Monthly Archive for November, 2005
Page 5 of 8
AnandTech have somehow gotten their hands on a premium edition Xbox 360 and for your pleasure they have taken it apart. This comprehensive tutorial is filled with pictures and with some easy to acquire (if you haven’t already gotten it) equipment.
Inside they discovered the Microsoft logo slapped all over the PowerPC-based CPU, Xenos GPU, and elsewhere clearly demonstrating the level of control Microsoft has had over this release compared to the original Xbox, which largely made use of off-the-shelf PC components.
I hope this doesn’t mean that Microsoft has ruined the console. probably not. The pictures are quite cool and even if you won’t want to take your apart if you get one it is still interesting to look at. I can see they have made the disassembly of the console harder than for the original Xbox. I took my original Xbox apart one weekend when I was bored and I can’t even explain the amount of dust that had accumulated over 2 and a half years that I found inside. Granted this 360 will have no dust inside since it is brand new.
There has been a lot of Xbox 360 news over this week and there will be for the next few weeks as the Xbox release is soon (Nov 22nd) in the US and everyone is excited and ready with their camping gear. The launch is still half a month away for us in the UK 
.
Microsoft has revealed the launch list of games which will be debuting along with the 360 itself on Nov 22nd. For the UK we have 15 games while for the US they have 18 (damn those Americans!) The games that will be in the UK and the US are: (15)
- Amped 3 (2K Sports)
- Call of Duty 2 (Activision)
- Condemned: Criminal Origins (SEGA)
- FIFA 06: Road to FIFA World Cup (Electronic Arts)
- GUN (Activision)
- Kameo: Elements of Power (Microsoft Game Studios)
- Perfect Dark Zero (Microsoft Game Studios)
- Peter Jackson’s King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie(Ubisoft)
- Madden NFL 06 (Electronic Arts)
- NBA Live 06 (Electronic Arts)
- Need for Speed: Most Wanted (Electronic Arts)
- Project Gotham Racing 3 (Microsoft Game Studios)
- Quake 4 (Activision, id software and Raven Software Corp.)
- Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 06(Electronic Arts)
- Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland (Activision)
The US and Canada will receive these extra games: (3)
- NBA 2K6 (2K Sports)
- NHL 2K6 (2K Sports)
- Ridge Racer 6 (Namco Ltd.)
To be honest the only game I’m a bit annoyed about that is not coming to the UK is Ridge Racer 6 as my friend has Ridge Racer on his PSP and he really likes it. I have also tried it out at a local Gamestation and I really liked the game, but ultimately I went with Wipeout as the game for my PSP as I loved it even more.
You may or may not know that Microsoft released its backwards compatibility list for the Xbox 360. Now you take all of these games and take it away from all the games playable on the Xbox and you get the games you can’t play. The games “you may have to sell or trade in“. Sadly TimeSplitters 2 and The Sims Bustin’ Out appear on that list. I need to think fast as the games will be worth more now than they will be after the release of the 360. But I really like those games and I don’t want to trade it in. Or maybe I trade those two games in to get a discount on a new Xbox 360 game? I will have to make my mind up soon…
As soon as I saw this I was amazed. It looks so cool! If you haven’t heard of the iPod wizard software, it allows you to change certain parts of the iPod firmware. Such as replacing the heading text to display anything you want. E.g. instead of ‘iPod’ display’Balazs iPod’. I have heard of this before but I have never tried it because I was afraid it would bugger up my iPod. I want to get a iPod w/ video but i really don’t have the money to fund it, and as I currently have a working iPod it is pretty stupid to ask it as a present. Anyway for Christmas I want a 360. It would be good to have a 5G iPod but I won’t die without it. Continuing with the story, this guy has used the iPod wizard software and the Apple iPod updater software to get into his nano and add cool icons next to the menu labels. It looks really cool!! If I had a nano I would so want to try it out as this is even cooler than the other hacks done using iPod wizard.
Make Magazine have an article about a similar sort of hack with iPod wizard, so you can read it here for more indepth knowledge before (if) you start.
NOTE: If you ruin your iPod don’t come crying to me, you are to blame if your nano becomes a paper weight (if it is that heavy at all).
There has been quite a lot of Xbox 360 news this weekend, probably because the realease date in the US is closing in. Anyway, someone found on Kotaku the manual for the Xbox 360. So you maybe thinking ‘anyone could have faked this’. But could anyone really have gone to the FCC and put the file there. The file comes in a PDF (Adobe Reader) format and runs 26 pages long. It seems quite real to me, though I too was skeptic at first. The manual has the look and technical content that a real manual would have.
The link was a bit funny on my Mac with Firefox 1.5RC2 and downloads a ‘.cgi’ file. If that happens to you either rename it to ‘.pdf’ or just open it with Adobe Reader (or your favourite PDF reader).
Some good man has been able to get ahold of the Xbox 360 allocations list for Best Buy stores in the US. So if you want to find out how many consoles your local Best Buy is going to get then find out your store number and click the link below to see the tables.
You can see from the image above that some stores are getting as little as 32 consoles alltogether. Could this mean a shortage. A calculation done DM:
The grand total of systems shipped to BestBuy, cores and premiums together is around 42,200. My math was all done manually so if anyone wants to check it, please do. According to a distributor I talked to, the first shipment will be about 250k Premiums and 95k Cores in the US. I did not believe him but now that I see this, it just might be true. Maybe this shortage is real after all, or maybe a bunch of BestBuy stores are missing from the list. Good estimation tool though.
It seems a bit weird to me how they would only get this many 360′s for all the people wanting them. But it does indicate on the bottom of each table that this amount is the amount that Microsoft is comitted to ship and that actual numbers may vary. So by November 22nd some people maybe happy, some may not or everyone will be happy. Lets hope this shortage is nonsense and everyone will get their 360′s in time (that includes me!)
[Kudos to dopeboyfresh67 for all the tables]
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I have no idea how this guy managed it, but he has gotten himself a retail Xbox 360. He videotapes himself opening the packaging and showing us the various bits and pieces. This confirmes the huge power supply of the Xbox 360 and he even shows many shots of it next to the 360 and starts laughing. This includes countries like Spain, France and Germany. This is probably real because everything inside the box looks real and it seems as if it is just ready to be put on the shelf. It just has the looks of a retail model and not something that would be a testing model. Just watch the video and see. Although the power supply is huge I’d rather have it external than make a huge console. At least I can hide it when it is not inside the 360 itself. Never the less I still don’t like the power supply being that huge. Oh well, I’m still getting the 360 no matter what. The power adapter shown is of a european model (not UK) model that use the 2 prong connector.
It was GameKult who managed to get ahold of the 360. It is a French site and they have an article here about it. Thanks to Google you can get a rough translation of it here. It is by no means perfect but you can get the jist of it.
So you Windows users know that there is a feature in Windows called Hibernation. This puts your computer into a sleep mode where it doesn’t consume any power, but it saves all your setting and everything you were doing. Well this hasn’t been available on the Mac and with the introduction of the new PowerBooks there is an option called ‘Safe Sleep’.
According to an Apple article:
Safe Sleep ensures that data stored in main memory will not be lost should the system shut down due to a loss of power during sleep mode. Prior to your system entering sleep, Safe Sleep automatically saves the contents of main memory […] to the hard drive. In the event the battery becomes completely depleted while the system is asleep, the computer will shut down. But when a power adapter is connected or a freshly charged battery is installed, the PowerBook can be restarted and it will automatically return to the desktop state that existed prior to entering sleep.
When starting up from safe sleep mode, a progress bar indicates that the computer is waking from sleep while the background is in grayscale and blurred. I managed to take a picture with my camera which can be seen above and small thumbnails below.
The thumbnails above show my mac before safe sleep [left image] and my mac during the bootup from safe sleep [right image]
Safe Sleep is so-far only officially available on the new PowerBooks. But Safe Sleep is very much software based , not hardware based. With Apple’s release of mac OS 10.4.3, Safe Sleep can be enabled on many Macs thanks to an excellent hack. To do so first insure Mac OS X, is up-to-date to with version 10.4.3 (or above). If not, run Software Update.
This worked fine for me, but I think I will disable it until I need to use it as I like the instant-on function of my Mac Mini. One thing to note is that during normal sleep mode my mac would display a ‘pulsating’ light to show it is in sleep mode, but when in safe sleep the light is turned off.
CAUTION: Proceed with this at your own risk, do not blame me or the ‘author’ of this hack if you do something wrong or it doesn’t work correctly. By clicking the link above you agree to this.
You may or may not know that the Xbox hasn’t been as big of a hit in Japan as it was everywhere else and Microsoft really wants to resolve this problem with the launch of the Xbox 360. Their solution is to create as much hype as possible. They have created an Xbox 360 lounge and now some TV Adverts. There are 3 adverts to see, but two of them are new. My favourite one was the ad with the many ‘rings of light’ from the 360 drawn everywhere. A screenshot is shown above. I didn’t like the rest, they were pretty crap boring.
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