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Microsoft Docs Indicate Future Xbox 360 Support For USB Storage
Internal Microsoft documents obtained by Joystiq indicate that its Xbox 360 console will gain support for USB storage devices some time this Spring.
"According to the document, the USB mass storage device must be at least 1GB and the system will do a compatibility check. 'The system partition occupies 512 MB of space, and by default the consumer partition occupies the remainder of the device capacity, or 16 GB, whichever is smaller.' Upon inserting a blank USB storage device, 'consumers are offered two choices: "Configure now" or "Customize."' The 'Configure now' option will use 'the entire device capacity, up to the maximum of 512 MB plus 16 GB,' meaning, regardless of the overall size of the device you're using, the Xbox will only enable 16 GB of usable, non-system storage. The 'Customize' option will allow you to 'preserve some pre-existing, non-console data on the device' such as music."
There have also been rumors of a new, smaller form factor for the 360, and hacker Ben Heck has given his thoughts on some leaked motherboard pictures.
I'm surprised I haven't seen PS3 fanboys laughing about this before.. it's even worse than not being able to watch DVDs on your Wii's DVD drive..
which is totally what she said
They're still developing new Xbox 360 versions? Usually after so many years, there appear new consoles. But this time it seems none of the big 3 console makers has any plans for this.
Another indication that processing speeds aren't really increasing anymore these days?
Does this means i can use my simple USB stick instead of a memory card to keep my savegames on? (i have two xboxes, so i need portability)
Either MS just killed their memorycard business, or this usb stuff is rather useless..
Also, YAY now you can just get the cheapest arcade xbox you can find, and a $10 usb stick, and have massive fun
People, what a bunch of bastards
The PS3 sucks just as bad as the Xbox...It just lasts slightly longer (hardware wise). And I can't play most DVD's on my PS3. Don't know why they just never worked right, BluRay works fine though.
i wanted to come here and troll but this place is so boring that i can't even find anything i feel like trolling about. hopefully they just take slashdot down soon. you dimwits would die with nothing to do sitting in your mother's basement.
FAGGOTS!!!!!!!!!onehundredelevenoneone!!!
So you can connect an external storage unit, but it'll only use 16GB of it? That's a bit less then the size of the smallest 360 hard drive, which they don't even sell anymore.
I guess they don't want to cannibalize their outrageously priced upgrade drive business.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
The 'Configure now' option will use 'the entire device capacity, up to the maximum of 512 MB plus 16 GB,'
So who sells 16.5 GB USB sticks?
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
Why cant i quit microsoft...?
it's even worse than not being able to watch DVDs on your Wii's DVD drive..
wiibrew
Watch Wii Menu 4.3 break your homebrew.
...when I can hook up a mouse and keyboard and actually be able to control games with them. My own personal hell is to have to play CODMW2 with a damn joystick.
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In TFA, they asked Heck whether the 16GB limit is a technological limitation of file systems or a deliberate choice. It seems pretty obvious to me that it's artificial and meant to protect their disk drive market. Considering that USB devices will, unlike now, be trusted storage where one can write DLC, XBLA games and even full game installs and GOD, there's no reason why one would use an externally powered USB drive instead of a small pendrive. That would mean 100$ for a 1TB drive, going in the drive maker's pockets, instead of 100$ for a 120GB drive, going in MS's pockets.
When I first read about this, I thought that I'd finally be able to use my NTFS formatted FreeAgent external drive on my 360. Too bad this isn't the case. It's ironic that the 360 doesn't seem to be able to use external drives formatted using the same file system being used in current Windows operating systems.
Freedom is drinking a beer in the park when you're supposed to be at work.
My xbox 360 has a 250GB external USB drive attached to it that is used to store copies of home movies.
Although the article isn't as clear as it could be, this is really about adding support for Xbox downloadable content to use USB storage.
Oh, and for a laugh - currently the Xbox can't read NTFS format drives. FAT isn't suitable. So... use a mac, format as HFS+, and the xbox will happily use them.
Any online game that allows a savegame hack to affect online play violates the "do not trust the client... EVER." mantra.
In all but MMO games, one of the clients also acts as the server. Whom should the players trust?
Better yet, why buy a cheap DVD player? It's redundant.
Redundancy has its advantages. When you wear out the drive in a $30 DVD player, you're out $30. When you wear out the drive in an unhacked Wii console, you're out $75 for a drive replacement. But when you wear out the drive in a $200 hacked Wii, on the other hand, you're out $200 plus your savegames. HackMii.com appears to be down right now (returning only "502 Bad Gateway"), but it ran a story sometime last year about Nintendo repairing a console with a dead DVD drive after warranty expiration and charging the owner for a whole new Wii because it was found to have been modded.
It almost seems like you are cheerleading their efforts to break someone's setup.
Once I was looking to develop Wii homebrew games myself. But then I saw two drawbacks.
First, I ran into the so-called "homebrew complexity wall", where a lone developer with a day job will lack the time to provide both high-quality code and high-quality art. In order to replace notoriously bad programmer art, I'd have to charge for my game in order to afford to pay an artist. Reactions to the sale of copies of BootMii-related tools show that the Wii homebrew community likes to keep it strictly non-commercial. Or can you recommend a way to make programmer art better without sticking to making Tetris clones over and over?
Second, I worry that working on homebrew for current consoles, as opposed to PC games, will jeopardize my chances of being hired by an established video game studio once I move out of the backwoods town of 200,000 people where I currently live.
so couldnt you just make 16gb partitions and have it use multiple ones?
When MS dropped the hammer on Datel's large, 3rd party memory cards, they said they had to do it since those devices allowed cheating. That is, they were read/writable from non-Xboxes since they used SD cards for storage and thus you could easily mod saves.
How does MS square that with this action? This device is read/writeable from non-Xboxes since it's regular USB, isn't it?
I personally never believed that MS' actions were for any reason other than to protect their revenue stream. But can't really go back on their story now, can they? Can Datel sue over something like this if they do?
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Exactly. But in a pleasant episode of karmic justice, the 360 had a very early firmware hack and is now torn apart with the JTAG hack, while the PS3 is - at least practically - still unhackable.
The 360 needs two cable card readers and the ability to plug in HUGE USB storage devices (1tb HHDs for example). Two cable card readers in the thing and people would start to wonder why they would by a stand alone DVR at all. The 360 has always been just one or two upgrades away from being the perfect home entertainment center. I think the only thing left is cablecard readers and USG mass storage.
DVD upscaling also works, on the 360, DVDs look horrendous, with plenty of aliasing and interlacing artifacts.
Twinstiq, game news
They are going through the effort to provide support for external storage drives but they are going to limit the available space to 16(.5) gigs? Are you fuckin' kidding me? What's the point? You can just do a better upgrade yourself!
Background:
There's a drive on the box already. You can't expand or upgrade it (officially) without going out and buying another "XBox" drive. Those "XBox" drives are the exact same fuckin' hard drives we all have in our laptops. The only thing that makes that drive enclosure special is that microsoft decided to create an adapter that plugs in the the SATA, that's right SATA, data port (I told you - exactly the same as laptop drives) and SATA power port on the back of the drive but the plug on the other end that plugs in to the motherboard in the XBox simply has those same wires in a different physical configuration. There are a guides on the web that tell you which drive to buy (just like a laptop hard drive upgrade) that the XBox will read. All you have to do is plug that new, bigger hard drive in to your computer, do some fancy formatting, put it back in the case it came in and plug it in to your XBox. Viola! New bigger hard drive for 1/3 the price with more space than you could've bought in SEVERLY overpriced\hyped "XBox" drives.
And the case:
Honestly?!?!?!?!? You know what causes the Red Ring O' Death? Overheating. That's right, if you use your XBox too much at a time, the entire inside of the case heats up to the point where the motherboard inside warps and chip(s) connections start breaking off. (Incidently, that's why the wrapping-your-xbox-in-a-towel trick works - if you heat the case up a lot, the broken metal that usually makes the chip connections expands and makes contact thus completing the circuit(s) again and the reason it only works a couple times is because all that warping takes a further toll on those connections, making the gap bigger and impossible to cover after a while) AND THEY'RE GONNA MAKE THE CASE SMALLER!!!! I'm sorry, Microsoft has really done some cool hardware stuff but this, is retarded. They had better be finding a way to cool the case. MICROSOFT: TRY MORE FUCKING FANS!!!! How hard is that. Tell me. Have you ever built a custom, gaming PC case that had less than 3 fans in it? The X360 has two! And they're tiny. And you hardly ever hear them. How much air could two tiny fans possibly move in a case that has hardly any air intake vents. This is why I took mine completely apart, down to the light/rrod-ring daughter board, and mounted it up in a custom PC case. I then mounted up the two fans that came with the XBox to that case (that has completely ventilated/mesh front and rear panels) as well as four 120mm case fans. I'll be damned if I have to buy another X360 because some idiot somewhere decided to engineer their product to self destruct.
Posted anonymously 'cause I don't want my XLive account disabled. (-=
_,|,, X360 Hardware Dev Team
Microsoft has managed a profit on the 360 by screwing consumers over at every corner. They have the only paid net service which has no browser so you're tied into what they want you to see. You have to buy wifi seperately at an insane cost. Same with upgrading your hard drive. You can only use their special hard drive which funnily enough costs way more than it should.
Despite their year lead and their supposed superior list of games the PS3 has zoomed up on their ass and has a slim chance of over taking the 360 by the end of the year though not likely.
They claimed the Wii's success didn't matter as it was a totally different market and here MS, like Sony, is dripping off Nintendo's idea of going after casuals with motion control because they got thrashed by Nintendo.
Now they're close to getting beat by Sony because no one outside of the US really cares for the 360 and the PS3 has superior worldwide power so MS is forced to be a little more open, like their competition, to try and maintain their lead.
MS fans should hope Sony over takes the 360 soon. It's about the only way MS will stop screwing their customers.
It's one less thing to have plugged into the wall.
Then why not just do your gaming, web surfing, and movie watching on a PC?
It's called cutting your loses. You can't win the war using proprietary data storage, so save the cost to the consumer! Almost everyone has spare USB flash drives around. Hell, use those 6 1GB drives you threw into a box and forgot about years ago.
the PS3 remains "unhackable" not because of Karmic justice or amazing copy protection but because of 3 simple facts:
-the Xbox360 was released a year before the ps3, so it had 1 more year to be hacked and 1 more year to make its game library more appealing (increasing interest in hacking it)
-the PS3 had a pretty uninteresting game library up until about a year ago, the install base was also pretty low compared to the other consoles until recently
-the Blu-Ray is a pretty good anti-piracy tool, pirating a ps3 game means a huge download and needing an expensive BR burner with very expensive BR blank discs. Pirating a ps3 game costs... what... maybe 40~60 times more than pirating a xbox360 game ?
at least the last 2 facts mean lower demand which leads to lower supply, as the cost of pirating ps3 games gets lower demand will rise and hacks will appear