Oh man I can’t wait to get my hands on this little bastard. I feel a little more confident that the wait was worth it.
XBox 360
Seriously, I’m close to having semi.
wowza, love the design of the console and those specs don’t look too shabby either. I wonder if the boys at Sony are getting worried.
For everything I’ve seen, they should be. The specs and price of the new XBox are better than anything I’ve seen out of Sony yet. We’ll see if they amend their positions now.
Great, but you do realise it is not backward compatible?
All Xbox games you have now will not work on it, and all new games developed for this one will not work on the old one.
I don’t think Sony needs to worry any way, as they still hold the lionshare of the market.
Why “360”? Doesn’t seem to be technical specs, so must be marketspeak: don’t these guys realise that if you turn 360 degrees, you end up back where you started? Besides, my Xbox cost me a month of depraved sexual favours to my dearly beloved on top of the price: I’m hanging on to my old one for the time being, and waiting for the game prices to fall.
Does anyone else think the Xbox 360 looks like the bastard child of an Xbox and an Mac? 
And for the 360 thing, instead of the logical Xbox 2, is that Microsoft doesn’t want to look like they are behind Sony, which is coming out with Playstation 3. MS did the same thing with Word for Windows skipping from version 2 to version 6 in order to match Wordperfect’s version number.
Do you have a cite for that? Not that I don’t believe you but I was led to believe that it would be and if it isn’t then I would be an extremely sad gamer.
Most media outlets are saying that Microsoft is trying, but they haven’t made it work yet. Apparently there will be a HD (my mistake) but the CPU and GPU are very different from the XBox’s.
I’m not too hot on console specs so can someone translate this for me:
I am presuming that this isn’t three 3.2GHz CPUs running in unison, what does it actually mean?
mittu: I believe it will have 3 dual-core processors, so yes, it is 3 processors running in unison (I’m sure someone will correct me if I’m wrong though). In fact, as they are all dual-core, you could say it’s kind of like 6 processors running in unison. Sort of. Call it 4 or 5, and you’d probably be closer to the truth. 
I was under the impression that whether or not it will be backwards compatible is yet to be announced. But although the hardware is very different, I presume they’re both DirectX-based, so I wouldn’t have thought it to be impossible…
I’ve just finished watching the MTV show where the XBox 360 (I can’t stand that name) was first introduced, and I can’t believe Microsoft PR’s machine. The Killers performing live, Hollywood celebs hosting/appearing on the show… this is why Nintendo’s market share will continue to fall, IMHO - it’s the one area they can’t compete in.
No, actually we’re somewhat pleased … .
I hate you Pochacco.
[sub]Come on, just a little hint. Please. 
[/sub]
Emulating the (slightly) modified PIII in the old Xbox at native speeds should be no problem for the 360, but from what I’ve read, emulating the GPU and associated imaging software technology may have proven impossible, for both technical and legal reasons. The split with nVIDIA was, reportedly, a rather acrimonius one. I’ve no idea how difficult it is to reverse-engineer imaging tech, but u$oft had to buy the technology to emulate Intel chips on the PPC, so they’re hardly innovators in this catagory. There’s rumors the Virtual PC coders actually got pulled from the VPC project to work on the 360. That makes me think there’s at least a good possibility they tried very had to provide backwards compatibility. Their stonewalling on the subject makes me suspect they’re down-to-the-wire on the decision on whether to promise it or not.
We’re going to be showing stuff at E3, so you don’t have long to wait. 
Actually, I think I was mistaken when I said before that it has 3 CPUs. xbox.com says that it has “three symmetrical cores running at 3.2 GHz each”, and “two hardware threads per core; six hardware threads total”. So it sounds like one processor, but with three cores. I’m not sure what a “hardware thread” is, though. Oh well, I’ll stop typing now.
The original XBox used an x86 processor. This one’s using a PPC processor. Ain’t no way it’s backward compatible.
Why? There is at least one proprietary, and a number of open-source x86 emulators for PowerPC available, and the most well-known, VirtualPC (sold by Microsoft), can run WindowsXP tolerably well for most office tasks on a fast G4 or G5 Mac. A single core in the 360’s processor is clocked about 4 times as fast as the Xbox’s x86 processor, so I should think at least CPU-related tasks could be handled at or near native speed. My understanding is it’s the graphics architecture that’s the main source of trouble.
As far as backward compatability, it’s a complete non-issue for a lot of people like me. You can’t get much more than $40 or so right now for a used one. When the new one is released, that price will fall further. I plan on just keeping the old one anyway, so it doesn’t matter.
How can I say this? Oh, yes. I’m not impressed. Not by the design. (White? It’ll look like crap next to the TV. Vertical? Great, recipe for CD drive failure.) and not by the demo product, and one hundred percent not by the production they put on. None of it was about the box, all the visuals looked like junk, and frankly, it looks… well. Fake. The hardware specs are amazing, but man, I think they focus grouped it to death. The games look like they won’t have that… spark of fun.
That console makes me want the sex, and I don’t even like the XBox (okay, I have one. But I needed it for Silent Hill 4. And Xmen Legends. And Halo. Shut up!)
Surprised that the ‘upcoming games’ list for the thing doesn’t have any mention of Halo on it at all, though.