Microsoft leaks details on XBOX 2

"RusH" wrote in message
2.80...
(Nate Edel) wrote in
:

Dreamcast. Say what you will about Sega having ****ed off fans
or not having a large enough marketing budget, but the
Dreamcast had great games and some very innovative (for the
time) ideas -- VMU, online play, etc. But they launched before
the juggernaut that was the PS2, and most people simply decided
to wait for the PS2.

Many of us bought both -- and the Dreamcast was (better than,
but) a lot closer to the N64 in terms of graphics quality and
apparant processing power.

rofl now thats funny

All you had to do was see DOA 2 (Dreamcast) and DOA 2SE (PS2)
next to each other to see that it was really obvious.

or compare Dreamcast games to GameCube games ... some are better on
the DC

Funny enough when I play Monkey Ball I think it would have made a great
Dreamcast game. Wonder was it originally in development for the DC?

On Mon, 2 Feb 2004 09:20:55 -0500, "Zackman"
wrote:
Somebody might want to fill Tony in on a little something called the
Dreamcast. Say what you will about Sega having ****ed off fans or not having
a large enough marketing budget, but the Dreamcast had great games and some
very innovative (for the time) ideas -- VMU, online play, etc. But they
launched before the juggernaut that was the PS2, and most people simply
decided to wait for the PS2. At the very least, you're going to get people

Except that Xbox Next is not the DreamCast and altho it wont initially
have the brand name of the PS3, it will have much more then the
DreamCast did

who will wait to make their decision on which console to buy after both have
launched, which negates any advantage of going first.

Because people had a good idea the PS2 was going to be a lot better
and it had a lot better brand name. The PS2 wasn't changed much in
response to the DreamCast and 6 months is not enough time to make even
relatively minor changes to a console as you seem to think based on
other posts. Of course, one will be stupid to think that Sony and MS
have no idea what each other is doing. Sony of course will have some
advantage not in that they can change the console when MS is about to
release theirs but in that they will still be finalisaing theirs while
MS has finalised their so they can make some minor changes if
necessary (major changes will still be impossible). Also of course,
this is a continuum, since Sony will continually be designed their
console mostly after MS.


A three month launch lead might do MS some good, especially if they launched
before Xmas 2005 and the PS3 came out in 2006. That would give them a decent
little head start. But they would NEED to back that up with some AAA titles
right out of the gate. If people don't decide they NEED to have an Xbox 2,
they'll just sit on the fence until the PS3 comes out.

Agreed to some extent. But if they have a no of AAA titles, people are
going to get it even if the PS3 is 6 months or 12 months away.
Especially if the PS3 isn't going to be much better.

Of course, people might wait if they think the PS3 is gonna be a lot
better. But if it is, it'll be because Sony had more time to make and
because they could afford to include more expensive (at the time) tech
because they knew it would be cheap enough when released. Not so much
because they waited to see what MS did

On Sun, 01 Feb 2004 18:36:57 -0700, Sir William
wrote:



Well, now Apple develops apps for Windows (iTunes)...but they are
competitors in the OS market (if you give Apple enough respect to say they
are competitive).

Microsoft more or less owns Apple so know they aren't

BTW, those aren't Apple processors. They are IBM ones. I repeat they
are made by IBM for whoever wants them. Apple is probably the primary
vendor at the moment but others do in fact use them. I suspect they
were a good choice since MS needs them as cheap (wuth low power
consumption and heat output) as possible. They don't need to perform
that well as long as they're cheap... Intel and AMD processor may beat
the crap out of the IBM ones being used in terms of performance but
they cost to much, use too much power and output too much heat

On Tue, 03 Feb 2004 03:05:43 GMT, Tony Hill
wrote:


Actually I was thinking more of a port of the Windows-esk operating
system used on the current XBox. However their previous experience
with WinNT for PPC could come in handy with this port.

As for the drivers, they would be rather problematic, though a very
simplified and dumbed down version should suffice.
WindowsCE already supports PPCs...

Just going from the article that said game-platform testing was being
done on PowerMac G5 systems. I don't know if it's true or not, for
all I know the author of the article could have been full of ****. I
was just presenting a hypothesis for what they MIGHT use G5 systems
for in regards to the XBox2.

I'm quite certain that MS does indeed have several Powermac G5 systems
in use for their Mac software. They are, after all, one of the
largest developers of Mac software in the world.

Yep and they also more or less own Apple so I'm sure they must have
some interest.

Actually, I'm wondering if they're using the PowerMac G5s to try and
help them get Xbox games working on the Xbox2. It'll be the best
system to develop Virtual Xbox on until the Xbox Next is ready for
that purpose.

On Mon, 02 Feb 2004 06:40:15 GMT, "Mark Leuck"
wrote:
"Bobby" wrote in message
...
Interesting that MS is ditching nVidia in favour of ATI. That contract
must
be worth $$$ to ATI.

While I'm sure ATI profits from MS remember the goal is to lower the price
and knowing MS they'll renegociate to hell and back just like they did
Nvidia

Well it depend. If ATI tries to give MS a pumped up PC oriented GPU
then, yes they might have a problem. But if, as they have done before
and as other console GPU developers do, they give them a console
oriented GPU then I suspect things will be different.

On Wed, 04 Feb 2004 09:18:47 +0800, I wrote:
Actually, I'm wondering if they're using the PowerMac G5s to try and
help them get Xbox games working on the Xbox2. It'll be the best
system to develop Virtual Xbox on until the Xbox Next is ready for
that purpose.

Actually, they will probably be used for developing games etc as well.
I had originally thought they must be running MacOS but this doesn't
really make sense on second thought. Likely they are running WindowsCE
and are the best working models Microsoft has of Xbox Next at the
moment.

In article , Nil Einne
wrote:

On Sun, 01 Feb 2004 18:36:57 -0700, Sir William
wrote:



Well, now Apple develops apps for Windows (iTunes)...but they are
competitors in the OS market (if you give Apple enough respect to say they
are competitive).

Microsoft more or less owns Apple so know they aren't

No they don't, they had a very small amount of NON-voting shares which
they've sold anyway.

BTW, those aren't Apple processors. They are IBM ones. I repeat they
are made by IBM for whoever wants them. Apple is probably the primary
vendor at the moment but others do in fact use them. I suspect they
were a good choice since MS needs them as cheap (wuth low power
consumption and heat output) as possible. They don't need to perform
that well as long as they're cheap... Intel and AMD processor may beat
the crap out of the IBM ones being used in terms of performance but
they cost to much, use too much power and output too much heat

No-one apart from Apple and IBM uses them so far.
AMD has licensed some of the fabrication process but thats about it
iirc.
Intel and AMD don't beat the crap out of the G5 and you have to ignore
the tests which have the competing OS's "in the way"
Go read

On Wed, 04 Feb 2004 02:09:54 GMT, John
wrote:
BTW, those aren't Apple processors. They are IBM ones. I repeat they
are made by IBM for whoever wants them. Apple is probably the primary
vendor at the moment but others do in fact use them. I suspect they
were a good choice since MS needs them as cheap (wuth low power
consumption and heat output) as possible. They don't need to perform
that well as long as they're cheap... Intel and AMD processor may beat
the crap out of the IBM ones being used in terms of performance but
they cost to much, use too much power and output too much heat

No-one apart from Apple and IBM uses them so far.

In the case of the PPC 970, yeah it's only Apple and IBM. However IBM
has quite a number of customers for their other PPC processors,
including Nintendo for the Gamecube. Most of these chips don't show
up on people's desktops though, but they are used a lot in routers,
in-car computers, PVRs, etc. Heck, those rovers driving around on
Mars use PowerPC processors (I don't know if they're made by IBM or
Motorola though).

In short, IBM has plenty of companies that might chose to use their
PPC 970 processor at some point in time, and likely some have already
done so. However chances are that you won't hear much about most of
them.

AMD has licensed some of the fabrication process but thats about it
iirc.
Intel and AMD don't beat the crap out of the G5 and you have to ignore
the tests which have the competing OS's "in the way"
Go read

The PPC 970 (aka G5) is a nice little processor. It performs very
comperable to the P4 and the Athlon64/Opteron chips. At 130nm
production they were all in the same basic ballpark for power
consumption as well, and while you couldn't buy PPC 970 chips on their
own, I would imagine that the price was pretty similar.

-------------
Tony Hill
hilla underscore 20 at yahoo dot ca

On Wed, 4 Feb 2004, John wrote:

In article , Nil Einne
wrote:

On Sun, 01 Feb 2004 18:36:57 -0700, Sir William
wrote:

Well, now Apple develops apps for Windows (iTunes)...but they are
competitors in the OS market (if you give Apple enough respect to say they
are competitive).

BTW, those aren't Apple processors. They are IBM ones. I repeat they
are made by IBM for whoever wants them. Apple is probably the primary
vendor at the moment but others do in fact use them. I suspect they
were a good choice since MS needs them as cheap (wuth low power
consumption and heat output) as possible. They don't need to perform
that well as long as they're cheap... Intel and AMD processor may beat
the crap out of the IBM ones being used in terms of performance but
they cost to much, use too much power and output too much heat

No-one apart from Apple and IBM uses them so far.
AMD has licensed some of the fabrication process but thats about it
iirc.
Intel and AMD don't beat the crap out of the G5 and you have to ignore
the tests which have the competing OS's "in the way"
Go read

Their is a very good reason why no other vendor has shipped a PPC 970
based system outside of Apple and IBM - IBM hasn't sold PPC 970's to any
other vendor other than Apple in 2003. I can't remember if it was due to
an exclusive contract or not. However, that contract has expired and
several Linux hardware vendors have announced PPC 970 products for release
later in the year.