Hardware

[icycalm]

New design coming out in the US on April 29th for $480. Includes an HDMI port and cable, and a 120GB hard drive. Looks good too.


Game Watch report

Official page

[Jedah]

Should be released that way earlier. Right now there's a big 360 user base, whose majority will feel cheated with the 20GB + No HDMI machines. I don't think its a good countermeasure to PS3, games should be. By the way the PS3 came to Greece last Friday. 3 of my friends bought it along with some launch titles. None of them feel justified. After spending 700+ euros for console & games plus a 1000-2000 for an 1080i/p TV, it's damn hard to shout that you didn't get what you expected. Thank God, Virtua Tennis 3 saved the disaster when we got together for 4 player matches. After an hour we switched to Pro Evo 6...

[bullethell]

And so it Begins...

The PlayStation Empire is falling. Devil May Cry 4 will be played with a 360 pad in the near future. Senko no Rode attracts STG fans and Ikaruga is online. Apart from FFXIII Hairesis and the final game of the MGS saga I can't really find any other reasons to buy one, at least for the moment.

[zak]

I was thinking of getting a new console this fall, and this looks pretty sweet. There's no way I'm buying a PS3 just for MGS4, so I guess I'll get a 360. Lost Odyssey has me pretty excited for some reason.

I don't have a HDTV though, and I don't want to buy one. I'd rather buy a gaming PC, or a new guitar, or something.

[Lain]

They should have called it xblox360 1337. Seriously why did they bother.

[dementia]

I'm unimpressed. No 65nm chip. Still just as loud. No HDMI 1.3, no DD+, no TrueHD sound.

I'm probably going the save some cash by just picking up the Premium 360 instead, even though it doesn't have HDMI at all.

EDIT: That new DVI cable it comes with (pictured between the component and HDMI cables); does that work on non-Elite Xbox 360s? It looks like it might form that angle, but it would make sense that it plugs into both the Elite's HDMI port (to output digital video) and the Analog port (for Audio output).

[Molloy]

The definately need to make it quieter. It's a bloody loud machine. I thought they'd have that fixed 6 months after the original machine came out.

[Ex Omni]

Fantastic idea. I don't see how anyone but the most unreasonable could feel cheated. Everyone expected a larger hard drive, if they needed it, or don't feel the 360 they bought was worth their $400, they shouldn't have bought it in the first place.

My one problem is that they failed to add HDMI on all the units universal, across the board, on top of that they failed to note that the other units do not contain HDMI (all the boxes say is that the elite includes a CABLE, not that it's the only unit CAPABLE of HDMI). Also I wish they had just dropped an 80gb HD on the premium, and moved the 20gb to the core system (keeping the current prices).

[El Chaos]

Microsoft will release on November 10 a limited Modern Warfare 2 edition that introduces their own 250GB HDD and includes the game and an additional controller.



http://www.xbox.com/en-US/hardware/x/xb ... e2console/

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/press/2009/0915-mw2.htm

In the style of newer "Elite" systems, it lacks both the HDMI cable and optical audio adapter and the supplied AV cable is missing the component video output RCA connectors.

[El Chaos]

Microsoft unveiled their redesigned 360 console.



It features integrated Wi-Fi connectivity, two more USB ports on the back (for a total of five), a 250GB hard disk drive (it's incompatible with previous HDDs, though) and optical audio output.

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/hardware/default.htm

[zinger]

I need a 360, and I'd get a chipped European system right away if it weren't for the potential (?) risks of getting banned from the Live service. So I'm considering getting a Japanese system instead, since I'll be playing mostly Japanese games anyway. What I'd like to know though is if it's possible to change the system menu language to English and whether they will let me use the XBLA service in English and in the country of Sweden with a Japanese console? Does XBLA have any region limitations at all anyway?

[El Chaos]

Microsoft will release a controller with a slightly redesigned D-pad along with a new Play and Charge kit on November 9.



The D-pad is switchable from the traditional "disc" shape to a "plus" shape by twisting it about 90 degrees to the right or the left.





http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kz6aTTKE6hE

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/Xbox360/Acces ... rollerdpad

[Victory]

zinger, the region limitations on XBLA work thusly: you have to make an account in a region to access the XBLA of that region, and you have to buy Microsoft Points separately for each region where you want to buy something.

I have my Japanese console's language set to English and its locale set to Finland. The only time you have to navigate something in Japanese is while you are on a Japanese account buying and downloading stuff (unlike European XBLA, Japanese XBLA is not localized and ignores your console language setting). Afterwards you can play everything on your European account as long as you stay on the same console.

[zinger]

Thanks Victory, that's great news!

[icycalm]

So G.rev finally managed to sell you a 360, eh? Still, I'd wait until the game actually comes out if I were you. You never know, they might change their mind again and release it on the iPhone instead.

[zinger]

G.rev and Yagawa: Pink Sweets, Muchi Muchi Pork, Mamoru-kun and now Strania. And then there's Radiant Silvergun which I've only played a few credits of before, as well as a couple of other super cool Cave STG's.

[icycalm]

Xbox 360 Prestige:

http://videogamerx.gamedonga.co.kr/1872503

MUCH better-looking than the hideous redesign (though I still prefer the original version -- this stuff's is just about as bland as a DVD player by this point...), and with a 2TB hard drive and in-built Kinect. Good stuff, though of course we should have had a new console by now...

[El Chaos]

Seems like that is just a conceptual design by Joseph Dumary.

http://www.yankodesign.com/2011/11/23/xbox-evolution/

http://www.coroflot.com/dumary

[icycalm]

Here's the factory reset code for the latest version of the dashboard, if anyone wants it:

http://www.se7ensins.com/forums/threads ... et.673502/

Settings
System
Console Settings
System Info
LT, RT, X, Y, LB, RB, X, X, X, X

And to format your hard drive you simply select it, press Y and pick the format option. I needed a fresh start, so I did both. And there's now an option to activate 512MB of free cloud storage, so you can move your saved games there before you do it. It's a nice feature, but note that the file moving is quite slow...

And note that formatting the hard drive and resetting everything to factory defaults does NOT wipe out any credit card information you may have stored on the machine, so selling a 360 is apparently not a good idea lol.

http://www.geek.com/articles/games/even ... -20120330/

Personally, I don't care because I never sell anything game-related, but others may be interested to know this.

However, the article says that there is a way to delete everything, if you can be bothered to:

So what can you do to stop your discarded system from turning over your entire life savings? Well, there’s not much you can do if you’ve already traded it in. However, for those that haven’t yet there’s something you can do to wipe your drive. Detach the hard drive from the Xbox 360, hook it up to your computer, and use Darik’s Boot and Nuke. This program will delete any contents on the drive it can detect. Or you can always complain to Microsoft to create a better factory restore program.

[El Chaos]

New redesign available today in the USA: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013- ... -announced

[icycalm]

Much, MUCH better-looking than v.2. I still prefer the original (it looks more like a game console, and hence has more character), but this takes second place. More details:

http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/06/10/ ... l-revealed

Microsoft has announced a new model of the Xbox 360. It is smaller, sleeker, and quieter than the prior "slim" model. It's available starting today in the United States, UK, Canada and Australia, with more territories coming soon, according to Microsoft.

Pricing for the slimmed down model will be the same as the older model, with a 4GB (no Kinect) edition running $199.99 and a 250GB model priced at $299.99. A 4GB system that includes the Kinect will cost $299.99.

More interestingly, from the same article:

The company will also bring two games per month, free of charge, to Xbox Live Gold members. The first game is Fable III, available now. July's two games are scheduled to be Assassin's Creed 2 and Halo 3. Additionally, it was announced that "hundreds" of games are still on the way for Xbox 360.

And I just rebought Halo 3 (the Platinum version this time, because my copy of the original is in France) a few days ago...

[icycalm]

Apparently the 360 has "crushed blacks". I haven't noticed anything so far because I don't color calibrate my displays. But I will start doing it once I set up my two new gaming rooms.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=758991

Why didnt people complain about the ''crushed blacks'' on the 360

A lot of 360 games were darker,had more vibrant colors and the ps3 games were lighter.Like the situation with the x1 and PS4, but people praised the 360's superior colors and blacks. Isnt a result of the different API's? why the sudden shift?

[El Chaos]

The Digital Foundry guys discussed this: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digit ... dmi?page=2

There has long been debate around our Face-Off screenshots which show darker, richer colours on the Xbox 360 versions of many games. The lushness of the images tends to make the PlayStation 3 shots look washed out in comparison, and there are still the occasional suggestions that we're running the PS3 games in limited-range RGB mode (we've been full-range RGB since the year dot, even though most HDMI capture cards still don't work with it properly).

Accurate screenshot exports on 360 aren't quite so common, but thankfully Microsoft kit out journalists with a tool from the XDK development kit that allows us to FTP into debug consoles and test kits and - yes - dump video RAM for screenshot purposes. Sony isn't quite so forthcoming with its own equivalent (ProDG's Target Manager) alas.

It's worth pointing out that you are still getting the pin-point precision that HDMI offers, but getting the right colour balance is going to require some pretty nifty display-side tweaking. There is the danger that the ramped up gamma will produce black crush style artifacting that strips away some element of image definition. The accuracy of our frame-rate analysis tools is not affected, however.

The Xbox 360 does process internally at 10-bit component and you can see some dithering artifacts if you look closely enough at the pixel level. And of course the Xbox 360 started out without any support for HDMI at all - it wasn't introduced until the Zephyr model that debuted in the form of the Xbox 360 Elite. Beforehand, the best output you could get was analogue component or VGA. Could this bizarre gamma shift be a bug within the new HANA controller that replaced the previous, analogue-only ANA chip?

Well, a comparison of component up against the framebuffer suggests the issue is not related just to the 360's HDMI output. While the scale of the gamma shift is different, it's still clearly not the right colour balance, whether you're using analogue component or the HDMI interface's YPbPr digital component alternative.

Quite why this happens is something we were uncertain about before a kindly developer clued us in. From what we've learned this week, it appears that this ramping up of the gamma is actually deliberate on Microsoft's part. The actual reason it is in place on the Xbox 360 is because Microsoft believe that it looks better on the average TV. Bearing in mind the breadth of displays available and how they are typically so badly calibrated when you buy them (brightness and contrast are often ramped up in order to make them stand out on the shop floor), we can't help but think that this is a call that the developer should make.

Developers are made aware of the gamma conversion, and Microsoft provide an exact table of the transformation so it can be reversed should developers wish to factor it out while they build the framebuffer - but with the black crush we see on occasion, we can only wonder if this is a 100 per cent non-destructive process. However, the fact that this option is there means that the issue probably can't be changed with a firmware update, as the chances are that "corrected" games will then look very strange indeed. Properly calibrated games like Burnout Paradise for example will no longer be displayed correctly.

Going back to our Face-Off comparison shots, the fact that people automatically assume that it is the PS3 game that is "washed out" as opposed to the 360 version having the gamma arbitrarily adjusted suggests that perhaps Microsoft has it right, that maybe the image is more pleasing to the human eye.

Update: An interesting email from a key multiplatform developer this morning corroborates the fact that 360 operates internally in component, the REC.709 standard to be precise, and this contact suggests that in theory it is the correct way to address an HDTV, though in practise sticking to RGB in the way that PS3 and PC do is more developer-friendly. He also suggests that the richer colour we see in 360 Face-Off shots might be explained in some cases because so much development is 360-led: calibration takes place on 360 and isn't corrected on PS3, resulting in the "washed out" look. However, even factoring in the REC.709 component standard, this developer also believes that 360 HDMI output does require adjustment.

Regardless, there does appear to be something rather odd going on here - what is the purpose of the reference levels? Displays operate either at limited RGB (360's "standard") or full-range RGB ("expanded" on the dash) so you do have to wonder quite why there is an "intermediate" setting at all when to the best of our knowledge there is no hardware that supports it. The intermediate setting does tone back the gamma effect a little, but this setting definitely isn't operating with full-range RGB so the gamut of available colours is lower.