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Firmware Troubles For Old Xbox 360s, Possibly PS3s As Well
Several readers have tipped news of firmware updates causing problems for both Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3. The Xbox issue was caused by a recent update thought to be preparing the platform for a new disc format that gives developers another 1GB or so of space to work with. As it turns out, the real purpose seems to be piracy countermeasures. Microsoft acknowledged the issue and promised that affected users would receive a new 360S console and a free year of Xbox Live to compensate. The PS3 problem was highlighted by reports of overheating consoles while playing L.A. Noire on the recently-released 3.61 firmware. Rockstar Games initially confirmed that the firmware was causing the overheating, but later backtracked. They issued a joint statement with Sony saying that neither the game nor the firmware was the culprit, leaving users wondering what else it could be.
http://majornelson.com/2011/05/18/clearing-up-some-confusion/ The new update is not what is causing the problem it was a previous update. It also explains this at the bottom of the gamasutra article
Rockstar Games initially confirmed that the firmware was causing the overheating, but later backtracked. They issued a joint statement with Sony
So, Sony talked to them nicely, convinced them with irrefutable logic that neither the game nor the firmware was the problem, and they skipped happily, hand-in-hand to the podium to announce it jointly. Sony would never be so evil as to threaten Rockstar Games with new firmware that prevents all Rockstar Games' games from working at all.
...but this is how you do customer service.
Microsoft acknowledged the issue and promised that affected users would receive a new 360S console and a free year of Xbox Live to compensate.
Acknowledge the problem, fix it (or replace it in this case with a superior model), and give compensation.
No nonsense customer service, and it gives gives them good PR.
Compare that to Sony...
There are millions of game consoles out there - millions - and yet there aren't very many revisions of hardware per model. It's not hard for the manufacturers to test how these required updates are going to affect their hardware. But here we are again, a story about revisions of two major consoles having serious issues with a firmware update.
These required updates are ridiculous. We wouldn't put up with having to take our cars back to the dealer to have required maintenance done that would take away some feature or option we paid for, let alone having the maintenance leave the car in a troubled or non-working state.
There needs to be some sort of consumer protection to prevent these types of things. What's next, an update for our phones that prevents us from dialing 800 numbers because they are costing corporations too much money when we call?
Why, hackers, of course!
It would be funny if it was true.
Yeah, it's PEBKAC syndrome. some PS3/360 owner does something stupid like putting their console on thick shag carpet, covering it with a blanket, or blocking the vents by putting it right against a solid surface because it makes too much noise and it overheats. Then they blame the game: "The game bricked my 360", or "this new firmware bricked my PS3".
Wouldn't that be legally fightable? I always thought the difference between "in warranty" and "out of warranty" (but within the expected lifetime of the device) was that "in warranty" the supplier had to prove you damaged it by using it in a wrong way and "out of warranty" you had to prove it was their fault.
IANAL, I am curious.
This may be country related, so I'll define that I am Dutch, I learned these definitions in the Netherlands.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
Blaming the game in such cases is stupid; but blaming the hardware or firmware isn't.
A computer shouldn't be expected to operate at full performance under all conditions; but failure to throttle clocks on high power silicon or halt gracefully before suffering hardware damage is pretty shoddy work; doubly so in something like a console or laptop, where the manufacturer has full control of every component, thermal sensor, fan, and airflow path inside the chassis.
How do you add additional capacity like that? If the drive could always read the higher density disks, why didn't they use them in the first place? Surely it's not that the manufacturing process is more expensive and they only just now figured out how to make it affordable.
Is there any grain of truth to this or is it pure BS cover for the piracy stuff?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
... I'll let you come over and play with my Wii.
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BMO
This would not be a problem for Rockstar if they had developed this title for the PC platform. Gaming PCs have much better ventilation than consoles.
I would argue that this is exactly the type of game that PC gamers would love, so it would have made a natural home for the title. (As you can guess, I'm rather miffed at not being able to play this one.)
This. Hopefully the update is still available.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
In the EU all non-perishables have two years minimum warranty too.
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where the manufacturer has full control of... [the] airflow path inside the chassis
The incredibly piss poor design of the original 360 in terms of airflow amazes me. You'd think that they would have at the very least brought someone in to do some basic consulting on heat dissipation in the case, but obviously they didn't spend any time at all thinking about it.
Seriously, if I remember right there were only two small exhaust fans in the entire system. Processor / Graphics were cooled only by a passive heatsink, nowhere near the intake of those fans. The only way to get any appreciable airflow past that heatsink would be to use a very restrictive shroud that forced those fan's intake to pass over the heatsinks. They used nothing. Nothing at all. The air around those heatsinks was pretty much completely stagnant.
With the first revision, they finally wised up and put a shroud in, but it only extends up to the front of the heatsinks and doesn't cover them. This most likely pulled air past the heatsink where they were near the shroud, but the far side still wouldn't have had much airflow.
They really just needed a fan blowing on the heatsink. It's the same basic strategy used in most computers. Move a lot of air past the areas of concentrated heat, then use case fans to slowly change the heated case air for fresh cool air. Heats up other components away from the big heat sources a bit more, but dramatically lowers temps for the processor. Either that or use properly designed shrouds that force ALL the intake air for those fans through the whole heatsink. Also, bigger fans so the thing didn't sound like a damn vacuum cleaner wouldn't have hurt.
The humor shibboleth. You failed it.
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BMO
but failure to throttle clocks on high power silicon or halt gracefully before suffering hardware damage is pretty shoddy work; doubly so in something like a console or laptop
PS2's and PS3's (at least the models I've owned) make a shrill noise and blink lights when they get too hot., I've had it happen once with both. Both times it was accidentally restricted airflow. The PS2 will shut itself down
In Germany and I assume in Dutch too, as those are mostly EU regulations, you have two kinds of warranty:
Regular warranty (Garantie), which is a free service offered by the manufacturer, this can be anything from 90 days to 5 years or just not exist at all, as the manufacturer isn't require to provide it.
And then there is defects liability (GewÃhrleistung), this is required by law for all electronic goods and last two years (even longer in UK I think). This liability however is against the seller not the manufacturer, if you bought your console at Amazon, you send it back to Amazon and you get a new one or they send it in for fixing. Those two years are split into two segments, the first six month the seller has to prove that the device wasn't already broken when he sold it and everything after that requires that you broke that you didn't break it by accident. In practice that is rarely relevant, as no good seller will require proof and instead just exchange the troublesome device unless of course the damage is obviously your fault.
As far as USA is concerned, I don't think here is any mandatory warranty at all, so you often only get 90 days or so from the manufacturer and after that you have to deal with the issues yourself. Class action lawsuits might however allow you to get some of your money back or pressure the manufacturer into extending the warranty (see 3 year warranty on RROD).
Acknowledgment or not, MS needs to stop futzing around with the DVD drive and just design a new generation console with a blu-ray drive. They're still limping along with an increasingly obsolete DVD drive (becoming more and more problematic on newer games like L.A. Noire) because they're too proud to pay Sony royalty rights for blu-ray and because they've been so focused on their Wii knockoff Kinect add-on. So, here we are at the end of the traditional 5-year console lifespan, and they don't even have a new console on the horizon. And now they're trying to squeeze more life out of their aging console with a software fix that breaks a lot of their older versions (and which will only add one lousy gig to the disc capacity anyway).
Bad move, MS. You used to have the definitive lead (in the U.S. anyway), and could have secured it by sticking to the traditional 5-year life cycle. But now Sony (and even Nintendo now) is catching up and preparing to pass. And you're just standing still.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
As others have noted, LA Noire overheating is also happening on xbox 360. Notice that in both cases it's older consoles? What's the game that a high percentage of people are playing now? So the big new game is what people happen to be playing on their dusty old hardware which is overheating. Same thing will happen next year with the big game and the older consoles around then. Anyway, it's the simplest explanation at this point.
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this is why pc is my main plataform, I buy only the exclusives games for ps3
It could be that I'm just a geek whose concern for WAF is basically zero(and, indeed, it probably is); but I think that the fetish for thinness and apparently-seamles plastic shells in non-portable consumer electronics has really done more harm than good from a user-experience standpoint.
Just as a function of basic geometry(and the fact that it is hard to get the central motor portion of a fan below a certain size) smaller fans have to either move less air, be louder, or both. Then you get into the pitch issue. 40mm fans whine. High speed ones whine really loudly. 60mm units are only slightly less annoying. 80s have the decency to "hum", and 120s just sort of whirr. If you make your device really thin, you are pretty much forced to either use small, annoying, inefficient fans in the standard 'snapped in to rear grills' location, or use a larger fan in some sort of ducted horizontal/blower configuration that usually just serves to emphasize that the static pressure capabilities of standard DC ventilation fans are pretty lousy.
I'm hardly arguing that every desktop and console should be an overclocker tower studded with illuminated 160mm units(and in portables small, custom, ventilation systems are definitely a necessary evil); but today's consoles would be substantially quieter, and less vulnerable to overheating, if the designers weren't pathologically afraid of showing a few mesh inflow/outflow areas, and using cases that can accommodate an 80mm or two... Particularly after they've been given a year to start wearing out their bearings(or sleeves, gotta keep that BOM down...), those 60s just suck, and sound like mosquito root-canal doing it.
My NES doesn't overheat at all while playing Duck Hunt on my CRT TV...
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
I've heard it from a couple of customers too ("oh you have to fix it, it's guided by the EU regulations"), but obviously managers POV was - your warranty is with the manufacturer.
The relevant paper seems to be: 31999L0044 Directive 1999/44/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 25 May 1999 on certain aspects of the sale of consumer goods and associated guarantees
And contains this:
As the EU just provides the outlines, not the exact implementation, details might of course varry from country to country. There is also a page on Implied Warranty on Wikipedia, but it doesn't seem to contain anything specific to the UK.
Sounds like a smokeout to me. Some older hacked Xboxes are invulnerable to M$'s new anti-piracy countermeasures, so they make a firmware upgrade that totally breaks the DVD drive. Replace the broken Xboxes with new ones. Now they don't have to worry about old hardware that they can't control...
I haven't owned any of them, so I don't know the specific behavior of any given console, I was just expressing the general position that no computing device sold for consumer use should be considered as other than defective if it can heat-damage itself under any conditions that a human would reasonably endure(the classic "all day in a locked car in the summer sun" or "stored at sub-freezing temperatures then taken inside and operated while condensation is forming inside" cases, for instance, would fall outside of that bound).
If you restrict their airflow, fill them with dust, or cram them against the wall right on top of your monstrous 70's tube amp, it is entirely reasonable for them not to run for very long; but being capable of graceful throttling or shutdown, ideally with an informative error response of some kind, is a perfectly reasonable baseline expectation.
I don't honestly follow the issue much, so I don't know whether, or how often, actual thermal brickings occur; but I'd count them as design defects rather than PEBKAC. On the other hand, somebody who restricts the airflow and then whines about how the device keeps displaying "Thermal shutdown, ensure that the device has proper ventilation." and shutting down is just a dumbass.
Barring people with "fungus" in their name, I doubt a lot of people have "monstrous 70's tube amp[s]".
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Well, a guy in the UK got a 84 pounds return because of the OtherOS removing update.
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Yeah, it's PEBKAC syndrome. some PS3/360 owner does something stupid like putting their console on thick shag carpet, covering it with a blanket, or blocking the vents by putting it right against a solid surface because it makes too much noise and it overheats. Then they blame the game: "The game bricked my 360", or "this new firmware bricked my PS3".
Normally I'd be agreeing with you, but I was playing Fable 3 recently on my 360 Elite and it's overheated a few times. I took apart the outer shell and gave it a good air-canning, and it over-heated less frequently (hours instead of about 30 minutes). This 360 sits upright on wood, close to the ground (as cool air resides close to the ground), and has good clearance above and around it. It's the only game I've played that causes over-heating in my 360. Mass Effect 2 and NHL 2011 run without issue for days at a time. DAYS.
On the other hand a friend of mine put his 360 into this tight space that is only open at the front. It sits on top of his audio receiver. He wonders why it overheats when he plays pac-man. *face-palm*.
What is it with you PC snobs anyway? When a PC exclusive title comes out, you don't see scores of console gamers spamming the game's message boards complaining that it isn't coming to consoles
You mean comments like "I don't think my computer could run this. Here's hoping for a console version." and "Man, this looks pretty awesome. I hope it comes out on consoles." which I just pulled out from a thread under a video of The Witcher 2 which just came out?
I could probably mine places like Gametrailers, G4 and IGN for more of that, but I think I've proven my point.
The rest of your 'analysis' if wrong also, but that's another story.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
MS released the HD-DVD drive before. I don't see why they couldn't release a Bluray version of the same thing. Well....any technical reason. It would certainly be easier than releasing a new console.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
I have noticed that after having applied 3.61, the PS3 is running it's fan at a noticeable higher level than with the previous firmwares, regardless of the task.
Bad move, MS. You used to have the definitive lead (in the U.S. anyway), and could have secured it by sticking to the traditional 5-year life cycle. But now Sony (and even Nintendo now) is catching up and preparing to pass. And you're just standing still.
Nintendo broke the cycle by releasing the Wii well ahead of MS and Sony, and I've yet to hear anything about the Playstation 4. While the continued use of DVD in the Xbox 360 is limiting developers, there are still plenty of games coming out that fit on one DVD. Aside from Lost Odyssey, Final Fantasy XIII and L.A. Noire, I can't think of another Xbox 360 game that needed more than 1 DVD disc.
Besides the disc space issue, I'm hard pressed to find reasons for MS to release a new console. It already does 1080p, and some games even do 3D if you've got the external hardware for it (TV, glasses etc).
MS is hardly standing still either - they are still expanding the services being offered by Xbox Live, which I would say is the biggest draw for the console. Sony's online service is a mess (not just security-wise), and Nintendo's is practically non-existent.
I am the proud owner of two 60GB fat PS3's. I bought them for the express purpose of running Linux and learning more about the Cell processor. I believe I have read that newer PS3's have been cheapened to the point where they cannot run Linux, firmware notwithstanding. I am thinking that this new firmware release that allegedly causes overheating and shutdown, could be an attempt to literally burn up these early collector's items. It has been several years since my PS3's were on the Internet communicating with Sony's network. I waited impatiently for years for their SL knockoff to arrive, and I finally just lost interest. For some reason one of my two unts has decided it doesn't want to play Bluray disks any more. This is probably the result of DRM issues. Even though it was in warrantee, I cannot send in the unit as they would undoubtedly update the firmware to the current version and my Linux would be hosed. I have am not clever enough to use geohot's package of secrets to unlock the PS'3 hypervisor security. I wish someone would develop a new set of PROMS (or whatever) that would dispense with the Sony GUI and hypervisor, and just allow a distribution of Linux to own the machine. Then I could do what I wanted which was to learn about the Cell, in a less memory restricted fashion. An after-market memory(ram) enhancement would be nice too.
I don't know why they didn't just stick with the HD-DVD format. Just because it's dead for everything else doesn't mean they couldn't still use it on their console for games. If anything, HD-DVD's increasing obscurity would help them combat piracy.