X-Box Background

March 22nd, 2008 by Mitch

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The 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 Australasia. 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 Haydos 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.

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, Sega CD and Sega Saturn 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.

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 inch 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.

CPU: 733 MHz Intel Celeron 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
• 932 megapixels/second (233 MHz x 4 pipelines), 1,864 megatexels/second (932 MP x 2 texture units) (peak)

  + 115 million vertices/second, 125 million particles/second (peak)

  + Peak triangle performance: 29,125,000 32 pixel triangles/sec raw or w. 2 textures and lit.

  # 485,416 triangles a frame at 60fps

  # 970,833 triangles a frame at 30fps

• 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 x 100 x 260 mm (12.5 x 4 x 10.5 in)