I will NEVER forget booting up San Andreas on that original Xbox, and wondering why one of the radio stations in game had SO much Weird Al. That’s when it clicked in my 11 year old head that all my saved songs could be played in game. Blew my mind.
Too bad it's a dead feature in most modern consoles, maybe there's some system level Spotify access (which I'll say is a bit better for convenience) would fill in that gap, at least for now.
Yeah it's a shame we can't upload songs anymore and play it in our games due to DRM nonsense. I remember one of the first games you could do that with on the Xbox was project gothem racing.
Yeah you can use spotify or apple music on both ps5 and xbox with playback controls integrated into the guide-menu. Pretty sure plex is also an option if you have music shared through it. On the xbox it's easier for independent developers to just publish apps so there are in fact media players that will just play files off usb devices too.
I worked on a launch window game for the original Xbox. We had a gigantic file with all of the game data and our plan was to dump it into the utility region of the hard drive, interleaving the install with a FMV tutorial that we would force the player to watch. Microsoft caught wind of this and I remember being in a call where Ed Fries bitched us out and said, I remember this as clear as day, "have you ever played a console game WITH AN INSTALL SCREEN!?" We wound up decreasing the size of the install file, killing the tutorial video, and then hiding the install during a string of countless, unbearably long licensing screens, which we claimed were required by the licensors, in order to make Microsoft stop complaining about how long the initial ioad was.
I'm curious what led you to have to dump that much game data on the hard drive, especially a launch-window game. Was the game unplayable otherwise? Could you not have done the Namco thing of using a mini-game as a loading screen?
@@hanzobi1926I'm so glad FatXplorer is a thing... a few years ago I was still using XboxHDM until I disposed of or misplaced my Pentium II era Dell tower. I'm running one Xbox with an 500gig SSD but would definitely love to pop in an 8 TB HDD soon into another Xbox.
To be fair the original xbox hd was either 8 or 10 gb depending on which HD you had which at most can fit 2-3 games saved to the HD. Halo 2 was about 5 gigs.
@@SupremeRuleroftheWorld I remember almost 10 years ago, COD IW drained 180.GB on my PS4. World record back then. If the online only mode drains 300.GB Alone without SP, there is seriously something wrong.
Here's an interesting anecdote. Back in the day I worked in QA on Project Snowblind. In those days it was common procedure to record to a VHS everything that the tester was doing in case there was a crash caused by some random event or some other hard to reproduce bug (that way the tester could just play back the video and see exactly what was happening). Well, on the Xbox version of Snowblind the developers added a debug feature that perfectly recorded the user and game actions to the hard drive and could play it back just like a video recording that would result in 100% reproducible crashes every time. One of the coolest debug features I've ever seen implemented in my QA career.
@@zebatov No, this would have been highly confidential since it was for titles in development. Grounds for termination if it ever left the premises. Also, we would just re-record over the tape when it filled up.
@@alexmurphy888 i assume you worked for crystal dynamics. a shame project snowblind was going to be a sequel or midquel to deus ex IW. reminds me of doom demo files
I actually really liked the xbox 360's ability to install games to the hard drive. When Skyrim came out, my brother bought it right away as he usually did with new games. I didn't have any money, so I didn't have any ability to buy it. One day his girlfriend's kid knocked over his Xbox and caused a circular scratch to form on the disk. It no longer could play, but the system still recognized it as Skyrim. I asked him to give it to me, and he did. He wandered off and bought himself a new copy. I went down to a red box kiosk, and rented a copy of Skyrim for a couple bucks. I used it to install the game onto the hard drive, and then I returned the rented copy. Then I could put the scratched disk into the Xbox, it recognized it as Skyrim, and I could play the game. It still works to this day. So effectively I got a copy of skyrim within a month of release date for 2 dollars.
The video keeps talking about Halo 2, but the loading was just as impressive for Halo 1. One big load at the start of a gigantic level, then just tiny stutters when playing through it.
Apparently, you can trigger the same behavior in Xbox emulators when playing Morrowind by starting the game and pressing Reset from within the emulator. I have not tested this. That's what this channel said in an older video.
Perhaps not. Memory leaks are extremely tricky things to debug, even in bare bone environments and programs. Eg, this diagnostic/spec checking program I wrote for old feature phones essentially queries the phone's RTOS and draws text on the screen. Memory usage would increase _very gradually_ every time you changed pages. I think I fixed it? But, it could also be an IHTML interface thing as that's the only half decent way to draw a GUI on screen and it's supplied by the OS (or is statically linked inside the distributed binary. The software stack on old phones is weird!).
The custom soundtrack feature is why I bought an OG Xbox on launch. Being able to burn CDRW's at 1x speed full of downloaded MP3s and copying them to the hard drive for custom soundtracks, good times. But having to manually rename songs using the controller was a pain. Great video, MVG.
@@Horus7 But being able to play games like PGR and Burnout 2 and Rallisport Challenge 2 with custom soundtracks was worth it. And yes, adding names to the songs was a pain. I guess we were more tolerant back then.
DMCA was in effect when XBOX launched and you absolutely can legally rip music for custom soundtracks today. The reason consoles don’t offer it today probably has more to do with consumers no longer buying CDs and the disc drive itself being optional.
@@Slash0mega They both fell by the wayside for most consumers. It’s all about subscription/streaming services today. Spotify, Pandora, Apple Music, etc with no files for you to drop. Maybe some games or consoles could have Spotify integration? I dunno. Pretty sure XBOX used WMA and Nintendo patched MP3 support out of the Wii’s Photo Channel in 2007 since they didn’t want to pay the Fraunhofer Institute license. Didn’t stop launch titles like ExciteTruck from playing MP3s from your SD card. ;)
@@No-mq5lw Modern Blu ray drives do have CD compatibility. I'm told the PS4 and PS5 cannot read CDs because it doesn't have the correct diode for it. This might just be a PlayStation thing. People are saying Xbox One, Xbox Series X can play CDs.
Yeah, I have my own personal Xbox original and Xbox 360 server, with all the DLC, patches, demos, wallpapers, avatars, everything ever released digitally, one day, I really how someone, or some awsome dev crew, develops a full unofficial Xbox marketplace that can be hosted in full on a home server or either using rented server space or perhaps hosted via blockchain, if this adds P2P online MP as well, it would be amazing, that includes online split screen style MP, for direct head 2 head couch style multiplayer over P2P or home hosted servers. A Raspberry Pi 5 or cluster of a few Pi 3 or 4 boards would be able to handle all that, who knows, maybe one day, there will be a universal marketplace and online multiplayer server for all legacy consoles and operating systems, with crossplay, imagine being able to play Black Ops 2 online with Steam, PS3 and 360 players under one universal server, this could even include soft emulated consoles, a massive universal video game server for preservation of patches, expansions, DLC, leaderboards, achievements, digital games, prototypes, with every generation up to 8th gen, I would love to be able to fire up Mario Kart 64 on my MiSTer and jump into a 16 player online race or battle in under 60 seconds, or download high-quality user made tracks complete with new MIDI or tracker music et cetera. I also really hope someone develops a definitive Blade OS based Xbox 360 that is compatible with all 360 games, has 100% OGXB compatibility and access to the unofficial marketplace that has 100% of digital files preserved and downloadable, this would be the perfect Xbox, after the Xbox 360, Xbox is irrelevant, the only exception being Rare Replay, if someone could make this ultimate Xbox 360 with the Blade OS available on a PC, complete with physical optical disc compatibility and up to 64K internal rendering, that would be incredible, especially if it was available for Windows 7, which has MUCH lower latency than Windows 10 and even more so 11, I would build an Xbox PC especially for it.
The OG XBox was my first experience with emulation and console modding. I installed an Xecuter 3 mod chip and a 200gb hard drive. I absolutely loved that thing. Being able to rip discs straight to the hard drive and play them off of it blew my mind back in the day. I also had it loaded with emulators. I even had my entire music collection on it. About 30gb at the time. I had it hooked up to my badass late 90s stereo system. You know the ones. The stereos that took up as much space as a small refrigerator. I would have parties and play music with the visualizer going on my 36 inch Toshiba CRT. People were amazed I was playing that much music without a disc changer. I still have it and it still works. Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
I was waiting for a mention of that game. Or even a mention of the original _Forza Motorsport,_ which did a similar thing. Plus, it used the hard drive to allow the player to collect hundreds of cars, each with extremely detailed custom paint/livery, parts and tuning setups, along with Drivatar AI data. None of that would even be remotely possible without the built-in hard drive in every console.
The original Forza was great for its innovation. The driver AI training and the pit stops were completely different for the time, and even compared to today.
The HDD was absolutely necessary after modding the console. You replace the 18gb HDD with a 250gb loaded up with custom roms, backups, media players and movies. It was da bomb!
@@djslip_irie hell yeah! The hacked console was so far ahead of it's time as an internet connected multimedia system! The OG modded was basically what the Xbox One was trying to be.
Original Xbox remains one of my favourite consoles ever. I modded mine, put an 80gb drive in there and just ripped everything to the drive. I could start Midtown Madness 3 loading, keep mashing the button to just get into a quick race and be in the game in 8 seconds. EIGHT SECONDS! This was like having an SSD before they were a thing. The speed of the hard drive compared to a dvd drive given how much data it needed to load was just unbeatable.
'Game' in the UK once offered free returns of games if you don't like it within a few days of buying..... Well..... Buy...... Do something I won't mention on a modded xbox ..... Return.
I have a 2TB model now. You can fit roughly ~95% of the entire library but I only have around 470 games. Too many sports games that are almost the same and some other uninteresting shovelware so I still have like 750GB of free storage. Though it's an excellent system for collectors who want to have almost every released Xbox game inside the console's hard drive, plus it has the best versions of the 6th gen multiplatforms. You can also get most of the DLC since it has been archived, I installed it for Toe Jam & Earl 3.
@Manic_Panic That's what I did with mine. You can also upload higher resolution textures into Morrowind, prototypes of unreleased games, and install hacked versions of games, like that infamous DoA beach sports game.
360's DVD drive was such a jet engine. Even with slower load times, installing to the HDD was worth the peace and quiet. Wasn't worth losing the blade UI though - that was something special.
IF you just barely jostled the thing, such as someone walking past the TV stand while it was going turbojet, it would eat the disc and make it unreadable. The 360 was a pile of junk, the OG was a literal tank.
@@PhyrexJ I might get some heat for this, but I actually think the NXE dashboard was a bit better. (Note, I am NOT talking about the shitty Metro style dashboard. Nobody likes that thing.)
@@pontiacg445 they cheaped out on the disc drives. They look so flimsy compared to the ones in an OG Xbox. My launch unit actually scratched the disc without having to touch the console, just normal usage was enough to create those circular scratches. I returned that unit within a month. The replacement left my discs untouched, even if I'd accidentally bump into the console while it was running. Sadly, that one passed away three years later, at the tail end of 2009, when I introduced it to Mass Effect. RRoD finally got to it. The 360 Elite that replaced it still works to this day, albeit with the hard drive from an Xbox 360 S, as I was running out of storage on the original 120 GB HDD it came with.
@@blazini KODI destroyed itself with continued tinkering, hacking and development, then was just seemly abandoned when its video codecs could not keep up... shame
@@rfxtuber I have no idea what this means. Kodi is not abandoned, it's open source....it's like you're suggesting it's a product that couldn't keep up. The repo is still titled xbmc and it was updated yesterday. No idea what you mean about codecs either. I run kodi every day for years on Linux. I can't think of anything Kodi can't play. I can see Android locking out codecs that have certain licenses but that's not Kodi's problem, if it were it would be a problem in Linux too and I assure you it's not.
@@blazini I will consider myself updated or out of date thankyou.. I'm referring too XBMC in the era of OG Xbox where I personally left it... when it was abandoned and we required a hashed together build called XBMC4Xbox. I should of said XBMC... Not Kodi, but of course XBMC is the spiritual forbear of KODI.. My opinion still stands tho..KODI is awesome when I used to use it, but got so fed up with stuff breaking, skins breaking, features changing, and many other issues that for me destroyed actually using it in the end... I tried to use it again on PC few years back, with a TV tuner setup, and nothing ever worked correctly? Always something wrong... That's why I say KODI destroyed itself due to constant state of change and bleeding edge... don't get me wrong, KODI was awesome and prob still is.. but I suppose I just got fed up with the tinkering in the end... Are you saying a build of XBMC is being updated today for OG Xbox or KODI for OG Xbox?
@@blazini Ahhh, I see what you mean, allow me to correct... I merged KODI and XBMC era into one, sloppy...... I am specifically referring to the days of the OG Xbox when XBMC was abandoned and replaced with a build called XBMC4Xbox.. (Codecs was not keeping up with MPEG4 ect) (This was at the time when everyone was moving off to other consoles ect) (I am aware Rocky5 does a build of XBMC on OG Xbox). Alas I am out of date... I should of said XBMC... not KODI... and of course KODi is still going strong today with newer builds ect... but my thoughts still stand with KODI tho.. I tried using it again on PC a few years back with a TV tuner setup and nothing would ever work correctly, used a few other builds like LibreElect ect... but in the end I got fed up with stuff breaking, skins, scripting, basically bleeding edge and the constant tinkering.. Don't get me wrong KODI is awesome... just got fed up having to hack around with it too much is all.. the repo of xbmc updated recent, do you mean XBMC4Xbox?
12:24 Curiously the NeoGeo games on Wii VC managed to do this differently, big games like KOF98 are stored entirely in ram, but a portion of the game is stored compressed in order to fit. The CROM portion is usually 32 MB and compresses really well, then it's presumably decompressed on-the-fly to a small cache that's also in memory. The consensus I think was that it wrote a pagefile to the nand, but that would be a slow process that could easily make the initial bootup take up to 1 minute. Which is not the case here.
I was never able to get below that 50,000+ blocks number and I had a lot of music ripped to the console. I had no idea it was eight gigs of storage. That’s insane for back then.
What's interesting is that at one point MS started putting 10GB HDDs in the Xbox but to keep compatibility with all previously released games that extra 2GB was unformatted. Of course with a mdded Xbox, homebrew apps could utilize that extra 2GB if your system had it. When formatted, it would be the F drive. Fun Fact about the DVD Playback kit. The actual DVD Player program was actually stored on a flash chip on the IR Receiver dongle and not on the HDD. This was done on purpose in case someone found a way to launch any app on the HDD using a bug in the system. With the DVD Player app in the IR receiver and not on the HDD there was no way to glitch your way into playing a DVD. Until homebrew media players for that Xbox came around.
I think this was also due to codec licensing. DVD players need to pay a royalty license to MPEG. Microsoft didn't want to pay the royalty for every Xbox as most won't be used as a DVD player.
@@FalenDragmire It wouldn't break compatibility. The games don't care how big your hard drive is, just so long as there's enough free space for caching and such. Also just to clarify, the extra 2GB F partition trick was only possible on some models of the og Xbox. Some have 8GB drives, same have 10GB drives (with only 8 available by default).
It was used to rip CDs on. Man remember Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas where you could set your radio station to your CDs for your own mix? That was the best.
The Xbox is my favorite console ever. The 6th Gen will always be the absolute peak of console gaming. Having a hard drive in a console blew my mind back in 2001. After playing Halo and DoA3, i was sold. I saved up and bought my own a few months later. I currently own over 20 working Xbox consoles; all modded, many rare variants.
The OG Xbox was amazing.. I never owned it as kid, I use to go to my friend's house and play his and man it made me into a Xbox fan for life.. Also: Thank you for exposing these scammers. YOU ARE DOING THE RIGHTFUL WORK OF SAVING PEOPLE'S LIVES!
The best thing about the hard drive was that it made game saves completely effortless again. You may not remember, but in the PS1 and PS2 days, saving your game was a _chore._ Not only did you have to have a memory card (which was sold separately, by the way) but you had to explicitly go through a laborious process. "Checking for Memory Card (PS2)" "Do you want to save to Memory Card (PS2)" "Choose which block to save on Memory Card (PS2)" "Are you sure you want to overwrite this data"? "Saving to Memory Card (PS2)" Every. Single. Time. No quick saves, no auto-saves. Thanks to the built-in hard drive, on Xbox you barely even had to think about it. At worst, you might have had to pick and name a save slot, but other than that, saving your game just kinda happened, like a SNES cartridge game with battery backup. Xbox was the first optical-disc console to deliver autosaves, something we take for granted now. And I don't know _anyone_ who _ever_ had less than 50,000 blocks available on their Xbox hard drive.
I swear, that original Xbox hard drive was like a freak of nature back then. It just seemed to have a nigh unlimited amount of storage! I had hundreds of CDs and I burned pretty much all of them on there and it didn't seem like it was even close to filling up. Admittedly that Xbox came out over 20 years ago, and not being a PC guy at the time, I didn't really understand what Gigabytes or hard drives were back then, I was a console gamer and I was still used to the Playstation 1 and their Memory Cards with tiny storage capacity, so suddenly having what seemed like a bottomless pit of data storage felt like magic!
If I recall correctly, a standard audio CD ripped to WMA (what the Xbox uses) is about 100mb. The og Xbox had 4.7GB of usable free space, or 4,700MB. That's a lot of CDs!
Loved the in-game music integration for songs/playlist on the HDD. For instance, booting up Forza and a custom playlist would play during menus and another for in game races. Not to mention the volume being automatically controlled the same way it would if the default soundtracks were playing. Or being stopped or lowered during cut scene or periods were dialog needs to be heard, again like it would if the default soundtrack was playing. Now play music while gaming is a very intrusive experience. It was perk feature customization and we haven't had anything like it since.
Xbox can’t be defeated with their innovation. I love it. 20+ years later and I still have my softmodded V1.6 with an SSD installed. Speed and Power is what made the Xbox appealing to most owners when it debuted.
@@joesaiditstrue Yeah, you use an adapter, game loads are probably faster due to seek time, but I didn't see much of a difference. But the lack of TRIM and data refresh worries had me go back to a regular hard drive. I don't use my xbox often, and the data on how long an SSD will store data is all over the place
A big corporation could still make a device that rips CDs. Xbox came out after the DMCA. The reason why DMCA does not apply to CDs is because they do not have copy protection in the first place. Cant violate copy protection if it doesn’t even exist! This is what makes it different from DVD or later. They all have (easily defeated) copyright protection that exists mainly as a legal tool. It indicates that anyone who has copied a disc will have intentionally broken copyright protection, and therefore broken the law.
Blue-ray isn't so easy. If you go looking for ways to play them on Linux, most results are about ripping the discs, rather than simply playing them, and they all make use of a closed-source, but freeware program that's somehow got a license for the DRM. For actually playing the discs directly, you need to get a database of per-title unique keys, as there aren't any general ones available, and any that do get made available get locked out from future discs.
@@gamecubeplayer That's just ripping with hardware devices instead of software. The goal was to play them directly without having to rip them. It's doable, as I covered in my previous post, but it is annoying. Yet another example of how DRM only hurts the legitimate customer.
Fun fact some CD's, iirc from Sony, did have some kind of nasty copy protection, I believe it installed a rootkit on your PC, led to a big scandal and iirc lawsuits.
There was a WWE game that allowed you to use custom soundtracks for your character's intro. I would burn 30-50 second sections of my favorite songs to a CD and then rip them to my Xbox to create fun intros for custom characters. The game that I played allowed tons of customization, so that you could time something like fireworks going off with a particular moment in the song. It was epic for the time.
Another fun tidbit: Xbox Live was intended or envisioned to run on Enron’s broadband network. I have no clue how close Microsoft and Enron came to a finalized deal (not that it would have mattered for obvious reasons), but it poses an interesting hypothetical: **If everything had gone according to plan, what would the early days of Xbox Live have looked like?** Picture the internet as a network of roads. Data packets are cars. Data packets have to drive to snd from a central stadium (Xbox Live server). The amount of time it takes to drive to/from is latency. Your house is on a residential street (last mile). Your residential street connects to your local roads (ISP). That’s fairly constant. Those flow into a series of highways) and interchanges. Getting to the stadium requires driving on busy highways and passing through varying roads and interchanges and eventually you wind up at the stadium. It’s indirect, you don’t always take the same route, and traffic is less predictable. Enron’s network was more akin to: Drive to the end of the street, and you out into on a smart highway system where the routes, speeds, QoS, and traffic are centrally managed. I’ve heard that if typical broadband latencies of the time were 50-100ms, this would have dropped it to somewhere around the 35-80ms range. But here’s where it gets interesting: user-level QoS adjustments in real-time. Meaning that in a given situation like a Halo or CoD match, latencies could have been handicapped to remove, or at least drastically reduce gameplay advantages from having the lowest latency internet connection relative to other players . “Lag” or rather its gameplay effects are because latencies aren’t uniform, right? Would Xbox Live have been the same without caffeine-fueled thirteen year olds shouting “LAG SWITCH” ? Regardless, it’s an interesting thought, innit?
still remember my big brother playing his music while doing the xbox magazine challenge of doing a full race without losing the style points on a camaro.
on my birthday as a kid, 20 years ago this summer, i got the xbox i currently have and have never stopped using. finally modded it last year and installed a bigger hard drive :-) so glad the community is still so active
I don't care what anyone else says, Duke will always be one of my favorite controllers. It fits my hands like no other. I love it so much that I bought a Hyperkin Duke for my Xbox One. It's one of the most nostalgic things ever. Right down to the tendency for third party controllers on the OG Xbox to fail in no time flat, the stupid thing started malfunctioning within a week. 😅 Still love it.
Peter moore wasn't saying he disliked it, just how the cost of including it really cut into their profits selling the Xbox. I remember getting a Sega Saturn later and believing it had an internal hard drive lol. But I wonder if the Saturn's internal memory gave it any benefits.
MVG love your stuff. That Hard Drive was awesome for games like Ninja Gaiden and Unreal Championship. In unreal the game was updated to up the frame rate by disabling Sync in the code. Good stuff. Capcom vs SNK used the HDD to save game replays like a VCR.
Mistakes were made this time, MVG... the Duke was, and remains, a beautiful creation. It's the only controller that doesn't cramp me up after a while. Bifurcating BIOS and OS/data storage natively quite literally set the standard for everything after it. A big part of my side gig is the restoration and upgrading of consoles from this generation and older. Native HDMI, RAM upgrades, SATA/80-pin IDE, 2TB HDD... and there are BIOS files that will natively run all of these modifications from boot. HDMI kit to a scaler turns the OG Xbox into something completely unlike anything else from its generation.
That big chunky controller was probably the number 1 reason I went with Playstation instead of Xbox consoles. I tried it at a friend's house, and it just always felt like I was hunting for the buttons or trying to find a comfortable way to hold it.
I was playing around with my original Xbox recently and it was almost startling to hear the music I ripped playing in MotoGP2. I had almost forgotten that was a thing.
I didn't get a Xbox until December 2005. The 360 came out and stores were selling the OG Xboxs for $100. I played it some here and there but never did much with it. I had a PS2 and a Gamecube and was happy with them. It wasn't until 2012 that I got the component cables for it and connected it to my HDTV, that i started to play it more, and really appreciate it.
im glad microsoft was the first to make a console with a built in drive cause that paved the way for the future consoles to have hard drives only and not memory cards which i found annoying to keep using
Sony literally did it first by a year. Just remember: Anything Microsoft does another company finds a way to do it better. Their phones, gaming systems, operating systems, Skype, literally everything.
@@Vernonnn Yes, the Ps2 was the first console to offer an optional HDD add-on. But the Xbox was the first console to ship with the HDD built-in from factory.
At my college they tested the X-Box before it came out, back in early (like February) 2001 and we told the guy who was filming us playing. That the 'Duke' controler would not work with fighting games because it was just too big and bulky for it. He literally lowered his head and said that that Microsoft knew this internally. But it was too late to fix it for launch, but there was already work for a replacement.
I think the real mistake they made with original Xbox was not allowing DVD playback by default. This lost them a lot of system sales to the PS2 which had this. That remote with dongle should of just been an optional accessory and not a requirement.
@@omegarugal9283 yeah. Microsoft believed that only a small subset of users would watch DVD's, so instead of paying a flat fee per console for something the majority might never use, they tied the license to the dongle and sold that separately.
@@icky_thump fortunately, some games, like Project Gotham Racing 2, allow you to use your custom soundtracks alongside of, instead of as a replacement for, the in-game soundtracks. In the case of PGR2, your custom soundtrack acts as an additional radio station you can select and manipulate using the right thumbstick.
For the games that were slower when installed from the harddrive. I remember reading about that back in the day from some developer that this was because Halo 3 used the utility partition when a hard drive was present. They never anticipated the install feature being added to the 360. So it would read from the hard drive, write to the utility partition and it made the game run slower as a result.
All I know is that after softmoding it that I was able to put Serious Sam on there since that game specifically had abysmal loading times on the OG Xbox. Not anymore!
There's a very good reason why the 360 Arcade SKU got dropped when the 360 got its Slim refresh; having persistent storage was essential for a game console in that generation! I also remember when the 360 got the ability to install games completely from disc to the hard drive in 2010, and Bungie specifically instructed players to NOT install Halo 3 and ODST; since those games used the hard drive (if present) to cache game data, installing the game would actually slow down loading since the data would end up being read twice (once from the data files, and again from the cache). Halo Reach was designed to use the HDD as cache if it was being run from disc, and to not cache its data if it were installed completely.
Ninja Gaiden was so damn impressive it even kept up with launch 360 and PS3 games outside of the resolution, and it did it all with two second load times after the initial minute long cache. God of War came out a year later, and it may have been impressive for the PS2, but playing them back to back you can really tell that disc limited them so much. The game is almost entirely linear and if you do find a way to do what they're not expecting it has a fairly lengthy load to compensate, meanwhile NGB manages to have an almost Metroid like design where you're let loose in a section of the map and expected to navigate back and forth until you figure a way out, and it does it all while looking more impressive and having comparable loading.
Ninja Gaiden had poor Japanese sales, so they made Ninja Gaiden Black (Ninja Gaiden with DLC included), then for PS3 they made Ninja Gaiden Sigma (a lil bit extra content and better graphics), then for PSP they released Ninja Gaiden Sigma Plus (the 4th version of the same NG)
A well forgotten visual showcase also with barely any load times is Dreamfall: The Longest Journey on original Xbox. But it also came out on PC simultaneously and most players of the series were on PC, so few people care. It also came out really late, long after Xbox360 came out.
I'm glad to see you covered the ability to use the HD for virtual memory... I worked on the "Men of Valor" game for XBOX back in the day, I think we were the very first game to use the Unreal engine on the XBOX. Anyway, during multi-player testing we would keep hitting a crash due to running out of memory, mostly due to fragmentation. To get around this issue, i implemented a virtual memory system, however on the first implementation we just used handles for each memory allocation block. Only blocks that haven't been accessed in a while, would get saved out to the hard-drive when memory got low, which saved the project. Anyway, later on i re-implemented it to use virtual memory pages, and did exactly the same thing, catch the exception when it tried to access a page that wasn't in memory, load it from the HD, and continue from the exception.... sadly, never got to use the new implementation, as the studio went south and I had to move on and just worked on PC games after that.
@@vegeta6555 Not at all. It usually had the best/most premium version of third party titles along with outstanding exclusives. Cube for the exclusives, PS2 for the range of titles, Dreamcast for the arcade experience. All are with owning even today
Toe Jam and Earl 3 used the hard drive to cache streaming video files for playback during level transitions. While you were playing a level, it would quietly transfer the streaming video introduction files for the next potential levels from the DVD to the hard drive. When you went through a door, it would play the introductory video from the hard drive while the artifacts for the new level were being loaded from the DVD. Once that was done, the player is given the option to start the level or wait for the intro to complete. End result: After the legal screen at the very beginning of boot, something was always happening. There were no "loading..." screens at all. Source: Me. I wrote all that.
You are 100% correct - the OG Xbox feels to me like the first of what we have now console wise, while the PS2 for example.feela like the last of everything that came before, purely because of the factory storage and how it was used.
"Simply wouldn't fly in today's world of DMCA." Why not? The only place where that's a problem is streaming and the number of people doing that is tiny compared to those just playing them privately. Worse, half the time they can't even stream the licensed tracks without getting a strike, let alone their own. If GTA V, one of the highest grossing games of all time, can include a custom soundtrack option then I don't think it's an issue.
It hasn't really got anything to do with it tbh, There's no particular controversy about the ability to rip your own music CD's for your own personal use and its still a standard feature in the likes of iTunes, Windows Media Player, etc. Standard Audio CD's don't have copy protection after all, and most of the laws are actually built around not being allowed to circumvent copy protection. So I don't really know why that line would be dropped in with little basis. Usually the software instead imposes limits around directly copying or burning that ripped music, but that's irrelevant to the Xbox scenario where you can't redistribute what's been ripped. It's more likely that they just don't feel the need to do it when streaming apps like Spotify are available. I'm sure they would cite how little the feature was actually used in their Xbox 360 metrics. And yeah, on your modern Xbox you can stream spotify music over your games, replacing the in-game music. The feature is still there, just in a different form. One that can make someone more money. =p
You're making the increasingly bold assumption that the modern music industry is run by capitalists. Making money is secondary to making sure you own nothing.
@@KopperNeoman Never attribute a political ideology what can be reasonably explained with laziness. The real reason we don't get integrated custom soundtrack support in most modern games is because it's work, and for a feature most people won't bother using. It's the same reason we don't get integrations for things like the Tobii eye tracker or RGB synchronisation.
I loved the OG Xbox growing up. It's a real shame it didn't get as many games as the PS2. I mean the last game on the PS2 was in 2013. While the last game on the Xbox was in 2008.
The last PS2 game was some random sport game and was only in south America or something. Most 3rd Party ps2 games just like the Xbox stopped after 2008
Halo 2 was a gamechanger and really showed how Microsoft was so ahead of the curve.We got patches and reballancing changes throughout the lifespan of the game as well as new maps as well.
I love your understated contributions to back end homebrew development. It's pretty clear you're a bit of an assembler whiz it's great you could put that knowledge to work.
When I was very little my uncle gave us his Modded Xbox while he was in the marines. A powerful emulator in the early 2000s was pretty crazy. And xbmc was really great.
I remember reading an interview in EGM with Ed Fries about the design of the X-Box. I thought that it was very forward thinking in many ways. I especially appreciated the hard drive, network adapter, and the extra long controller cords with the breakaway connections to prevent pulling the whole unit off the shelf if someone trips over the cable. I was disappointed to see that the 360 arcade model would not include a hard drive, since that would mean developers would need to code to the lowest common denominator. This is similar to my complaint regarding the Series S. While offering a discounted price for a less capable hardware SKU undoubtedly makes some consumers happy, it also introduces an unnecessary programming constraint for Xbox devs. The original Xbox is still my favorite in spirit because it was a powerful beast without apology or hedging of bets. Long live the OG Xbox.
It didn't (doesn't) have to be a deathknell though. Lowest common denominators will still arguable have impacts on what is done / possible, but there isn't a reason why the programmers can't embrace to most powerful configuration either. They just need to be sure they have a good experience provided for the widest audience (base model, no hard drive). Sometimes it does make you go a path you'd rather not. A lot of triple A titles just never make it to the switch. I get it. Woefully underpowered comparatively. The 360, with 512 MB of system memory, wasn't as restrained. If you utilized that system memory carefully, and used good design choices when you did need to access the DVD drive, it wasn't so bad.
This is actually a really fascinating video. I always knew the OG Xbox had a hard drive, but I never knew games actually took advantage of it for caching. This explains a lot! My friend has an OG Xbox, and sometimes we set it up to play split-screen Halo. The last time we played, the game took AGES to load despite the disc looking absolutely pristine. Gameplay was also extremely buggy, sounds not playing right, scripted NPC sequences being out-of-order or completely desynchronized, etc. It never occurred to me that the internal drive was used for caching. But if that internal drive begins to fail, it would likely cause all sorts of problems like slow load times, or all-around buggy games. I will ask my friend if I can check the drive on his Xbox next time I see him.
Great video. But I'd like to point out that Splinter Cell and Forza Motorsport also made smart use of the Xbox's hard drive. In fact, in Turn 10's racing game, the difference in track loading became somewhat surprising when the data was already stored in the console's data exchange space.
Great video. There was another game that made use of the hard drive: Blinx. It loaded big chunks of gameplay in realtime onto the hard disk so you can reverse back in time to undo missteps. Yes, I know, Prince of Persia Sands of Time had a similar feature and was available for PlayStation 2, Xbox and GameCube, but the technique used on that game was something different. In Blinx you could literally travel through time. A “4D” video game that was very unique in the sixth generation. I owned all three consoles back then and I think it was the best console generation ever. The leap from 5th gen consoles to 6th gen was immense and would be never seen again thereafter.
The OG XBOX was tied to the Hard Drive. If the Hard Drive dies, then the system dies. The XBOX won't be able to run with a replaced hard drive due to security
Yeah, but you can say that about near anything. If the original 360 overheats, some component somewhere breaks and the system dies and never works again. At least with an OG xbox you can get the security key and clone it over to any other hard drive.
@pontiacg445 wrong, you could only get the key through unlocking it with software only accessible in Linux. If you didn't do this before hdd died, then it's game over
@@goukifafa Oh, well it wasn't easily known back in the day to do that. My hard drive died from my launch XBOX and I had to buy a new one in Nov. of 2003. It is still BS that Microsoft required you to do that in order to save your XBOX or send it to Microsoft for 180 dollars at the time to replace the hard drive and get the password.
@@goukifafa In the end, due to this and other things I became a PC gamer including modding my PC to my liking and resulting in not have these issues anymore.
@pontiacg445 Getting this info at the time wasn't easily accessible. The hard drive was easily replaceable in the original XBOX so your response doesn't work in this situation. The XBOX 360 let you replace the hard drive at least. The XBOX 360 motherboard design and fan placements were the cause of the overheating. Believe what you want. It was very difficult to search the internet still for proprietary info from a game console back in the early 2000's. This is especially true to gain the required password when switching hard drives. At this point it's probably pointless to argue. I just want it known that it was very difficult to retrieve and implement a simple fix such as a hard drive failure on the original XBOX and it required Microsoft's proprietary tools to get the password implement the replaced hard drive.
Competitive Tetris Worlds with custom soundtracks was a joy. I'm instantly transported to 2003 when I hear Big Dumb Face "Fightin' Stance." We fired up that console a few years back and it was still humming just fine.
OK, this may be a pessimist take, but it sounds like to me the addition of the HDD in the xbox marked the beginning of video game consoles' downfall. The addition of updates is the main problem we have today. It lead to unfinished games becoming the norm, and game rentals as a service, loss of game ownership, and the eventuality of being forced to always be online to play 'your' game. The next gen consoles won't even have disk drives, I imagine, which is the end of ownership in its entirety, and judging by what I'm hearing here, it all sorta started with this hard drive and the vision of updates for the original xbox. I loved the xbox because at the time my PS2 had to be sent in for warranty repairs 3x with Sony. So something comparable that was unknown (which to 12 year old me meant 'reliable') was a huge breath of fresh air. Many good memories with both this and the PS2. Didn't really use the hard drive for anything other than game saves though. A very cool addition indeed.
I get where you are coming from but let's be real, it was inevitable either way. PC games already were getting patches and updates and of course they would want to integrate that into a console. Also the game being "released unfinished then patched later" stuff didn't really happen until towards the end of 7th Gens and beginning of the 8th gen. Even tho Sonic 06 was a early 7th gen title it never really got updates that "fixed" the game.
@@XyamaProductions It's definitely a problem with the PC market as well, but it's not as big of a problem as it is on consoles, IMO. If we revisit a modern console and PC 20 years from now, if you buy a game new on GoG or similar DRM free platform, you own it, and you can install and play it. But conversely, the store is GONE for the console, you can't even buy it, and if you buy a hard copy it can't even install without checking with the store, which is again, gone. There's no alternatives. And then on top of that there is a much bigger hacking community around PC than consoles, so 20 years later, if my PC game won't play because of some DRM shit? There's probably an easily grabbable hacked executable which bypasses the DRM. Conversely, there's a much steeper curve to circumventing DRM and many less hackers doing the modding on consoles. So yea, the problem exists for PC as well, but I guess the difference I see is that solutions are easily available for PC, where-as there's no real solution available for console. You have to hack the console itself, which is a pain in the ass on modern consoles.
Ahhh that OG Xbox was so clutch. My friends brother had one that was fully loaded with every old game imaginable. We'd wake up early and sneak into his room to play while he was at college lol countless hours of emulation on that Xbox. Good times.
The hard drive was in a sense the reason we now need to install games and download patches and everything. It certainly has benefits but there is something to be said for just putting a cartridge or a disc into a console and it just works. No install, no patches, no DLC.
It's Microsoft's policies that allow it. I miss being able to insert a disc and just go. Now you have to insert your disc, let it install, then wait hours worth of updates if you aren't willing to go disconnect from xbox live. Can't play a game with friends because it needs an update that will take the whole night to prepare. Can you imagine if Microsoft said no to Ubisoft and Bethesda, we won't publish your game because it crashes and it's a defective mess?
I never had an OG Xbox but back in those days I did have an OG model PS2 with a 200 GB HDD in it via the network adapter. Used HD Advance and filled the HDD with game images via my neighborhood Family Video store and games borrowed from friends. Those were good times! 😊
Hated that the xbox required a dongle and remote to play dvds, very cheeky of M$ to do that. Had to soft mod it with a custom dash to be able to play dvds with a pad, like what the ps2 could already do out of the box. The HDD was really cool though, not having to worry about save space, dumping music cds for playback in games like PGR2, and of course, space for the dlc!
I wonder if any games took advantage of compression and unpakced things on the fly to the HDD for temp storage to allow fitting larger games on the 4.7 GB Single layer or 8.5 GB on dual layer DVDs. Then again 8.5 GB seems like a lot of space for a single game, and thats pretty much the capacity of the OG XBOX (which had 8 or 10GB hard drives)
The HDD is so large and slow it would make more sense to cache everything than do on the fly decompression, and it's faster than a disc read and could move data around for better serial reads if needed. Halo 1 and Halo 2 might be making huge HDD data buffers for a new map. You always had to watch in 2 for it to move to 100% progress whenever you changed the multiplayer map or selected a campaign level in coop.
That feeling of PC gaming and console gaming meeting in my living room is one I will never forget. Especially since the 6th and 7th gen were the end of bespoke consoles. The Steam Deck was the closest, but I’ve never felt that since where it seemed like barriers were being utterly demolished.
Sadly, this opened the door to sell beta versions as full games so final users became the beta testers and then patch the games. Also to remove content from the games and sell it as DLC.
I noticed the menus saying ""50000+ blocks free". How big is a "block" on the Xbox hard drive? Same size as on the Playstation 1's memory card? And why did these systems give storage capacity in nebulous "blocks", rather than in bytes like later systems did? Compare the first two Playstation systems: the PS1 uses "blocks", while the PS2 just uses bytes when saying how much memory card space something will take.
The most fun use for the HDD (that many people today wouldn't think is a big deal) was the ability to rip your own CDs & play your own music over games. It didn't drown out your game, it was super easy, and it was super cool to have your own soundtrack going while playing whatever you want. Absolutely loved that feature!
Met a girl from canada in 04 on halo 2 and she sent her xbox to me in florida to mod/install a ton of emulators on so she could play pokemon and stuff on it........20 years later we still talk/play together and I still have the box she shipped it to me in wrapped in like 10 layers of duck tape and she still has the xbox and still plays all the games I installed on it for her. Good times!
Been wanting to do an OG Xbox build for years. I just know once I start I'll be a few hundred dollars deep with all the cool stuff you can do lmao. I loved the console as a teen tho, finally felt like a lower cost alternative to a PC with the HDD etc. Only was missing a keyboard and mouse.
One thing you failed to mention was the addition of the hard drive (and an Internet connection) ushered in the unfortunate era of games shipping with game breaking bugs or features that were missing as promised at launch because the developers could update their games post launch with large updates given the ample space the HD provided. Not saying that it wouldn't have happened eventually, but the HD definitely accelerated it to where we are now with games barely playable at "launch" aka Anthem.
Xbox 360 had hard limitations on Title Updates originally, such as how big they could be and charged developers like $40,000 for every patch after the first title update. The Title Updates were mainly to fix minor issues that didn't get noticed before release or multiplayer bugs. Since Xbox One every game is completely installed to the console, so anything can be easily modified and replaced via xbox live after release. Some games like Hogwarts and Halo Infinite are not functional with just the disc.
Thanks Microsoft for the OG Xbox. I had a blast with the console and games. The MOD HDD upgrade to 500GB was a game changer indeed. NO other console was on that level at that time. Later on though, the PS2 was Modded to Hell and Back . I had fun with that too.
Copy all my CDs to the HDD when I was a kid
Then play them in supported games, like GTA and Tony Hawk. Also you could borrow a friends CDs and copy them to your system.
Playing Tetris to Headbanger's Ball
Goated feature for that time
Me too i listened to soo much of my music in Xbox games
250GB HDD, went to the Video library and rented games and ripped them straight to the HDD 😅
I will NEVER forget booting up San Andreas on that original Xbox, and wondering why one of the radio stations in game had SO much Weird Al. That’s when it clicked in my 11 year old head that all my saved songs could be played in game. Blew my mind.
I remember playing my custom songs on counter strike online.. kicking butt online listening to my songs was epic.
Too bad it's a dead feature in most modern consoles, maybe there's some system level Spotify access (which I'll say is a bit better for convenience) would fill in that gap, at least for now.
my game was desert storm, when green day starting playing i was so happy
Yeah it's a shame we can't upload songs anymore and play it in our games due to DRM nonsense. I remember one of the first games you could do that with on the Xbox was project gothem racing.
Yeah you can use spotify or apple music on both ps5 and xbox with playback controls integrated into the guide-menu. Pretty sure plex is also an option if you have music shared through it. On the xbox it's easier for independent developers to just publish apps so there are in fact media players that will just play files off usb devices too.
I worked on a launch window game for the original Xbox. We had a gigantic file with all of the game data and our plan was to dump it into the utility region of the hard drive, interleaving the install with a FMV tutorial that we would force the player to watch. Microsoft caught wind of this and I remember being in a call where Ed Fries bitched us out and said, I remember this as clear as day, "have you ever played a console game WITH AN INSTALL SCREEN!?"
We wound up decreasing the size of the install file, killing the tutorial video, and then hiding the install during a string of countless, unbearably long licensing screens, which we claimed were required by the licensors, in order to make Microsoft stop complaining about how long the initial ioad was.
That's so crazy
What game is this?
😭
@@CarlosIvanFocus also very interested, what game?
I'm curious what led you to have to dump that much game data on the hard drive, especially a launch-window game. Was the game unplayable otherwise? Could you not have done the Namco thing of using a mini-game as a loading screen?
The Hard drive was meant for Roms Microsoft was so thoughtful .
Now you can have up to 16TB with Cerbios.
Haha exactly!
I fell off my chair laughing man 😂
hahaha
@@hanzobi1926I'm so glad FatXplorer is a thing... a few years ago I was still using XboxHDM until I disposed of or misplaced my Pentium II era Dell tower.
I'm running one Xbox with an 500gig SSD but would definitely love to pop in an 8 TB HDD soon into another Xbox.
10:07 "The hard drive, was crucial"
I always thought XBOX hard drives were Seagate
Not enough people are appreciating this comment.
Don't forget Western Digital. The Xbox used both. IIRC, it's the Western Digital units that are 10GB
@@halofreak1990 i think you missed the joke
@@Sharpless2 It's possible to get a joke, and also add more detail to the concept being used _for_ the joke.
@@Sharpless2 I don't think they did.
I got the joke, and had the same response. "Haha... uh, wasn't it WD?"
2001: Too much storage space I don't know what to do with them
2024: Barely enough to fit a CoD game
To be fair the original xbox hd was either 8 or 10 gb depending on which HD you had which at most can fit 2-3 games saved to the HD. Halo 2 was about 5 gigs.
@@banditkeithkingofduelmonsters On my 1995 CD32 Console i have 1.GB HDD. Average size of one game were 1-2.MB.
@@V3ntilator Yeah, but the OG Xbox came with the hdd built in, CD32 you had to buy it separately yourself.
it would not fit like at all, COD just broke 400 gigs after updates. how the F they managed to make a FPS game that big i have no idea.
@@SupremeRuleroftheWorld I remember almost 10 years ago, COD IW drained 180.GB on my PS4. World record back then.
If the online only mode drains 300.GB Alone without SP, there is seriously something wrong.
Here's an interesting anecdote. Back in the day I worked in QA on Project Snowblind. In those days it was common procedure to record to a VHS everything that the tester was doing in case there was a crash caused by some random event or some other hard to reproduce bug (that way the tester could just play back the video and see exactly what was happening). Well, on the Xbox version of Snowblind the developers added a debug feature that perfectly recorded the user and game actions to the hard drive and could play it back just like a video recording that would result in 100% reproducible crashes every time. One of the coolest debug features I've ever seen implemented in my QA career.
Did you get a copy of the VHS?
@@zebatov No, this would have been highly confidential since it was for titles in development. Grounds for termination if it ever left the premises. Also, we would just re-record over the tape when it filled up.
@@alexmurphy888 i assume you worked for crystal dynamics. a shame project snowblind was going to be a sequel or midquel to deus ex IW. reminds me of doom demo files
@@joshallen128 I was on the publisher side, so Eidos and eventually Square Enix
I actually really liked the xbox 360's ability to install games to the hard drive.
When Skyrim came out, my brother bought it right away as he usually did with new games. I didn't have any money, so I didn't have any ability to buy it. One day his girlfriend's kid knocked over his Xbox and caused a circular scratch to form on the disk. It no longer could play, but the system still recognized it as Skyrim. I asked him to give it to me, and he did. He wandered off and bought himself a new copy.
I went down to a red box kiosk, and rented a copy of Skyrim for a couple bucks. I used it to install the game onto the hard drive, and then I returned the rented copy. Then I could put the scratched disk into the Xbox, it recognized it as Skyrim, and I could play the game. It still works to this day. So effectively I got a copy of skyrim within a month of release date for 2 dollars.
Wait...your brother's girlfriend had a kid, how???🤔
@@UncleRuckusswell usually sex is involved
@@UncleRuckusswhen a mommy and a daddy love eachother very much...
@@UncleRuckuss She had gotten out of a bad marriage iirc.
@@vhfgamer So your teenage brother got himself a MILF
The video keeps talking about Halo 2, but the loading was just as impressive for Halo 1. One big load at the start of a gigantic level, then just tiny stutters when playing through it.
My disk was so scratched that sometimes the light in the initial Halo 1 loading screen would go backwards lol
Morrowwind rebooting itself to solve a memory leak is wild. I wonder if anyone ever found the memory leak.
It's also a very Bethesda move. 😅
Apparently, you can trigger the same behavior in Xbox emulators when playing Morrowind by starting the game and pressing Reset from within the emulator. I have not tested this. That's what this channel said in an older video.
Deus Ex Invisible War also did the same thing, even on PC.
Perhaps not. Memory leaks are extremely tricky things to debug, even in bare bone environments and programs.
Eg, this diagnostic/spec checking program I wrote for old feature phones essentially queries the phone's RTOS and draws text on the screen.
Memory usage would increase _very gradually_ every time you changed pages. I think I fixed it? But, it could also be an IHTML interface thing as that's the only half decent way to draw a GUI on screen and it's supplied by the OS (or is statically linked inside the distributed binary. The software stack on old phones is weird!).
@@bowi1332 It just works
The custom soundtrack feature is why I bought an OG Xbox on launch.
Being able to burn CDRW's at 1x speed full of downloaded MP3s and copying them to the hard drive for custom soundtracks, good times.
But having to manually rename songs using the controller was a pain.
Great video, MVG.
I remember giving names to 1000s of songs on my og xbox. What a pain 😄
@@Horus7 But being able to play games like PGR and Burnout 2 and Rallisport Challenge 2 with custom soundtracks was worth it.
And yes, adding names to the songs was a pain. I guess we were more tolerant back then.
Ohhh I forgot all about naming them....official CDs had names I think
@@francesoxberry6816 Naming tracks using the controller took ages.
DMCA was in effect when XBOX launched and you absolutely can legally rip music for custom soundtracks today. The reason consoles don’t offer it today probably has more to do with consumers no longer buying CDs and the disc drive itself being optional.
That would just make it easyer though... No need to rip, slap your fave mp3s on a sd card and boom.
@@Slash0mega They both fell by the wayside for most consumers. It’s all about subscription/streaming services today. Spotify, Pandora, Apple Music, etc with no files for you to drop. Maybe some games or consoles could have Spotify integration? I dunno.
Pretty sure XBOX used WMA and Nintendo patched MP3 support out of the Wii’s Photo Channel in 2007 since they didn’t want to pay the Fraunhofer Institute license. Didn’t stop launch titles like ExciteTruck from playing MP3s from your SD card. ;)
Don't even think modern Blu ray drives have CD playback anymore
@@No-mq5lw Modern Blu ray drives do have CD compatibility. I'm told the PS4 and PS5 cannot read CDs because it doesn't have the correct diode for it. This might just be a PlayStation thing. People are saying Xbox One, Xbox Series X can play CDs.
GTAV has an option to turn off copyrighted music so streamers don't get hit with a strike for it.
If you still have an OG Xbox with the original drive, please check out the DLC Archive project and see if your content is needed.
got a link?
Got one
Links don't work on UA-cam.
Unless you're a spam bot, that is.
Yeah, I have my own personal Xbox original and Xbox 360 server, with all the DLC, patches, demos, wallpapers, avatars, everything ever released digitally, one day, I really how someone, or some awsome dev crew, develops a full unofficial Xbox marketplace that can be hosted in full on a home server or either using rented server space or perhaps hosted via blockchain, if this adds P2P online MP as well, it would be amazing, that includes online split screen style MP, for direct head 2 head couch style multiplayer over P2P or home hosted servers.
A Raspberry Pi 5 or cluster of a few Pi 3 or 4 boards would be able to handle all that, who knows, maybe one day, there will be a universal marketplace and online multiplayer server for all legacy consoles and operating systems, with crossplay, imagine being able to play Black Ops 2 online with Steam, PS3 and 360 players under one universal server, this could even include soft emulated consoles, a massive universal video game server for preservation of patches, expansions, DLC, leaderboards, achievements, digital games, prototypes, with every generation up to 8th gen, I would love to be able to fire up Mario Kart 64 on my MiSTer and jump into a 16 player online race or battle in under 60 seconds, or download high-quality user made tracks complete with new MIDI or tracker music et cetera.
I also really hope someone develops a definitive Blade OS based Xbox 360 that is compatible with all 360 games, has 100% OGXB compatibility and access to the unofficial marketplace that has 100% of digital files preserved and downloadable, this would be the perfect Xbox, after the Xbox 360, Xbox is irrelevant, the only exception being Rare Replay, if someone could make this ultimate Xbox 360 with the Blade OS available on a PC, complete with physical optical disc compatibility and up to 64K internal rendering, that would be incredible, especially if it was available for Windows 7, which has MUCH lower latency than Windows 10 and even more so 11, I would build an Xbox PC especially for it.
@@indignasmr7379 i forgot!
The OG XBox was my first experience with emulation and console modding. I installed an Xecuter 3 mod chip and a 200gb hard drive. I absolutely loved that thing. Being able to rip discs straight to the hard drive and play them off of it blew my mind back in the day. I also had it loaded with emulators. I even had my entire music collection on it. About 30gb at the time. I had it hooked up to my badass late 90s stereo system. You know the ones. The stereos that took up as much space as a small refrigerator. I would have parties and play music with the visualizer going on my 36 inch Toshiba CRT. People were amazed I was playing that much music without a disc changer. I still have it and it still works.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
Slayers UI?
Surprising you did not mention _Blinx: The Time Sweeper_ whose rewind mechanic made extensive use of the Xbox's hard drive.
I was waiting for a mention of that game. Or even a mention of the original _Forza Motorsport,_ which did a similar thing. Plus, it used the hard drive to allow the player to collect hundreds of cars, each with extremely detailed custom paint/livery, parts and tuning setups, along with Drivatar AI data. None of that would even be remotely possible without the built-in hard drive in every console.
My favorite games, Blinx 1 & 2
THHIIIISSSSSSIIIIHHT 🐱
Common Blinx W (it is the world's first 4D platformer)
The original Forza was great for its innovation. The driver AI training and the pit stops were completely different for the time, and even compared to today.
The HDD was absolutely necessary after modding the console. You replace the 18gb HDD with a 250gb loaded up with custom roms, backups, media players and movies. It was da bomb!
XBMC for life!
The base HDD was only 8 GB
Ah yes "backups"
@@djslip_irie hell yeah! The hacked console was so far ahead of it's time as an internet connected multimedia system! The OG modded was basically what the Xbox One was trying to be.
@@xelyx13 i almost remembered
Original Xbox remains one of my favourite consoles ever. I modded mine, put an 80gb drive in there and just ripped everything to the drive. I could start Midtown Madness 3 loading, keep mashing the button to just get into a quick race and be in the game in 8 seconds. EIGHT SECONDS! This was like having an SSD before they were a thing. The speed of the hard drive compared to a dvd drive given how much data it needed to load was just unbeatable.
'Game' in the UK once offered free returns of games if you don't like it within a few days of buying..... Well..... Buy...... Do something I won't mention on a modded xbox ..... Return.
@@jajabinx35 Blockbuster also used to be a place you could rent games...
I threw a 2TB in mine. Just about every game is in it, plus a whole bunch of emulators. Best investment I have done.
I have a 2TB model now. You can fit roughly ~95% of the entire library but I only have around 470 games. Too many sports games that are almost the same and some other uninteresting shovelware so I still have like 750GB of free storage. Though it's an excellent system for collectors who want to have almost every released Xbox game inside the console's hard drive, plus it has the best versions of the 6th gen multiplatforms.
You can also get most of the DLC since it has been archived, I installed it for Toe Jam & Earl 3.
@Manic_Panic That's what I did with mine. You can also upload higher resolution textures into Morrowind, prototypes of unreleased games, and install hacked versions of games, like that infamous DoA beach sports game.
360's DVD drive was such a jet engine. Even with slower load times, installing to the HDD was worth the peace and quiet. Wasn't worth losing the blade UI though - that was something special.
Blade UI was peak Xbox
IF you just barely jostled the thing, such as someone walking past the TV stand while it was going turbojet, it would eat the disc and make it unreadable. The 360 was a pile of junk, the OG was a literal tank.
@@PhyrexJ I might get some heat for this, but I actually think the NXE dashboard was a bit better. (Note, I am NOT talking about the shitty Metro style dashboard. Nobody likes that thing.)
@@arnox4554NEVER liked the Metro (final) dashboard. Absolute Garbage and makes all the themes useless cause it's blocked by everything
@@pontiacg445 they cheaped out on the disc drives. They look so flimsy compared to the ones in an OG Xbox. My launch unit actually scratched the disc without having to touch the console, just normal usage was enough to create those circular scratches. I returned that unit within a month. The replacement left my discs untouched, even if I'd accidentally bump into the console while it was running. Sadly, that one passed away three years later, at the tail end of 2009, when I introduced it to Mass Effect. RRoD finally got to it. The 360 Elite that replaced it still works to this day, albeit with the hard drive from an Xbox 360 S, as I was running out of storage on the original 120 GB HDD it came with.
OG Xbox ruled my world for a solid 5 years. Halo CE, Ninja Gaiden, Fable, Burnout 3 and Burnout Takedown, then it got new life with XBMC.
XBMC, Kodi before Kodi was Kodi. I was using XBMP before that
@@blazini KODI destroyed itself with continued tinkering, hacking and development, then was just seemly abandoned when its video codecs could not keep up... shame
@@rfxtuber I have no idea what this means. Kodi is not abandoned, it's open source....it's like you're suggesting it's a product that couldn't keep up. The repo is still titled xbmc and it was updated yesterday. No idea what you mean about codecs either. I run kodi every day for years on Linux. I can't think of anything Kodi can't play. I can see Android locking out codecs that have certain licenses but that's not Kodi's problem, if it were it would be a problem in Linux too and I assure you it's not.
@@blazini I will consider myself updated or out of date thankyou.. I'm referring too XBMC in the era of OG Xbox where I personally left it... when it was abandoned and we required a hashed together build called XBMC4Xbox. I should of said XBMC... Not Kodi, but of course XBMC is the spiritual forbear of KODI.. My opinion still stands tho..KODI is awesome when I used to use it, but got so fed up with stuff breaking, skins breaking, features changing, and many other issues that for me destroyed actually using it in the end... I tried to use it again on PC few years back, with a TV tuner setup, and nothing ever worked correctly? Always something wrong... That's why I say KODI destroyed itself due to constant state of change and bleeding edge... don't get me wrong, KODI was awesome and prob still is.. but I suppose I just got fed up with the tinkering in the end... Are you saying a build of XBMC is being updated today for OG Xbox or KODI for OG Xbox?
@@blazini Ahhh, I see what you mean, allow me to correct... I merged KODI and XBMC era into one, sloppy...... I am specifically referring to the days of the OG Xbox when XBMC was abandoned and replaced with a build called XBMC4Xbox.. (Codecs was not keeping up with MPEG4 ect) (This was at the time when everyone was moving off to other consoles ect) (I am aware Rocky5 does a build of XBMC on OG Xbox). Alas I am out of date... I should of said XBMC... not KODI... and of course KODi is still going strong today with newer builds ect... but my thoughts still stand with KODI tho.. I tried using it again on PC a few years back with a TV tuner setup and nothing would ever work correctly, used a few other builds like LibreElect ect... but in the end I got fed up with stuff breaking, skins, scripting, basically bleeding edge and the constant tinkering.. Don't get me wrong KODI is awesome... just got fed up having to hack around with it too much is all.. the repo of xbmc updated recent, do you mean XBMC4Xbox?
12:24 Curiously the NeoGeo games on Wii VC managed to do this differently, big games like KOF98 are stored entirely in ram, but a portion of the game is stored compressed in order to fit. The CROM portion is usually 32 MB and compresses really well, then it's presumably decompressed on-the-fly to a small cache that's also in memory.
The consensus I think was that it wrote a pagefile to the nand, but that would be a slow process that could easily make the initial bootup take up to 1 minute. Which is not the case here.
I was never able to get below that 50,000+ blocks number and I had a lot of music ripped to the console. I had no idea it was eight gigs of storage. That’s insane for back then.
The later versions had 10 gigs drives, I believe
What's interesting is that at one point MS started putting 10GB HDDs in the Xbox but to keep compatibility with all previously released games that extra 2GB was unformatted. Of course with a mdded Xbox, homebrew apps could utilize that extra 2GB if your system had it. When formatted, it would be the F drive.
Fun Fact about the DVD Playback kit. The actual DVD Player program was actually stored on a flash chip on the IR Receiver dongle and not on the HDD. This was done on purpose in case someone found a way to launch any app on the HDD using a bug in the system. With the DVD Player app in the IR receiver and not on the HDD there was no way to glitch your way into playing a DVD. Until homebrew media players for that Xbox came around.
I think this was also due to codec licensing. DVD players need to pay a royalty license to MPEG. Microsoft didn't want to pay the royalty for every Xbox as most won't be used as a DVD player.
How would an extra 2gb of storage space break compatibility with older titles?
I think MVG had this in a video on the Xbox.
@@Peter-kn8py That too.
@@FalenDragmire
It wouldn't break compatibility. The games don't care how big your hard drive is, just so long as there's enough free space for caching and such.
Also just to clarify, the extra 2GB F partition trick was only possible on some models of the og Xbox. Some have 8GB drives, same have 10GB drives (with only 8 available by default).
It was used to rip CDs on. Man remember Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas where you could set your radio station to your CDs for your own mix? That was the best.
There were other entrancements over the PS2 versions of the games, which were apparently forgotten for all subsequent rereleases
The Xbox is my favorite console ever. The 6th Gen will always be the absolute peak of console gaming. Having a hard drive in a console blew my mind back in 2001. After playing Halo and DoA3, i was sold. I saved up and bought my own a few months later. I currently own over 20 working Xbox consoles; all modded, many rare variants.
Man I loved that console 😍 The experience felt next-gen with the HD.
Karl you are becoming Xavier commenting everywhere i go 😅🤣
@@snake2106 haha we have the same interests I think!
@@KarlRockgamer for life! The og Xbox was awesome, halo ce Lan parties! ❤❤
Legend
The OG Xbox was amazing.. I never owned it as kid, I use to go to my friend's house and play his and man it made me into a Xbox fan for life..
Also: Thank you for exposing these scammers. YOU ARE DOING THE RIGHTFUL WORK OF SAVING PEOPLE'S LIVES!
The best thing about the hard drive was that it made game saves completely effortless again.
You may not remember, but in the PS1 and PS2 days, saving your game was a _chore._ Not only did you have to have a memory card (which was sold separately, by the way) but you had to explicitly go through a laborious process.
"Checking for Memory Card (PS2)"
"Do you want to save to Memory Card (PS2)"
"Choose which block to save on Memory Card (PS2)"
"Are you sure you want to overwrite this data"?
"Saving to Memory Card (PS2)"
Every. Single. Time. No quick saves, no auto-saves.
Thanks to the built-in hard drive, on Xbox you barely even had to think about it. At worst, you might have had to pick and name a save slot, but other than that, saving your game just kinda happened, like a SNES cartridge game with battery backup. Xbox was the first optical-disc console to deliver autosaves, something we take for granted now. And I don't know _anyone_ who _ever_ had less than 50,000 blocks available on their Xbox hard drive.
Yep, also, MCs data could get corrupted over time and stop working if the contact pins got corroded or too dirty.
Well said
LoL, lots of Ps2 games use auto-save, there is not need for an HDD to have that feature.
@@jsr734 'Are you sure ''bout that?' - john cena.
You guys think the PS2 didn't have auto-save? Why talk about a console you apparently never played?
Without that HDD I would have never started modifying consoles. It's the reason I became obsessed with emulation.
I swear, that original Xbox hard drive was like a freak of nature back then. It just seemed to have a nigh unlimited amount of storage! I had hundreds of CDs and I burned pretty much all of them on there and it didn't seem like it was even close to filling up.
Admittedly that Xbox came out over 20 years ago, and not being a PC guy at the time, I didn't really understand what Gigabytes or hard drives were back then, I was a console gamer and I was still used to the Playstation 1 and their Memory Cards with tiny storage capacity, so suddenly having what seemed like a bottomless pit of data storage felt like magic!
If I recall correctly, a standard audio CD ripped to WMA (what the Xbox uses) is about 100mb.
The og Xbox had 4.7GB of usable free space, or 4,700MB. That's a lot of CDs!
I absolutely loved the custom soundtrack option. We played a lot of some ATV racing game listening to 90s punk/ska music.
Loved the in-game music integration for songs/playlist on the HDD. For instance, booting up Forza and a custom playlist would play during menus and another for in game races. Not to mention the volume being automatically controlled the same way it would if the default soundtracks were playing. Or being stopped or lowered during cut scene or periods were dialog needs to be heard, again like it would if the default soundtrack was playing. Now play music while gaming is a very intrusive experience.
It was perk feature customization and we haven't had anything like it since.
Xbox can’t be defeated with their innovation. I love it. 20+ years later and I still have my softmodded V1.6 with an SSD installed. Speed and Power is what made the Xbox appealing to most owners when it debuted.
@michigansoundwizard do games get a noticable bump in loading speed from the SSD? assuming you have to use some sort of IDE to SATA card
@@joesaiditstrue Yeah, you use an adapter, game loads are probably faster due to seek time, but I didn't see much of a difference. But the lack of TRIM and data refresh worries had me go back to a regular hard drive. I don't use my xbox often, and the data on how long an SSD will store data is all over the place
A big corporation could still make a device that rips CDs. Xbox came out after the DMCA. The reason why DMCA does not apply to CDs is because they do not have copy protection in the first place. Cant violate copy protection if it doesn’t even exist! This is what makes it different from DVD or later. They all have (easily defeated) copyright protection that exists mainly as a legal tool. It indicates that anyone who has copied a disc will have intentionally broken copyright protection, and therefore broken the law.
Blue-ray isn't so easy. If you go looking for ways to play them on Linux, most results are about ripping the discs, rather than simply playing them, and they all make use of a closed-source, but freeware program that's somehow got a license for the DRM. For actually playing the discs directly, you need to get a database of per-title unique keys, as there aren't any general ones available, and any that do get made available get locked out from future discs.
@@Roxor128you could just record the discs into mp4s with an hdmi capture card & an hdcp splitter
@@gamecubeplayer That's just ripping with hardware devices instead of software. The goal was to play them directly without having to rip them.
It's doable, as I covered in my previous post, but it is annoying. Yet another example of how DRM only hurts the legitimate customer.
Fun fact some CD's, iirc from Sony, did have some kind of nasty copy protection, I believe it installed a rootkit on your PC, led to a big scandal and iirc lawsuits.
@@erica1399Funnily eboguh Sony Music ended up suing Sony Computer
There was a WWE game that allowed you to use custom soundtracks for your character's intro. I would burn 30-50 second sections of my favorite songs to a CD and then rip them to my Xbox to create fun intros for custom characters. The game that I played allowed tons of customization, so that you could time something like fireworks going off with a particular moment in the song. It was epic for the time.
Yep WWE raw 2 I did this myself made Max Payne and Rocky Balboa and other movie characters
Bro wtf why they cut this feature. Microsoft always makes the best stuff while simultaneously destroying it once they perfect it
You could do this for nfl2k5 too 😮😍
Another fun tidbit: Xbox Live was intended or envisioned to run on Enron’s broadband network. I have no clue how close Microsoft and Enron came to a finalized deal (not that it would have mattered for obvious reasons), but it poses an interesting hypothetical: **If everything had gone according to plan, what would the early days of Xbox Live have looked like?**
Picture the internet as a network of roads. Data packets are cars. Data packets have to drive to snd from a central stadium (Xbox Live server). The amount of time it takes to drive to/from is latency.
Your house is on a residential street (last mile). Your residential street connects to your local roads (ISP). That’s fairly constant. Those flow into a series of highways) and interchanges. Getting to the stadium requires driving on busy highways and passing through varying roads and interchanges and eventually you wind up at the stadium. It’s indirect, you don’t always take the same route, and traffic is less predictable.
Enron’s network was more akin to: Drive to the end of the street, and you out into on a smart highway system where the routes, speeds, QoS, and traffic are centrally managed.
I’ve heard that if typical broadband latencies of the time were 50-100ms, this would have dropped it to somewhere around the 35-80ms range.
But here’s where it gets interesting: user-level QoS adjustments in real-time. Meaning that in a given situation like a Halo or CoD match, latencies could have been handicapped to remove, or at least drastically reduce gameplay advantages from having the lowest latency internet connection relative to other players . “Lag” or rather its gameplay effects are because latencies aren’t uniform, right? Would Xbox Live have been the same without caffeine-fueled thirteen year olds shouting “LAG SWITCH” ?
Regardless, it’s an interesting thought, innit?
Listening to my Hip-Hop collection on Project Gotham Racing
PGR... Halcyon daye. Spent so much time online racing with friends 2002/2003
@@pshearduk Yep, I remember listening to my CD's while playing PGR online back then too! It just made it that much more enjoyable!
That was such a great game. I played it listening to the Live album Birds of Pray which was absolutely perfect.
still remember my big brother playing his music while doing the xbox magazine challenge of doing a full race without losing the style points on a camaro.
on my birthday as a kid, 20 years ago this summer, i got the xbox i currently have and have never stopped using. finally modded it last year and installed a bigger hard drive :-) so glad the community is still so active
I don't care what anyone else says, Duke will always be one of my favorite controllers. It fits my hands like no other. I love it so much that I bought a Hyperkin Duke for my Xbox One. It's one of the most nostalgic things ever. Right down to the tendency for third party controllers on the OG Xbox to fail in no time flat, the stupid thing started malfunctioning within a week. 😅 Still love it.
Man, you must have the hands of a giant. I'm impressed.
I agree. I traded all my s-controllers for my friends' Dukes. THERE ARE DOZENS OF US!
@faenethlorhalien over an octave on the piano, that's all I can really say.
Has anyone tested the latency of the Duke pad vs the S pad, something tells me the Duke will be a much better performer.
I too, love the Duke. I'm 5'6 and don't have monster sized hands, yet it feels so comfortable to me.
Peter moore wasn't saying he disliked it, just how the cost of including it really cut into their profits selling the Xbox. I remember getting a Sega Saturn later and believing it had an internal hard drive lol. But I wonder if the Saturn's internal memory gave it any benefits.
That PS2 online adapter was a bit hard to code for initially. It was quite fiddly. :)
MVG love your stuff. That Hard Drive was awesome for games like Ninja Gaiden and Unreal Championship. In unreal the game was updated to up the frame rate by disabling Sync in the code. Good stuff. Capcom vs SNK used the HDD to save game replays like a VCR.
Mistakes were made this time, MVG... the Duke was, and remains, a beautiful creation. It's the only controller that doesn't cramp me up after a while.
Bifurcating BIOS and OS/data storage natively quite literally set the standard for everything after it. A big part of my side gig is the restoration and upgrading of consoles from this generation and older. Native HDMI, RAM upgrades, SATA/80-pin IDE, 2TB HDD... and there are BIOS files that will natively run all of these modifications from boot. HDMI kit to a scaler turns the OG Xbox into something completely unlike anything else from its generation.
That big chunky controller was probably the number 1 reason I went with Playstation instead of Xbox consoles. I tried it at a friend's house, and it just always felt like I was hunting for the buttons or trying to find a comfortable way to hold it.
The duke is god tier!!!
The Duke is a controller for people with big hands, but gamers are the majority of them small handed
I was playing around with my original Xbox recently and it was almost startling to hear the music I ripped playing in MotoGP2. I had almost forgotten that was a thing.
I didn't get a Xbox until December 2005. The 360 came out and stores were selling the OG Xboxs for $100. I played it some here and there but never did much with it. I had a PS2 and a Gamecube and was happy with them. It wasn't until 2012 that I got the component cables for it and connected it to my HDTV, that i started to play it more, and really appreciate it.
It was the best generation in gaming 😌
im glad microsoft was the first to make a console with a built in drive cause that paved the way for the future consoles to have hard drives only and not memory cards which i found annoying to keep using
Except for Nintendo, they never included any HDD on their consoles and opted for external storage or internal flash memory.
Sony literally did it first by a year. Just remember: Anything Microsoft does another company finds a way to do it better.
Their phones, gaming systems, operating systems, Skype, literally everything.
@@Vernonnn Yes, the Ps2 was the first console to offer an optional HDD add-on. But the Xbox was the first console to ship with the HDD built-in from factory.
@@jsr734Standarized Flash Memory and External Media, so still an upgrade over the propietary GC Flash Memory
At my college they tested the X-Box before it came out, back in early (like February) 2001 and we told the guy who was filming us playing. That the 'Duke' controler would not work with fighting games because it was just too big and bulky for it. He literally lowered his head and said that that Microsoft knew this internally. But it was too late to fix it for launch, but there was already work for a replacement.
I think the real mistake they made with original Xbox was not allowing DVD playback by default. This lost them a lot of system sales to the PS2 which had this. That remote with dongle should of just been an optional accessory and not a requirement.
Yes, that was one of the reasons why i didn´t chose the Xbox over the Ps2 in the first place.
license fee was to expensive
@@omegarugal9283 yeah. Microsoft believed that only a small subset of users would watch DVD's, so instead of paying a flat fee per console for something the majority might never use, they tied the license to the dongle and sold that separately.
should've
The time when games could not be updates easily but magically worked, fast forward to today and those days gone by are missed.
your voice and way of breaking things down/way with words makes these videos so much more interesting than most youtubers attempts
I loved putting music on the original XBOX because there were games that let you listen to your music while you played the games.
In 2024 this is pretty much the standard way to play games now!
Where?
Spotify, on your phone or PC :P
@@manoftherainshorts9075 hot take - I still prefer to listen to the game's soundtracks, anyday.
@@icky_thump fortunately, some games, like Project Gotham Racing 2, allow you to use your custom soundtracks alongside of, instead of as a replacement for, the in-game soundtracks. In the case of PGR2, your custom soundtrack acts as an additional radio station you can select and manipulate using the right thumbstick.
For the games that were slower when installed from the harddrive. I remember reading about that back in the day from some developer that this was because Halo 3 used the utility partition when a hard drive was present. They never anticipated the install feature being added to the 360. So it would read from the hard drive, write to the utility partition and it made the game run slower as a result.
All I know is that after softmoding it that I was able to put Serious Sam on there since that game specifically had abysmal loading times on the OG Xbox. Not anymore!
There's a very good reason why the 360 Arcade SKU got dropped when the 360 got its Slim refresh; having persistent storage was essential for a game console in that generation!
I also remember when the 360 got the ability to install games completely from disc to the hard drive in 2010, and Bungie specifically instructed players to NOT install Halo 3 and ODST; since those games used the hard drive (if present) to cache game data, installing the game would actually slow down loading since the data would end up being read twice (once from the data files, and again from the cache). Halo Reach was designed to use the HDD as cache if it was being run from disc, and to not cache its data if it were installed completely.
I saved all my cd's and I miss that console. I may go to a Game Stop or pawn shop to find another.
0:05 men only want one thing and it's: things that can be described in the same way Guts' sword was described.
Ninja Gaiden was so damn impressive it even kept up with launch 360 and PS3 games outside of the resolution, and it did it all with two second load times after the initial minute long cache.
God of War came out a year later, and it may have been impressive for the PS2, but playing them back to back you can really tell that disc limited them so much. The game is almost entirely linear and if you do find a way to do what they're not expecting it has a fairly lengthy load to compensate, meanwhile NGB manages to have an almost Metroid like design where you're let loose in a section of the map and expected to navigate back and forth until you figure a way out, and it does it all while looking more impressive and having comparable loading.
Ninja Gaiden had poor Japanese sales, so they made Ninja Gaiden Black (Ninja Gaiden with DLC included), then for PS3 they made Ninja Gaiden Sigma (a lil bit extra content and better graphics), then for PSP they released Ninja Gaiden Sigma Plus (the 4th version of the same NG)
Ninja Gaiden was on an entirely other level designwise than GoW.
A well forgotten visual showcase also with barely any load times is Dreamfall: The Longest Journey on original Xbox.
But it also came out on PC simultaneously and most players of the series were on PC, so few people care. It also came out really late, long after Xbox360 came out.
@@lmcgregoruk Sigma Plus is on PS Vita, not PSP. Sigma also interestingly enough has more load zones and longer load times than the Xbox version.
@@NiGHTSnoob My bad.
I'm glad to see you covered the ability to use the HD for virtual memory... I worked on the "Men of Valor" game for XBOX back in the day, I think we were the very first game to use the Unreal engine on the XBOX. Anyway, during multi-player testing we would keep hitting a crash due to running out of memory, mostly due to fragmentation. To get around this issue, i implemented a virtual memory system, however on the first implementation we just used handles for each memory allocation block. Only blocks that haven't been accessed in a while, would get saved out to the hard-drive when memory got low, which saved the project. Anyway, later on i re-implemented it to use virtual memory pages, and did exactly the same thing, catch the exception when it tried to access a page that wasn't in memory, load it from the HD, and continue from the exception.... sadly, never got to use the new implementation, as the studio went south and I had to move on and just worked on PC games after that.
I love the Xbox even now I still play it more than current gen
Eh. It was the worst of the generation by far.
@@vegeta6555 untrue, it has great classics.
I hope you removed the clock capacitor if it is not a 1.6 Xbox, so the future can live on!
@@vegeta6555 How can this opinion be so bad.
@@vegeta6555 Not at all. It usually had the best/most premium version of third party titles along with outstanding exclusives. Cube for the exclusives, PS2 for the range of titles, Dreamcast for the arcade experience. All are with owning even today
Toe Jam and Earl 3 used the hard drive to cache streaming video files for playback during level transitions.
While you were playing a level, it would quietly transfer the streaming video introduction files for the next potential levels from the DVD to the hard drive.
When you went through a door, it would play the introductory video from the hard drive while the artifacts for the new level were being loaded from the DVD.
Once that was done, the player is given the option to start the level or wait for the intro to complete.
End result: After the legal screen at the very beginning of boot, something was always happening. There were no "loading..." screens at all.
Source: Me. I wrote all that.
You are 100% correct - the OG Xbox feels to me like the first of what we have now console wise, while the PS2 for example.feela like the last of everything that came before, purely because of the factory storage and how it was used.
"Simply wouldn't fly in today's world of DMCA." Why not? The only place where that's a problem is streaming and the number of people doing that is tiny compared to those just playing them privately. Worse, half the time they can't even stream the licensed tracks without getting a strike, let alone their own. If GTA V, one of the highest grossing games of all time, can include a custom soundtrack option then I don't think it's an issue.
It hasn't really got anything to do with it tbh,
There's no particular controversy about the ability to rip your own music CD's for your own personal use and its still a standard feature in the likes of iTunes, Windows Media Player, etc. Standard Audio CD's don't have copy protection after all, and most of the laws are actually built around not being allowed to circumvent copy protection.
So I don't really know why that line would be dropped in with little basis. Usually the software instead imposes limits around directly copying or burning that ripped music, but that's irrelevant to the Xbox scenario where you can't redistribute what's been ripped.
It's more likely that they just don't feel the need to do it when streaming apps like Spotify are available. I'm sure they would cite how little the feature was actually used in their Xbox 360 metrics.
And yeah, on your modern Xbox you can stream spotify music over your games, replacing the in-game music. The feature is still there, just in a different form. One that can make someone more money. =p
You're making the increasingly bold assumption that the modern music industry is run by capitalists.
Making money is secondary to making sure you own nothing.
@@KopperNeoman Never attribute a political ideology what can be reasonably explained with laziness. The real reason we don't get integrated custom soundtrack support in most modern games is because it's work, and for a feature most people won't bother using. It's the same reason we don't get integrations for things like the Tobii eye tracker or RGB synchronisation.
@@KopperNeoman 'Shalom!' said klaus schwab
I loved the OG Xbox growing up. It's a real shame it didn't get as many games as the PS2. I mean the last game on the PS2 was in 2013. While the last game on the Xbox was in 2008.
The last PS2 game was some random sport game and was only in south America or something. Most 3rd Party ps2 games just like the Xbox stopped after 2008
Halo 2 was a gamechanger and really showed how Microsoft was so ahead of the curve.We got patches and reballancing changes throughout the lifespan of the game as well as new maps as well.
I love your understated contributions to back end homebrew development. It's pretty clear you're a bit of an assembler whiz it's great you could put that knowledge to work.
10:45 ‐ correction: hard drive capacity limit is 16TB now days, not 2TB.
That’s so insane. My 1tb barely has a dent after copying my 20 disks to it.
When I was very little my uncle gave us his Modded Xbox while he was in the marines. A powerful emulator in the early 2000s was pretty crazy. And xbmc was really great.
I remember reading an interview in EGM with Ed Fries about the design of the X-Box. I thought that it was very forward thinking in many ways. I especially appreciated the hard drive, network adapter, and the extra long controller cords with the breakaway connections to prevent pulling the whole unit off the shelf if someone trips over the cable. I was disappointed to see that the 360 arcade model would not include a hard drive, since that would mean developers would need to code to the lowest common denominator. This is similar to my complaint regarding the Series S. While offering a discounted price for a less capable hardware SKU undoubtedly makes some consumers happy, it also introduces an unnecessary programming constraint for Xbox devs. The original Xbox is still my favorite in spirit because it was a powerful beast without apology or hedging of bets. Long live the OG Xbox.
It didn't (doesn't) have to be a deathknell though.
Lowest common denominators will still arguable have impacts on what is done / possible, but there isn't a reason why the programmers can't embrace to most powerful configuration either. They just need to be sure they have a good experience provided for the widest audience (base model, no hard drive). Sometimes it does make you go a path you'd rather not. A lot of triple A titles just never make it to the switch. I get it. Woefully underpowered comparatively.
The 360, with 512 MB of system memory, wasn't as restrained. If you utilized that system memory carefully, and used good design choices when you did need to access the DVD drive, it wasn't so bad.
This is actually a really fascinating video. I always knew the OG Xbox had a hard drive, but I never knew games actually took advantage of it for caching. This explains a lot! My friend has an OG Xbox, and sometimes we set it up to play split-screen Halo. The last time we played, the game took AGES to load despite the disc looking absolutely pristine. Gameplay was also extremely buggy, sounds not playing right, scripted NPC sequences being out-of-order or completely desynchronized, etc. It never occurred to me that the internal drive was used for caching. But if that internal drive begins to fail, it would likely cause all sorts of problems like slow load times, or all-around buggy games. I will ask my friend if I can check the drive on his Xbox next time I see him.
Great video. But I'd like to point out that Splinter Cell and Forza Motorsport also made smart use of the Xbox's hard drive. In fact, in Turn 10's racing game, the difference in track loading became somewhat surprising when the data was already stored in the console's data exchange space.
the og xbox i picked up had a bunch of cd ripped to the hard drive and my god it’s a time capsule from the early 2000s
mine had late 80s house and 90s rave stuff on it lol
Great video. There was another game that made use of the hard drive: Blinx. It loaded big chunks of gameplay in realtime onto the hard disk so you can reverse back in time to undo missteps. Yes, I know, Prince of Persia Sands of Time had a similar feature and was available for PlayStation 2, Xbox and GameCube, but the technique used on that game was something different. In Blinx you could literally travel through time. A “4D” video game that was very unique in the sixth generation. I owned all three consoles back then and I think it was the best console generation ever. The leap from 5th gen consoles to 6th gen was immense and would be never seen again thereafter.
The OG XBOX was tied to the Hard Drive. If the Hard Drive dies, then the system dies. The XBOX won't be able to run with a replaced hard drive due to security
Yeah, but you can say that about near anything. If the original 360 overheats, some component somewhere breaks and the system dies and never works again.
At least with an OG xbox you can get the security key and clone it over to any other hard drive.
@pontiacg445 wrong, you could only get the key through unlocking it with software only accessible in Linux. If you didn't do this before hdd died, then it's game over
@@goukifafa Oh, well it wasn't easily known back in the day to do that. My hard drive died from my launch XBOX and I had to buy a new one in Nov. of 2003.
It is still BS that Microsoft required you to do that in order to save your XBOX or send it to Microsoft for 180 dollars at the time to replace the hard drive and get the password.
@@goukifafa In the end, due to this and other things I became a PC gamer including modding my PC to my liking and resulting in not have these issues anymore.
@pontiacg445 Getting this info at the time wasn't easily accessible.
The hard drive was easily replaceable in the original XBOX so your response doesn't work in this situation.
The XBOX 360 let you replace the hard drive at least. The XBOX 360 motherboard design and fan placements were the cause of the overheating.
Believe what you want. It was very difficult to search the internet still for proprietary info from a game console back in the early 2000's. This is especially true to gain the required password when switching hard drives.
At this point it's probably pointless to argue. I just want it known that it was very difficult to retrieve and implement a simple fix such as a hard drive failure on the original XBOX and it required Microsoft's proprietary tools to get the password implement the replaced hard drive.
Competitive Tetris Worlds with custom soundtracks was a joy. I'm instantly transported to 2003 when I hear Big Dumb Face "Fightin' Stance." We fired up that console a few years back and it was still humming just fine.
OK, this may be a pessimist take, but it sounds like to me the addition of the HDD in the xbox marked the beginning of video game consoles' downfall. The addition of updates is the main problem we have today. It lead to unfinished games becoming the norm, and game rentals as a service, loss of game ownership, and the eventuality of being forced to always be online to play 'your' game. The next gen consoles won't even have disk drives, I imagine, which is the end of ownership in its entirety, and judging by what I'm hearing here, it all sorta started with this hard drive and the vision of updates for the original xbox.
I loved the xbox because at the time my PS2 had to be sent in for warranty repairs 3x with Sony. So something comparable that was unknown (which to 12 year old me meant 'reliable') was a huge breath of fresh air. Many good memories with both this and the PS2. Didn't really use the hard drive for anything other than game saves though. A very cool addition indeed.
I get where you are coming from but let's be real, it was inevitable either way. PC games already were getting patches and updates and of course they would want to integrate that into a console.
Also the game being "released unfinished then patched later" stuff didn't really happen until towards the end of 7th Gens and beginning of the 8th gen. Even tho Sonic 06 was a early 7th gen title it never really got updates that "fixed" the game.
@@XyamaProductions It's definitely a problem with the PC market as well, but it's not as big of a problem as it is on consoles, IMO. If we revisit a modern console and PC 20 years from now, if you buy a game new on GoG or similar DRM free platform, you own it, and you can install and play it. But conversely, the store is GONE for the console, you can't even buy it, and if you buy a hard copy it can't even install without checking with the store, which is again, gone. There's no alternatives.
And then on top of that there is a much bigger hacking community around PC than consoles, so 20 years later, if my PC game won't play because of some DRM shit? There's probably an easily grabbable hacked executable which bypasses the DRM. Conversely, there's a much steeper curve to circumventing DRM and many less hackers doing the modding on consoles.
So yea, the problem exists for PC as well, but I guess the difference I see is that solutions are easily available for PC, where-as there's no real solution available for console. You have to hack the console itself, which is a pain in the ass on modern consoles.
Thank you MVD for all the love you’ve have shown to the original Xbox!
Ahhh that OG Xbox was so clutch. My friends brother had one that was fully loaded with every old game imaginable. We'd wake up early and sneak into his room to play while he was at college lol countless hours of emulation on that Xbox. Good times.
Love these kind of vids, always very interesting to listen to. Great work, mvg!.
The Duke was amazing I preferred it to the micro
what everyone wanted was Dreamcast 2, and we almost got it with the OGXB
The hard drive was in a sense the reason we now need to install games and download patches and everything. It certainly has benefits but there is something to be said for just putting a cartridge or a disc into a console and it just works. No install, no patches, no DLC.
It certainly gave developers more leeway in regards to game development.
@@poluticon Yes, you pay for it !
@@jrclad2964 Well, yes, we all pay, games aren't free.
It's Microsoft's policies that allow it. I miss being able to insert a disc and just go. Now you have to insert your disc, let it install, then wait hours worth of updates if you aren't willing to go disconnect from xbox live. Can't play a game with friends because it needs an update that will take the whole night to prepare. Can you imagine if Microsoft said no to Ubisoft and Bethesda, we won't publish your game because it crashes and it's a defective mess?
I never had an OG Xbox but back in those days I did have an OG model PS2 with a 200 GB HDD in it via the network adapter. Used HD Advance and filled the HDD with game images via my neighborhood Family Video store and games borrowed from friends. Those were good times! 😊
0:59 - Naughty, naughty😂😂
Whats so naughty about it?
@johnbrooks6243 BMX XXX. You can do ur research on that game lol
Custom soundtracks were amazing. I remember making playlist for specific games. I'm sad that feature wasn't reused by anyone in the future.
Hated that the xbox required a dongle and remote to play dvds, very cheeky of M$ to do that. Had to soft mod it with a custom dash to be able to play dvds with a pad, like what the ps2 could already do out of the box. The HDD was really cool though, not having to worry about save space, dumping music cds for playback in games like PGR2, and of course, space for the dlc!
I think it was a way for them not to pay for the DVD license per console. When you purchased the remote, that covered the license fee as well.
@@shaneedwards5256 Something Sony probably didn't have to do by virtue of helping develop the format.
End credits music slaps so hard 15:08
I wonder if any games took advantage of compression and unpakced things on the fly to the HDD for temp storage to allow fitting larger games on the 4.7 GB Single layer or 8.5 GB on dual layer DVDs. Then again 8.5 GB seems like a lot of space for a single game, and thats pretty much the capacity of the OG XBOX (which had 8 or 10GB hard drives)
The HDD is so large and slow it would make more sense to cache everything than do on the fly decompression, and it's faster than a disc read and could move data around for better serial reads if needed. Halo 1 and Halo 2 might be making huge HDD data buffers for a new map. You always had to watch in 2 for it to move to 100% progress whenever you changed the multiplayer map or selected a campaign level in coop.
That feeling of PC gaming and console gaming meeting in my living room is one I will never forget. Especially since the 6th and 7th gen were the end of bespoke consoles. The Steam Deck was the closest, but I’ve never felt that since where it seemed like barriers were being utterly demolished.
At the time? "finally, a console where my mother neglecting to buy a memory card has no impact on my enjoyment of the machine"
Game saves. Music. God, custom soundtracks alone was reason enough for it to exist. DLC.
OG Xbox was an amazing. It felt like a real jump forward.
The Wii also has a VM feature that was added onto retroarch for the large neo geo games like ms3 and garou-mark of the wolves
Sadly, this opened the door to sell beta versions as full games so final users became the beta testers and then patch the games. Also to remove content from the games and sell it as DLC.
The use of the HDD to record highlights used in the halftime shows for NFL2K5 was just another new feature of the game's awesome presentation
I noticed the menus saying ""50000+ blocks free". How big is a "block" on the Xbox hard drive? Same size as on the Playstation 1's memory card?
And why did these systems give storage capacity in nebulous "blocks", rather than in bytes like later systems did? Compare the first two Playstation systems: the PS1 uses "blocks", while the PS2 just uses bytes when saying how much memory card space something will take.
IIRC, a 'block' is 16 kB on Xbox. The choice for blocks instead of bytes or kiloBytes was made to simplify things for the end user.
The most fun use for the HDD (that many people today wouldn't think is a big deal) was the ability to rip your own CDs & play your own music over games.
It didn't drown out your game, it was super easy, and it was super cool to have your own soundtrack going while playing whatever you want. Absolutely loved that feature!
Met a girl from canada in 04 on halo 2 and she sent her xbox to me in florida to mod/install a ton of emulators on so she could play pokemon and stuff on it........20 years later we still talk/play together and I still have the box she shipped it to me in wrapped in like 10 layers of duck tape and she still has the xbox and still plays all the games I installed on it for her. Good times!
Been wanting to do an OG Xbox build for years. I just know once I start I'll be a few hundred dollars deep with all the cool stuff you can do lmao. I loved the console as a teen tho, finally felt like a lower cost alternative to a PC with the HDD etc. Only was missing a keyboard and mouse.
One thing you failed to mention was the addition of the hard drive (and an Internet connection) ushered in the unfortunate era of games shipping with game breaking bugs or features that were missing as promised at launch because the developers could update their games post launch with large updates given the ample space the HD provided. Not saying that it wouldn't have happened eventually, but the HD definitely accelerated it to where we are now with games barely playable at "launch" aka Anthem.
It introduced the PC philosophy to consoles: "ship it broken, fix it later".
Xbox 360 had hard limitations on Title Updates originally, such as how big they could be and charged developers like $40,000 for every patch after the first title update. The Title Updates were mainly to fix minor issues that didn't get noticed before release or multiplayer bugs. Since Xbox One every game is completely installed to the console, so anything can be easily modified and replaced via xbox live after release. Some games like Hogwarts and Halo Infinite are not functional with just the disc.
Thanks Microsoft for the OG Xbox. I had a blast with the console and games. The MOD HDD upgrade to 500GB was a game changer indeed. NO other console was on that level at that time. Later on though, the PS2 was Modded to Hell and Back . I had fun with that too.
Ah yes, controllers the size of Gamecubes. I love it.
Closer to Dreamcasts, but the point still stands.
I had one early on, I quickly got bored of it and sold it to fund a better computer.