XBox

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Revision as of 15:42, 29 November 2006

The Xbox is a sixth generation era video game console produced by Microsoft. It was first released on November 15, 2001 in North America, February 22, 2002 in Japan, and on March 14, 2002 in Europe. The Xbox was Microsoft's first independent venture into the video game console arena, after having developed the operating system and development tools for the MSX, and 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.

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. As well, 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 DirectXbox, to show the extensive use of DirectX within the console's technology. "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 took over the Xbox project and developed a marketing and advertising campaign to help reach youth audiences. J Allard was also primarily responsible for Microsoft's follow-up product, the Xbox 360.

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 and was the best-selling game of the year. 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 13th, 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 and Dead or Alive 3. However, the failure of several first-party games (including Fuzion Frenzy and Azurik: Rise of Perathia damaged the initial public reputation of the Xbox.

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, 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.

In 2005, the long-awaited PC titles Doom 3, Half-Life 2 and Far Cry Instincts were released.

Detailed specifications

• CPU: 733 MHz Intel Mobile Celeron (Micro BGA2. The cache size, FSB, and even 8-way associative L2 cache all match up to a Mobile Celeron 733/128/133. The only real difference is that the actual Mobile Celeron 733 was only made in a Micro FCBGA and Micro FCPGA package and not the Micro BGA2 seen on the Xbox. Intel was just rolling out the Micro FCBGA package around the time of the Xbox's introduction so it's understandable that the system was designed with the Micro BGA2 interface in mind. So for the Xbox, Microsoft had Intel put a Mobile Celeron 733 onto the older Micro BGA2 package and called it a Pentium III. For all intents and purposes a Mobile Celeron 733 is a Pentium III with a smaller L2 cache but the correct distinction still needs to be made here.
  • Intel IA-32 instruction set
  • SIMD: SSE. Four single-precision floating-point numbers in one instruction.
    • Theoretical maximum 4 FLOPS/cycle (2.9 gigaFLOPS for Xbox)
    • Pentium III had architectural drawbacks that lessened real-world SSE throughput.
  • SIMD: MMX. Integer functions. Switching between FPU and MMX is slow, so not of great use for 3D rendering tasks. Often used for audio and video.
  • 133 MHz FSB.
  • 32 kB L1 cache. 128 kB L2 Advanced Transfer Cache (256-bit).
• Unified Memory Subsystem: Total (shared) Memory: 64 MB DDR SDRAM running at 200 MHz, supplied by Hynix or Samsung depending on manufacture date and location
  • 6.4 GB/s Theoretical Memory Bandwidth
• Graphics Processor: 233 MHz custom chip developed by Microsoft and NVIDIA code named NV2A, the A setting it apart from the PC based NV20 and NV25 (A Geforcev3.5 of sorts, NVIDIA used a substantial amount of the GeForce 3 design, but added many of the new features to be found in its quick successor the GeForce 4. It gained enhanced vertex processing with 2 vertex shaders, and more flexible pixel shading than DirectX 8.
  • Theoretical Geometry Rate: 115+ million vertices/second
  • Theoretical Particle Performance: 125 M/s
  • Pipeline Configuration: 4 pixel pipelines with 2 texture units each
  • Theoretical Pixel Fill Rate: 932 Megapixels/second (233 MHz x 4 pipelines)
  • Theoretical Texture Fill Rate: 1,864 Megatexels/second (932 MP x 2 texture units)
  • 4 Simultaneous Textures
  • 6:1 Compressed Textures through DDS
  • Full Scene Anti-Aliasing
• Storage Medium: 2-5x DVD-ROM (Dual Layer) (XFAT), 8 gigabyte hard disk (new consoles contain a 10GB physical hard drive, though it is formatted to only use 8GB, uses XFAT), optional 8MB memory card for savegame transfer
• Audio Processor : NVIDIA MCPX (a.k.a. SoundStorm NVAPU)
  • Audio Channels: 64 3D channels (up to 256 stereo voices)
  • 3D Audio Support: HRTF Sensaura 3D enhancement.
  • MIDI DLS2 Support
  • AC3 (Dolby Digital) Encoded Game Audio via TOSLINK
• 10/100base-T ethernet
• DVD Movie Playback with a separate DVD Playback Kit/Remote required (or by modding the Xbox and running DVD-playing homebrew video games software)
• Maximum Resolution (2x32bpp frame buffers Z): 640(vert.)480(horiz.)
  • Note: NTSC (Non-HD) TV's have fewer than 500 horizontal lines. PAL TV's have fewer than 600 horizontal lines.
• EDTV Support: 480p(see game boxes for supported resolutions).
• 4 proprietary USB controller ports
• Weight: 3.86 kilograms (8.5 lb).
• Dimensions: 320 × 100 × 260 millimeters (12.5 × 4 × 10.5 in)