...
A defect caused by a poor design, and only in the early models. Sounds familiar! A moving part was made of plastic and it wore a groove down in it over time. This messed up the lens alignment as it wasn't hitting the disk at 90 degrees. Turning it upsidedown meant that that gravity did the same job as the plastic sled. You could fix it by filling the groove with glue or some other filler to level it off.
My main point: How many of the people with problems have the machine sitting on a carpet? I see this at friends places all the time. Most devices have vent holes on the bottom and passive ventilation is essential from bottom to top. If you place it on a carpet, you cover half of the vents and remove most of the airflow. If the xbox 360 is already a hot potato, this could even lead to a fire hazard. However, it should not be crashing. If it's overheating, the BIOS should notice and shutdown long before you start to get random glitches.
If you don't have a desk to put it on, put a hard-back book between it and the floor.
Yep. I've done this type of work and it's possible for it to not be a big deal -- provided that the developers stick to a robust set of patterns and protocols for interacting with the DSP compute hardware. For sanity's sake, all of the sync code should be wrapped up into frameworks so that various sub-teams never end up wandering off and generating buggy one-off low-level synchronization code. Devs coding for the specialized hardware (DSP/Cell) write to interfaces that are clean and purely single-threaded. Clients on the main hardware threads never need to screw around with low-level sync code. The framework itself can be instrumented to assist in finding and debugging any odd concurrency issues that come up, but for the most part a well-designed framework allieviates a lot of annoying concurrency bugs in the first place. When bugs are found they get quashed once and for-all in the framework, instead of being distributed willy-nilly (and sometimes in non-obvious ways) around the system.
To folks looking for further reading, I suggest starting with Pattern Oriented Software Architecture, Vol 2: Patterns for Concurrent and Networked Objects by Douglas Schmidt, et. al. A number of these patterns are also available as papers from Schmidt's website -- see Google. I also recommend checking out the Future(s) pattern, not covered in POSA2. The idea is to have an asynchronous operation return a Future object that represents the result of the async computation. When the result in needed, the object either returns it (if the async computation is done) or blocks (if the async computation isn't done). This allows both batching of multiple parallel async activities, as well as result/input dependency management. A somewhat simple example:The nice thing is that the work requests (here, loading or transforming data) can (potentially) all run in parallel. Note that LoadTexture, LoadModel, and Transform all return instantly -- we'll only wait for a result when it's called for, and we only wait if the result is not already available.
The magic bullet to project management and time estimation is simple. As someone who has worked as a manager of others, as a programmer, and in the construction business, I will sit here and tell you that projects can be estimated with tremendous accuracy. The secret is two fold: This first part is that the person doing the estimate has to be qualified and capable of doing the work him/her self. Second: The project needs to have already completed the first stages of design. While this seems like a lot just to get a project estimate, it is critical.
This is the reason that so many companies fail to estimate correctly. Either they have incompetent (read as nontechnical) people estimating the amount of time something will take, or else they are trying to estimate without having layed out the course of the overall design. People who know how to do this kind of estimation are in extreme demand, and unfortuately are extremely rare for the simple reason that most managers aren't qualified to do the work of those they manage. Those that are, have a tendency to start their own companies...
-=Geoskd
www.geoskd.com
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted