gamicus
Xbox
Xboxlogo
Xbox
Basic Information
Type(s)
 Home Console
Generation
 Sixth
Microsoft Corporation
Xbox 360
PlayStation 2, GameCube, Dreamcast
Unit(s) sold
 24,000,000+ (worldwide)
Halo 2
Technical Information
Networking
 Xbox Live
(discontinued as of April 15, 2010)
Storage
 8 or 10 GiB hard drive
Supported Media
 DVD-ROM, DVD Video, Audio CD
Save Capabilities
 Xbox Memory Card & Internal hard drive
Input(s)
Xbox Controller,Xbox Controller S
European Union European Release
March 14, 2002
CanadaUnited StatesMexico North American Release
November 16, 2001
Japan Japanese Release
February 22, 2002
Awards | Covers | Credits | Gallery | Help
Patches | Reviews | Screenshots | Videos
For the eighth-generation console, see Xbox One.

The Xbox is the first home console from the Xbox series manufactured by Microsoft. It was released on November 15, 2001 in North America, followed by a release in Austraolia, Europe, and Japan in early 2002. It is part of the sixth generation of video game hardware, competing with Sony's PlayStation 2 and Nintendo's GameCube. It was the first major console produce by an American company since the release of the Atari Jaguar in 1993.

The console was announced in March 2000. With the release of the PlayStation 2, which featured the ability to playback CD-ROMs and DVDs in addition to playing games, Microsoft became concerned that game consoles would threaten the personal computer as an entertainment device for living rooms. Most game consoles up to that point were built from custom hardware components, but the Xbox was built around standard personal computer components using variations of Microsoft Windows and DirectX as its operating system to support games and media playback. The console also was built with direct support for broadband connectivity to the Internet via an integrated Ethernet port, and with the release of Xbox Live, a subscription-based online gaming service, a year after the console's launch, Microsoft gained an early foothold in online gaming and made the Xbox a strong competitor in the sixth generation of consoles.

The Xbox was a launch success in North America, selling 1.5 million units before the end of 2001, aided by the popularity of one of the system's launch titles, Halo: Combat Evolved, which sold a million units by April 2002. Despite its popularity, however, Microsoft lost over $4 billion druing its market life as they were unable to make a steady profit off the console due to its manufacturing price being far more expensive that its retail price. Furthermore, it underpeformend outside of Western markets, especially in Japan due to an overabundance of games marketed towards Americans and the console's large size. It was vastly outsold by the PlayStation 2, but outsold the GameCube and the Sega Dreamcast.

The system was discontinued on June 4, 2006 for Japan; March 11, 2007 for Europe; and March 2, 2009 for North America.

History

The Xbox was initially developed within Microsoft by a small crew, including Seamus Blackley, a game developer and high energy physicist.

While some critics were initially concerned that the Xbox would allow Microsoft to extend its dominance of the PC software market to consoles, as of 2005 estimates show that the Xbox's share of the worldwide console market is comparable to the GameCube, and far behind that of the PlayStation 2. The Xbox did not sell well in Japan, due to poor acceptance of non-Japanese consoles within that market. Couple with limited Japanese developer support, few game choices and the large size of the hardware itself, it made for a very poor offering for Japanese players. Microsoft predicted that it would not make a profit on the Xbox for at least three years and that turned out to be correct; the division had its first profitable quarter in 2005.[citation needed]

In November 2002, Microsoft released the Xbox Live online gaming service, allowing subscribers to play Xbox games online with (or against) other subscribers around the world, as well as offer a content downloaded service for games. This online service only worked with broadband. The milestone of 1 million subscribers was announced on July 8, 2004.

Several internal hardware revisions were made over the manufacturing life of the console to discourage modding, cut manufacturing costs, and to provide a more reliable DVD-ROM drive.

Discontinuation and successors

The successor to the Xbox, the Xbox 360, was officially announced on May 12, 2005 on MTV. It was released on November 22, 2005 in North America. Support for out-of-warranty Xbox consoles was discontinued on March 2, 2009. Support for Xbox Live on the console ended on April 15, 2010.

Hardware

Microsoft built the Xbox around industry-standard PC hardware, unlike the traditionally proprietary design of nearly all other gaming consoles.

The inclusion of the hard drive not only served as a disk cache for faster game loading times (compared to the Playstation 2) and repository for saved game information (eliminating the need for sold-separately memory cards), it also allowed users to download and save new content for their games from Xbox Live. Players were also able to copy music from standard Audio CDs, to partially or completely replace the soundtrack of Xbox games that supported custom soundtracks; these were all firsts in console history. Custom soundtracks were often supported in non-cinematic games (e.g. racing/driving games) where the music is inconsequential to what is happening in the game.

Although the Xbox is based on the x86 architecture and ran an operating system that is believed to have been inspired by the Windows NT architecture that powered Windows 2000, however, it is not a derivative of either. The Xbox also incorporated restrictions designed to prevent behaviour or functionality not approved by Microsoft.

The Xbox is much larger and heavier than its contemporaries, and shipped with an unusually large controller. The size of the console is mainly due to the large, tray-loading DVD-ROM drive and the standard 3.5" hard drive. Despite managing to be smaller and lighter than similar commodity PCs, the Xbox has found itself a target of mild derision, as gamers poked 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. While some elements of the Xbox's design, like break-away cables for the controllers (to prevent the console from being yanked off the shelf) take the size of the console into account, it has undoubtedly hurt the system's sales to the space-conscious Japanese.

Another common complaint about the system was that the Duke controller was seen as too large for some people. For the Japanese Xbox launch, a new and smaller controller was introduced, a design which was subsequently released in other markets as the "Controller S", which eventually replaced the original design. Currently, all Xbox consoles come with a "Controller S", and the original version of the controller (also known as 'The Duke') is no longer sold.

Detailed specifications

Official Xbox accessories

Audio/video connectors

Numerous unofficial third-party cables and breakout boxes were sold that provided combinations of outputs not found in these official video packages; however, with the exception of a few component-to-VGA transcoders and custom-built VGA boxes, the four official video packages represent all of the Xbox's possible outputs. This output selectivity is made possible by the Xbox's SCART-like AVIP port.

Networking

Multimedia

Controllers and removable storage

Xbox and DirectX

Microsoft's set of low-level APIs for game development and multimedia purposes, DirectX, was used as a basis for the Xbox's hardware programming (as well as its name, which implies "DirectX Box"). The API was developed jointly between Microsoft and NVIDIA, whose chips power the Xbox graphics. The Xbox API is similar to DirectX version 8.1, but is non-updateable just like other console technologies.

Modding the Xbox

The popularity of the Xbox inspired efforts to circumvent the built-in hardware and software security mechanisms (sometimes in order to use the Xbox as a low cost web server), as well as to add customized design touches to the console's case (similar to PC case modding). Hardware modding involved anything from simply replacing the console's green decorative "jewel" with a custom-designed one to opening up the case and installing a modchip.

Software modding is much less intrusive, and only involves running software exploits to trick the Xbox into running unsigned executable code. This allowed running an alternate dashboard such as Avalaunch, Evolution-X or UnleashX and in turn made playing original homebrew games through arcade and games console emulators possible. This was especially attractive as the Xbox is designed to output to TVs, and high-quality controllers and arcade sticks are available for use.

The original hard drive can also be replaced with a larger one. Then, Xbox games could be copied from the DVD to the hard drive, and then played directly from the hard drive. This required a modded Xbox using one of the alternative dashboards, and is used by scrupulous users to eliminate load times or leave their games in storage, and by unscrupulous users to play illegally copied games.

Beyond gaming, a modded Xbox can be used as a media center with the Xbox Media Center software (XBMC), which allowed the playing of DVDs without the $30 DVD kit, and also allowed the user to play music and video files from the Xbox hard drive, or stream it from another computer over a network. A modded Xbox can even be configured to run Linux or a Microsoft Windows as its operating system. ReactOS also had a version capable of loading on the Xbox, but development of this was discontinued.

Modding an Xbox may require opening the Xbox case, and most internal hardware modifications will render an Xbox unable to participate in Xbox Live, which is why many modders used a switch to enable them to enable or disable the modifications to the Xbox at will. As of November 2004, Microsoft took new action, and banned Xboxes with hard drive modifications from the Xbox Live service.

See also

References


External Links