Microsoft leaks details on XBOX 2

[joe smith]

Shouldn't that give a HUGE advantage to the ATARI 2600?

Sure did. How many XBox did Microsoft sell in the 1980s and 1990s?

And how huge is the advantage now? Why anyone bothers to compete with the
ATARI 2600 in the first place, if it has like 20+ year lead? Let's be
realistic here, the key isn't if you launch a month or two before your
opposition, but if you have the product the customers want. Timing plays a
small role in the equation, but more generally Microsoft has to make people
WANT to have the XBOX2. It's that "simple".

HALO was the reason I got XBOX. Since then most of the titles have been
something I most of the time have easily skipped, but it makes a really nice
"mediacenter" when you mod it, and replace the puny hard-drive with
something half-decent, and stream videos off your home fileserver sitting in
the basement. For that, it's ideal especially when you have the xbox remote
controller.

I would have bought XBOX years earlier, too, even as mediacenter only w/o
the possibility to run games on the darn thing. It's a nice extra, but
currently there is lacking on game titles I would be willing to spend my
time on, not to mention pay money to spend my time on. They should
concentrate on that aspect and suddenly larger audience will be interested
in the darn thing. I don't have delusions that people who run modified
console are anykind of mainstream market for'em.

Obviously the bunch at Microsoft are pretty smart, generally, so I would
think they already decided what kind of market they want to appeal to. If
you sell the system for "gamers only", it means you're going head-to-head
with SONY on the area where they are the strongest: content. But if they try
to make appeal to broader range of different markets, it means they will
have to be interested in making profit for actual console units sold (which
isn't the case, I think their business model was to make profit with the
software, correct me if I am wrong). Therefore it doesn't make any sense to
try to make profit selling as many consoles as possible, if the consoles
will not generate income in a long term from the customers. So the guys like
me, who buy very little games and use the console as mediacenter, are
actually net loss for them.

Therefore, I came to the simplest conclusion that they need ****ing better
content and +-few months for the launchdate doesn't help much if their
content side is ****ed. I'm not saying that their current catalogue is
crappy, I'm just saying that in MY OPINION there isn't anything for me,
besides a few titles which I enjoy very much. I'll buy the next console
from'em aswell because I like everything new and shiny.

Excuse me, have to run, they are coming to get me again.

 

[joe smith]

I hope XBOX 2 has a DVI 1080i output.

720P is enough for me, most plasmas in 50-60" range end up at something like
1280x768, the HDTV's I seen are mostly projection tv's, which suck, even
when using the TI's technique (seen only Samsung so far using that one).

There doesn't seem to be much in the way of display devices, even if you
have the money and secondly HDMI should catch on over the stupid analogic
connectors like Y/C, RGB, YCbCr (component) and others. Atleast the route
from the wall socket to my display is fully-digital (tm), DigiTV is using
analogic transmission still which is a caveat, but image quality is a hell
of a lot better than on traditional analogic cable, terrestrial or sat. From
the receiver the mpeg2 stream goes to the display with DVI-D cable so no
loss there. But HDMI would allow larger resolutions, etc. linking ALL
devices using the same fully-digital-no-compression-highresolution
signaling, and then digital (gigabit ethernet will do for now) connection
between devices generally and we're all set.

We have all the technology from years ago but we need the Standard to start
things moving. Blablablablaaa... but before these basic issues aren't
adequatly handled I think everything else is secondary in priority. After
the industry agrees on a standard (HDMI seems to be going well ahead), we
just don't get mass-marketed products which you can mix together to
functional home theatre system, fully digitally. Now it's mixing this and
that analogic technique and a mass of cables. I don't have anything against
cables per-se, but if there was standard, preferrably somekind of switch
topography could add channels if running out of bandwidth from p2p.

20 more years, I think, then we got it. Or blow ourselves up before that.
Which ever comes first.

p.s. In Japan they seem to have a clue, which way to go regarding digital
broadcasting (D3-D4 ring a bell?).. Europe's DigiTV is just plain obsolete
already even before it's fully adopted.