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What To Do With a Free Xbox 360 Pro?
OzPeter writes "Last week I won an Xbox 360 Pro. However, I am not a gamer, and after looking at the current MS offerings, I am not tempted to become one. But I am in the market for a Media Center PC that I can use for streaming TV shows off the 'net as well as general web browsing and displaying video through the HDMI port. With that in mind, I again looked at MS and saw they seemed to have positioned the Xbox as an adjunct to a separate Windows Media Center PC and not as a stand alone unit (which is not what I want). So, once again, I did some more research into the Xbox homebrew scene and discovered things like Xbox Linux. But after reading that site, it is apparent that MS is trying to beat down the homebrewers, and I am left wondering how much hassle it would be to go down that path. So my question is: how should I re-purpose my Xbox? Is it worthwhile doing the Homebrew/Linux option (and can anyone share any experiences)? Are there other ways of re-purposing the device that I haven't considered? Or should I just keep it boxed up as a Christmas present for a favorite nephew?"
Its worth less to you than somebody who would use it for gaming.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
XBMC was originally made for hacked classic Xboxes. It doesn't run on the Xbox 360. While it was great at the time, the old Xbox didn't support HD output which limits it's use these days.
XBMC has however been ported to run on Windows, Linux and Macintosh operating systems and does support HD output on these systems. This makes for a pretty good home theater PC setup and is more flexible than the built in stuff on Xbox 360.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Nope, any prize must be claimed. See Publication 525, page 34. The example given is a $50 prize.
Report on form 1040, line 21.
All three major consoles charge to develop.
The Nintendo Wii development kit is $1,700.
The Sony PS3 development kit is $2,000 (non-Linux)
The XBox 360 development kit....$100
Depending on the price that the game ends up costing ($5, $3, or $1), given the millions of gamers who are on the marketplace, an indie game studio could somewhat easily recoup that year's losses($100) from having Microsoft host their game by selling anywhere between 20 and 100 copies of their game. If the game is good, they should have little problem. If it stinks, they may have more problems. If no one is buying the game, they will eventually take it off, freeing up the marketplace for others to try selling their games, which may or may not be good.
You're flatly wrong.
The Xbox 360 development kit is absolutely not $100. You can get a one-year membership to the XNA Creators Club, which allows you to submit games to the Xbox Indie Games service, for $99 USD. The actual development kit associated with this service is free, but you need to pay a $99 fee to actually use the publication channels for a year.
This is NOT a commercial development kit.
Moreover, as it relates to "commercial potential", Xbox Indie Games have been repeatedly grumbled about by prominent authors. The absolute upper cap for the single highest profile Indie Game is 10,000 unit sales. Developers in the price categories that even have a shot at that order of magnitude of sales are taking anywhere from 70 cents to 2.10 for their games. For commercial game production, Xbox Indie Games will NOT be profitable.
Actual commercial Xbox 360 development kits, used to develop Xbox Live Arcade games and Xbox 360 games, cost substantially more.
All of this information is available in a ten second Google tour of the subject. Why was parent modded +5?