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I'm not sure what you're suggesting here. The X in Xbox is a leftover from its early development when it was the DirectX Box. The X in DirectX came about as s

I'm not sure what you're suggesting here. The X in Xbox is a leftover from its early development when it was the DirectX Box. The X in DirectX came about as shorthand for all the various DirectWhatever APIs that Microsoft was introducing in the late 90s. EDIT: If the suggestion is that the porting should be relatively easy because the Xbox runs DirectX, well, kind of. It's not a 1:1 mirror of the API available on Windows, and the actual hardware is fairly divergent from what you find in PCs, even if it is x86 again.

joezydeco 11y ago
The overarching point was that Xbox was supposed to eliminate all this hardware/driver/platform incompatibility, wasn't it?
- chx 11y ago
  Nope. Citation needed. That never was the point.
- commandar 11y ago
  I don't know that Microsoft has ever made that claim. The original Xbox was the closest to standard PC hardware, and even it diverged somewhat from what was available on standard PCs at the time at both a hardware level and API level. The common APIs make it easier to develop cross-platform, but the platforms are still different.
breakingcups 11y ago
Depending on ones definition of fairly divergent, that's not really true. It is a near-standard GeForce 3 chipset, just without some legacy stuff like a keyboard controller. Other than that it has a Celeron 733 MHz CPU, an Vidia GeForce 3MX, 64MB RAM, a 8GB hard disk, an (admittedly non-standard) DVD drive and an nForce Ethernet card. Controller ports are USB underneath. So yeah, some hardware differs but it is mostly cosmetic and as a software developer it shouldn't matter to you. See https://web.archive.org/web/20080209140715/http://www.xbox-linux.org/wiki/Porting_an_Operating_System_to_the_Xbox_HOWTO https://web.archive.org/web/20080209140715/http://www.xbox-l... for more information.
- castell 11y ago
  Your parent meant in his last sentence the Xbox One (aka Xbox #3), you wrote correctly about Xbox 1.
  - breakingcups 11y ago
    Wow, my bad! I had no idea they switched back to an x86 architecture after the 360.
    - commandar 11y ago
      Both the Xbox One and the PS4 are running on very similar AMD APU platforms, with Sony opting for a variant with considerably more GPU power.
- commandar 11y ago
  As castell pointed out, I was actually making reference to the Xbox One there. I did reference the original Xbox in a later post, and I mostly had the GPU in mind there. The NV2A is close to the GeForce3 in design, but it's still not quite the same chip that was available to consumers. It was kind of a stepping stone between the GF3 and GF4 and was designed to support some things that would later show up in DX9 while not truly being a DX9 GPU. Close, but not quite the same as standard PC hardware, and that in-between generations nature of the hardware and APIs means that optimizing for it as a target platform is going to require extra time to get it working as well on "true" DX8.1 or DX9 hardware.

joezydeco 11y ago

The overarching point was that Xbox was supposed to eliminate all this hardware/driver/platform incompatibility, wasn't it?

chx 11y ago
Nope. Citation needed. That never was the point.
commandar 11y ago
I don't know that Microsoft has ever made that claim. The original Xbox was the closest to standard PC hardware, and even it diverged somewhat from what was available on standard PCs at the time at both a hardware level and API level. The common APIs make it easier to develop cross-platform, but the platforms are still different.

breakingcups 11y ago

Depending on ones definition of fairly divergent, that's not really true. It is a near-standard GeForce 3 chipset, just without some legacy stuff like a keyboard controller. Other than that it has a Celeron 733 MHz CPU, an Vidia GeForce 3MX, 64MB RAM, a 8GB hard disk, an (admittedly non-standard) DVD drive and an nForce Ethernet card. Controller ports are USB underneath. So yeah, some hardware differs but it is mostly cosmetic and as a software developer it shouldn't matter to you. See https://web.archive.org/web/20080209140715/http://www.xbox-linux.org/wiki/Porting_an_Operating_System_to_the_Xbox_HOWTO https://web.archive.org/web/20080209140715/http://www.xbox-l... for more information.

castell 11y ago
Your parent meant in his last sentence the Xbox One (aka Xbox #3), you wrote correctly about Xbox 1.
- breakingcups 11y ago
  Wow, my bad! I had no idea they switched back to an x86 architecture after the 360.
  - commandar 11y ago
    Both the Xbox One and the PS4 are running on very similar AMD APU platforms, with Sony opting for a variant with considerably more GPU power.
commandar 11y ago
As castell pointed out, I was actually making reference to the Xbox One there. I did reference the original Xbox in a later post, and I mostly had the GPU in mind there. The NV2A is close to the GeForce3 in design, but it's still not quite the same chip that was available to consumers. It was kind of a stepping stone between the GF3 and GF4 and was designed to support some things that would later show up in DX9 while not truly being a DX9 GPU. Close, but not quite the same as standard PC hardware, and that in-between generations nature of the hardware and APIs means that optimizing for it as a target platform is going to require extra time to get it working as well on "true" DX8.1 or DX9 hardware.