Xbox is a sixth generation era video game console produced
by Microsoft Corporation. It was first released on November 15, 2001 in North
America, February 22, 2002 in Japan, and on March 14, 2002 in Europe and
Australiasia. It is the predecessor to Microsoft's Xbox 360 console. The Xbox
was Microsoft's first independent venture into the video game console arena,
after having collaborated with Sega in porting Windows CE to the Sega Dreamcast
console. Notable launch titles for the console included Halo: Combat Evolved,
Amped: Freestyle Snowboarding, Dead or Alive 3, Project Gotham Racing, and
Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee.
History
Development
The Xbox was initially developed within Microsoft by a small team which included
Seamus Blackley, a game developer and high energy physicist. The rumors of a
video game console being developed by Microsoft first emerged at the end of 1999
following interviews of Bill Gates. Gates said that a gaming/multimedia device
was essential for multimedia convergence in the new times of digital
entertainment. On March 10, 2000 the "X-box Project" was officially confirmed by
Microsoft with a press release.
According to the book Smartbomb, by Heather Chaplin and Aaron Ruby, the
remarkable success of the upstart Sony Playstation worried Microsoft in late
1990s. The growing video game market seemed to threaten the PC market which
Microsoft had dominated and relied upon for most of its revenues. Additionally,
a venture into the gaming console market would also diversify Microsoft's
product line, which up to that time had been heavily concentrated into software.
According to Dean Takahashi's book, "Opening the Xbox", the Xbox was originally
going to be called Direct-Xbox, to show the extensive use of DirectX within the
console's technology[1]. "Xbox" was the final name decided by marketing, but the
console still retains some hints towards DirectX, most notably the "X"-shaped
logo, which DirectX is famous for, along with the "X" shape on the top of the
system.
As time progressed Microsoft's J Allard was responsible for the hardware and
system software development. Ed Fries was responsible for all game development
on the platform. Mitch Koch was responsible for sales and marketing and all
three reported to Robbie Bach. This team was also primarily responsible for
Microsoft's follow-up product, the Xbox 360.
Software
See also: List of Xbox games
The Xbox launched in North America on November 15, 2001. The greatest success of
the Xbox's launch games was Halo: Combat Evolved which was critically well
received[1] and was the best-selling game of the year for 4 years runing. Halo
still remains one of the console's standout titles, while its sequel Halo 2
became the best-selling title of the console and enjoyed a long reign as the
most played game on the Xbox Live service until November 13, 2006 when the hit
Xbox 360 title Gears of War claimed the top spot. Other successful launch titles
included NFL Fever 2002, Project Gotham Racing[2] and Dead or Alive 3 [3]).
However, the failure of several first-party games (including Fuzion Frenzy [4]
and Azurik: Rise of Perathia [5]) damaged the initial public reputation of the
Xbox.
Halo: Combat Evolved proved to be a great success for the Game Industry and
Microsoft Game Studios.Although the console enjoyed strong third party support
from its inception, many early Xbox games did not take full advantage of its
powerful hardware, with few additional features or graphical improvements to
distinguish them from the PS2 version, thus negating one of the Xbox's main
selling points. Lastly, Sony countered the Xbox for a short time by temporarily
securing PlayStation 2 exclusives for highly anticipated games such as the Grand
Theft Auto series and Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance although they were later
ported to the Xbox and no longer exclusive.
In 2002 and 2003, several releases helped the Xbox to gain momentum and
distinguish itself from the PS2. The Xbox Live online service was launched in
late 2002 alongside pilot titles MotoGP, MechAssault and Tom Clancy's Ghost
Recon. Several best-selling and critically acclaimed titles for the Xbox were
published, such as Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell, Ninja Gaiden and LucasArts' Star
Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Take-Two Interactive's exclusivity deal with
Sony was amended to allow Grand Theft Auto III, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and
its sequels to be published on the Xbox. In addition, many other publishers got
into the trend of releasing the Xbox version alongside the PS2 version, instead
of delaying it for months.
In 2004, Halo 2 set records as the highest-grossing release in entertainment
history making over $100 million in its first day[6], as well as being a
successful killer app for the online service. That year, Microsoft and
Electronic Arts reached a deal that would see the latter's popular titles
enabled on Xbox Live.
Ninja Gaiden was released in 2004 to much critical acclaim.
Xbox Live
On November 15, 2002, Microsoft launched its Xbox Live online gaming service,
allowing subscribers to play online Xbox games with (or against) other
subscribers all around the world and download new content for their games to the
system's hard drive. This online service works exclusively with a broadband
Internet connection. Approximately 250,000 subscribers had signed up within 2
months of Xbox Live's launch [7]. In July 2004, Microsoft announced that Xbox
Live had reached 1 million subscribers, and only a year later, in July 2005,
that membership had reached 2 million. An Xbox Live Gold subscription (which
affords the user the most features of any membership) currently costs US$50 a
year (roughly US$4 a month). Recently, competitive leagues have been created,
namely playing "Halo 2." Leagues include prizes and sponsorships.
Hardware
Xbox motherboard
Xbox drivesSee also: Xbox special limited editions
The Xbox was designed to take advantage of a slowdown in the saturated PC gaming
market and incorporates a built-in Ethernet adapter. Also, the console costs as
much as a high-end video card alone in 2001, while having comparable graphics
processing power (the Xbox's NV2A graphics chipset is a derivative of the
GeForce 3). The Xbox was also the only console of its generation to support
Dolby Digital 5.1 Nonetheless, most of these features were not fully exploited
in its first year of launch, notably the lack of Xbox Live online multiplayer.
The Xbox was the first console to incorporate a hard disk drive, used primarily
for storing game saves compressed in zip archives and content downloaded from
Xbox Live. This eliminated the need for separate memory cards (although some
older consoles, such as the TurboCD and Sega CD had featured built-in battery
backup memory prior to this). Most of the games also use the hard drive as a
disk cache, for faster game loading times. Some games support "Custom
soundtracks," another particularly unusual feature allowed by the hard drive. An
Xbox owner can rip music from standard audio CDs to the hard drive so players
can play their custom soundtrack, in addition to the original soundtrack of Xbox
games that support such a feature.
Although the Xbox is based on commodity PC hardware and runs a stripped-down
version of the Windows 2000 kernel using APIs based largely on DirectX 8.1, it
incorporates changes optimized for gaming uses as well as restrictions designed
to prevent uses not approved by Microsoft. A similar approach (PC hardware,
stripped-down Windows) was used by the Tandy VIS entertainment system. The Xbox
does not use Windows CE due to Microsoft internal politics at the time, as well
as limited support in Windows CE for DirectX[citation needed].
The Xbox itself is much larger and heavier than its contemporaries. This is
largely due to a bulky tray-loading DVD-ROM drive and the standard-size 3.5"
hard drive. Because of this, the Xbox has found itself a target of mild
derision, as gamers poke fun at it for things like a warning in the Xbox manual
that a falling Xbox "could cause serious injury" to a small child or pet.
However, the Xbox has also pioneered safety features, such as breakaway cables
for the controllers to prevent the console from being yanked from the shelf.
The original game controller design, which was particularly large, was similarly
often criticized since it was ill-suited to those with small hands. In response
to these criticisms, a smaller controller was introduced for the Japanese Xbox
launch. This Japanese controller (which was briefly imported by even mainstream
video game store chains, such as GameStop) was subsequently released in other
markets as the "Xbox Controller S", and currently all Xbox consoles come with a
"Controller S", while the original controller (known as Controller "0" or "The
Duke") was quietly discontinued.
Several internal hardware revisions have been made in an ongoing battle to
discourage modding (hackers continually updated modchip designs in attempt to
defeat them), cut manufacturing costs, and to provide a more reliable DVD-ROM
drive (some of the early units' drives gave Disc Reading Errors due to the
unreliability of the Thomson DVD-ROM drives that were used). Later generation of
Xbox units that used the Thomson TGM-600 DVD-ROM drives and the Philips VAD6011
DVD-ROM drives were still vulnerable to failure that rendered the consoles
either unable to read newer discs or caused them to halt the console with an
error code usually indicating a PIO/DMA identification failure, respectively.
These units would not be covered under the extended warranty.
Detailed specifications
CPU: 733 MHz Intel Coppermine-based IA-32 CPU. Micro-PGA2 package. 180 nm
process.
SSE. Floating point SIMD. 4 single-precision floating point numbers per clock
cycle.
Resulting Gflops on cpu alone: 2.9Gflops
MMX. Integer SIMD.
133 MHz 64-bit GTL+ front side bus to GPU/chipset.
32 KiB L1 cache. 128 KiB on-die L2 Advanced Transfer Cache (256-bit bus).
Shared memory subsystem
64 MiB DDR SDRAM at 200 MHz. 6.4 GB/s
Supplied by Hynix or Samsung depending on manufacture date and location.
Graphics processing unit (GPU) and system chipset: 233 MHz NV2A ASIC.
Co-developed by Microsoft and NVIDIA.
4 pixel pipelines with 2 texture units each
115 million vertices/second, 125 million particles/second (peak)
Peak triangle performance: around 30,000,000 32 pixel triangles/sec raw or w.
textures and lit.
932 megapixels/second (233 MHz x 4 pipelines), 1,864 megatexels/second (932 MP x
2 texture units) (peak)
4 textures per pass, texture compression, full scene anti-aliasing (NV Quincunx,
supersampling, multisampling)
Bilinear, trilinear, and anisotropic texture filtering
Similar to the NV20 and NV25 PC GPUs.
Storage media
2-5x (2.6 MB/s-6.6 MB/s) CAV DVD-ROM
8 or 10 GB 3.5-inch 5,400 RPM hard disk. Formatted to 8 GB. FATX file system.
Optional 8 MB memory card for saved game file transfer.
Audio processor : NVIDIA MCPX (a.k.a. SoundStorm NVAPU)
64 3D channels (up to 256 stereo voices)
HRTF Sensaura 3D enhancement
MIDI DLS2 Support
Monaural, Stereo, Dolby Surround, and Dolby Digital Live 5.1 audio output
options
Integrated 10/100BASE-TX Ethernet
DVD movie playback
A/V outputs: composite video, S-Video, component video, SCART, Optical Digital
TOSLINK, and stereo RCA analog audio.
Resolutions: 480i, 576i, 480p, 720p and 1080i.
Controller Ports: 4 proprietary USB ports
Weight: 3.86 kg (8.5 lb)
Dimensions: 320 × 100 × 260 mm (12.5 × 4 × 10.5 in)
Xbox and DirectX
Microsoft's set of low-level APIs for game development and multimedia purposes,
DirectX, was used as a basis for the Xbox.
Microsoft and Nvidia chip pricing dispute
In 2002, Microsoft and Nvidia entered arbitration over a dispute on the pricing
of Nvidia's chips for the Xbox.[2] Nvidia's filing with the SEC indicated that
Microsoft was seeking a US$13 million discount on shipments for Nvidia's fiscal
year 2002. Additionally, Microsoft alleged violations of the agreement the two
companies entered, sought reduced chipset pricing, and sought to ensure that
Nvidia fulfill Microsoft's chipset orders without limits on quantity. The matter
was settled on February 6, 2003, and no terms of the settlement were
released.[3]
Official accessories
Audio/video connectors
Standard AV Cable: Provides composite video and monaural or stereo audio to TVs
equipped with RCA inputs. Comes with the system. European systems come with a
RCA jack to SCART converter block in addition to the cable.
RF Adapter: Provides a combined audio and video signal on an RF connector.
Advanced AV Pack: Provides S-Video and TOSLINK audio in addition to the RCA
composite video and stereo audio of the Standard AV Cable.
High Definition AV Pack: Intended for HDTVs, it provides a YPrPb component video
signal over three RCA connectors. Also provides analog RCA and digital TOSLINK
audio outputs.
Advanced SCART Cable: The European equivalent to the Advanced AV Pack, providing
a full RGB video SCART connection in place of S-Video, RCA composite and stereo
audio connections (composite video and stereo are still provided by the cable,
through the SCART connector, in addition to the RGB signal), while retaining the
TOSLINK audio connector. As Europe has no HDTV standard, no High Definition
cable is currently provided in those markets.
Numerous unofficial third-party cables and breakout boxes exist that provide
combinations of outputs not found in these official video packages; however,
with the exception of a few component-to-VGA converters and custom-built VGA
boxes, the four official video packages represent all of the Xbox's possible
outputs. This output selectivity is made possible by the Xbox's SCART-like AVIP
port.
Networking
Ethernet (Xbox Live) Cable: A Cat 5 cable for connecting the Xbox to a broadband
modem or router.
Xbox Wireless Adapter: a wireless bridge which converts data running through an
Ethernet cable to a wireless (802.11b or 802.11g) signal to connect to a
wireless LAN. While the official Wireless Adapter guarantees compatibility with
the Xbox, almost any wireless bridge can be used.
Xbox Live Starter Kit: A subscription and installation pack for the Xbox Live
service, as well as a headset (with monaural earpiece and microphone) that
connects to a control box that plugs into the top expansion slot of a
controller. The headset can in fact be replaced with most standard
earpiece-and-microphone headsets; headset specialist Plantronics produces
various officially-licensed headsets, including a special-edition headset for
Halo 2.
System Link Cable: A Cat 5 Ethernet crossover cable for connecting together two
consoles or a Cat 5 straight through cable used in conjunction with an Ethernet
hub for connecting up to four consoles, for up to 16 total players. This
functionality is similar to Sega's DirectLink for Sega Saturn.
Multimedia
Xbox Media Center Extender: A kit that allows Xbox to act as a Media Center
Extender to stream content from a Windows XP Media Center Edition PC. It can
also be used for DVD playback.
DVD Playback Kit: Required in order to play DVD movies, the kit includes an
infrared remote control and receiver. DVD playback was not included as a
standard feature of the Xbox due to licensing issues with the DVD format that
would have added extra cost to the console's base price. By selling a DVD remote
separately, Microsoft was able to bundle the cost of the DVD licensing fee with
it. Although there is nothing to prevent the Xbox from acting as a Progressive
scan DVD player, Microsoft chose not to enable this feature in the Xbox DVD kit
in order to avoid royalty payments to the patent-holder of progressive scan DVD
playback. The DVD Playback kit only plays DVD's from the local region. The DVD
Playback kit will also allow the xbox to play VCD movies. By default, the Xbox
can only play xbox games and audio cd's.
Xbox Music Mixer: A utility software bundled with a microphone that connects to
an adapter that plugs into the top expansion slot of a controller. Provides a
music player with 2D/3D visualizations as well as basic karaoke functions. It
also allows users to upload pictures in JPEG format (to create slide shows) as
well as audio in MP3 format and Microsoft's WMA (for karaoke or a game's Custom
Soundtracks feature) from a Windows XP machine running the Xbox Music Mixer PC
Tool.
Controllers and removable storage
The Duke and Controller SThe Xbox controller features two analog sticks, a
directional pad, two analog triggers, a Back button, a Start button, two
accessory slots and six 8-bit analog action buttons (A, B, X, Y, Black, and
White). The precise layout of the controls differs between the two variations of
controller.
Standard Xbox Controller (aka "The Duke"[citation needed]): Originally the
normal Xbox controller for all territories except Japan, this has since been
quietly discontinued and replaced in Xbox packs by the Controller S. The Duke
controller has been criticized for being relatively large and bulky compared to
other video game controllers (it was awarded "Blunder of the Year" by Game
Informer in 2001).[4] The black and white buttons are located above the A, B, X,
and Y buttons, and the Back/Start buttons are located between and below the
d-pad and right analog stick. Also, the standard face buttons (A, B, X, and Y)
were oriented in an oblong parallelogram rather than a uniform diamond, which
was very unusual compared to other standard controllers.
Controller S: A smaller, lighter Xbox controller. Once the standard Xbox
controller in Japan (codenamed "Akebono"), it was released in other territories
by popular demand, and eventually replaced the standard controller in the retail
pack for the Xbox console. The white and black buttons are located below the A,
B, X, and Y buttons, and the Back/Select buttons are similarly placed below the
left analog stick. This controller has received its share of criticism as well,
especially with regards to placement of the black/white and start/select
buttons.[5]
There are also 3rd party controllers such as a Logitech 2.4 GHz wireless
controller. This controller is approved by Microsoft. However, third-party
unlicensed wireless controllers exist as well.
An 8 MB removable solid state memory card can be plugged into the controllers,
onto which game saves (zip archives in reality) can either be copied from the
hard drive when in the Xbox Dashboard's memory manager or saved during a game.
Note that some recent games (e.g. Ninja Gaiden and Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach
Volleyball) do not support this accessory as a cheat prevention measure. This
system has been defeated by the Xbox hacking community, who have developed tools
to modify savegames to work in a different console, though some unique technical
information concerning the recipient Xbox must be known. It is also possible to
save an Xbox Live account on a memory unit, making it possible to share it with
another Xbox owner, assuming both have access to Xbox Live.
Modding the Xbox
The popularity of the Xbox inspired efforts to circumvent the built-in hardware
and software security mechanisms, a practice informally known as modding. The
Xbox BIOS was dumped a few months after release, and hacked so it would skip
digital signature checks, and media flags, allowing unsigned code, Xbox game
backups, etc to be run. This is due to flaws in the Xbox's security.[8] Modding
an Xbox in any manner will void its warranty, as it may require disassembly of
the console. Having a modified Xbox will also disallow it from accessing Xbox
Live as it contravenes the Xbox Live terms of use[9], unless using a softmod
with a multiboot and Shadow C configuration such as Ndure.
Four main methods exist of modding the Xbox:
Modchip - Installing a modchip inside the Xbox that bypasses the original BIOS,
with a hacked BIOS to circumvent the security mechanisms.[10]
TSOP Flashing - Reflashing the TSOP (Thin Small-Outline Package) with a
non-Microsoft release, by bridging two points on the motherboard, making it
writable, and then using a specially crafted gamesave (Similar to a softmod, see
below) to flash the onboard TSOP. This method only works on 1.0 to 1.5 Xboxes,
due to changes in motherboard layout.[11]
Softmod - Using select official game releases to load game saves that exploit
buffer overflows in the save game handling. [12] When loaded, they install
security circumventions, and are known to be safe for Xbox Live if the user
enables multibooting with the Microsoft dashboard and an original game disc is
used.[13]
Hot swap - Using a computer to change the data on the hard drive. This requires
having the Xbox unlock the hard drive when it is turned on, then swapping the
hard drive into a running computer. From there it can be accessed by a special
LiveCD. By using this in combination with the TSOP flash, it is possible to
completely mod the Xbox with your computer and a soldering iron.[14] It is also
an alternative on 1.6 Xboxes with the updated Dashboard (1.6 does not have a
flashable bios).[15]
Beyond gaming, a modded Xbox can be used as a media center with the Xbox Media
Center.[16]
There are also distributions of Linux developed specifically for the Xbox,
including those based on Gentoo [17], Debian (see also Xebian) [18], Damn Small
Linux [19], and Dyne:bolic [20].
Pricing
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North America
US$299 (November 15, 2001, Launch Price) (CAD$449)
US$199 (May 15, 2002) (CAD$299)
US$179 (May 14, 2003) (CAD$249)
US$149 (March 29, 2004) (CAD$199)
Europe (prices include tax)
479€ (Launch Price (Ireland) (March 14, 2002),
299€ (Launch Price (Rest of Europe) and Ireland April 2, 2002)
249€ (August 30, 2002)
199€ (April 10, 2003)
149€ (August 27, 2004)
99€ (Ireland; Christmas 2005 promotional price)
99€ (Spain, January 2006 promotional price)
99€ (Italy, 2006)
79€ (The Netherlands, March 2006)
United Kingdom
£299.99 GBP (Launch Price March 14, 2002)
£199.99 (2003)
£139.99 (August 27, 2004)
£129.99 (2005)
£104.99(Christmas 2005)
£99.99 (2006)
£49.99 (Christmas 2006)
£39.99 (January 2007)
Oceania
AU$699 AUD (April 26, 2002, Launch Price) (Quickly dropped to $399 after 6 weeks
to compete with launch of Nintendo GameCube)
AU$239 AUD (2004)
AU$209 AUD (2005)
AU$188 AUD (2006 Q2)
NZ$499 NZD (October 3, 2002, Launch Price)
NZ$399 NZD (2003)
NZ$349 NZD (2004)
NZ$299 NZD (2004 Q2)
NZ$249 NZD (2004 Q4) (2005)
Japan
¥34,800 JPY (February 2, 2002, Launch Price)
¥24,800 JPY (May 22, 2002)
¥16,800 JPY (November 20, 2003)
Of note is the high European launch price. As with many games consoles (for
example, the contemporary PlayStation 2), the Xbox was launched with a price in
GBP equal to its US price in USD (in this case, $/£299), and this price then
converted using the GBP-Euro exchange rate for the rest of Europe. Ignoring the
GBP-USD exchange rate in this way creates a near 100% mark-up for Europe.
With a price-dropped PlayStation 2 and a comparatively inexpensive GameCube as
competition, many users were naturally reluctant to invest in the console.
Microsoft countered with a £100 price drop (and its equivalent in the rest of
Europe) on April 26, 2002, just a month and 12 days after its initial launch in
the UK. To avoid frustrating early adopters, they offered any two current games
and an extra controller for free to any purchaser who could provide a sales
receipt showing the original higher price.
By September 15, 2005 Microsoft reported a four billion dollar loss in selling
the Xbox gaming system.[
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