Onewingedangel22
Xbox sucks I_D get over it. There are NO good games on it that you cant find on a PC or OTHER system. The xbox is like a little retarded computer that rides the short bus to school becuase its not as good as a real one.
I have to disagree.
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[3] 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 is the most played game on the Xbox Live service. 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 Xbox 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.
In 2005, the long-awaited PC titles Doom 3, Half-Life 2 and Far Cry Instincts and the best hit was Halo 2 which were released for Xbox.
The Xbox was the first console to incorporate a hard disk drive as standard, 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 older 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[citation needed], 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" 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 and injuring a nearby person or pet.
The original game controller design, which was particularly large, was similarly often criticized since it was ill-suited to those with small hands because of the large handles. 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 that was launched with the Xbox (known as Controller "O" Controller "F"[For fatty] 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).
However, 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.
The Xbox incorporates a built-in Ethernet adapter. The Xbox's NV2A graphics chipset is a derivative of Nvidia's GeForce 3.
* 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.
o Intel IA-32 instruction set
o 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.
o 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.
o 133 MHz FSB.
o 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
o 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.
o Theoretical Geometry Rate: 115+ million vertices/second
o Theoretical Particle Performance: 125 M/s
o Pipeline Configuration: 4 pixel pipelines with 2 texture units each
o Theoretical Pixel Fill Rate: 932 Megapixels/second (233 MHz x 4 pipelines)
o Theoretical Texture Fill Rate: 1,864 Megatexels/second (932 MP x 2 texture units)
o 4 Simultaneous Textures
o 6:1 Compressed Textures through DDS
o Full Scene Anti-Aliasing
* Storage Medium: 2-5x DVD (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)
o Audio Channels: 64 3D channels (up to 256 stereo voices)
o 3D Audio Support: HRTF Sensaura 3D enhancement.
o MIDI DLS2 Support
o 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 software)
* Maximum Resolution (2x32bpp frame buffers Z): 640(vert.)480(horiz)
o 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 milimeters (12.5 × 4 × 10.5 in)
I'm done... and I am a Sony Whore!!!
xd
