The desi ad for the XBox360 - here.

And the corresponding site - here.

• XBOX 360 Fact Sheet at xbox.com


• Inside the XBOX 360, part I: procedural synthesis and dynamic worlds at arstechnica.com


• The scoop on the XBOX 360's embedded OS at windowsfordevices.com


• XBOX 360 vs. PS3, part I, part II at majornelson.com

The PlayStation 3 specs were released at the E3 Expo on Monday. The PS3 is supposed to be twice as fast as the XBOX360 with a floating point speed of 2 teraflops. Right now (as per the supercomputer rankings for November 2004), there is only one supercomputer in India faster than the PS3 (Link to article in Times of India). And imagine such kind of a system selling for 400-500$ (around Rs 23000) a piece. And all this computing power being used to drive the next generation graphics in the games. A normal console lifespan is around 5 years...so both of these heavyweight consoles will stay around 2010 and some predict the PC would have itself become a multi-core 5GHz machine by then. The question is would we still be just surfing, checking emails and chatting with that kind of machine?

The Microsoft Xbox 360 details were leaked today and are all over the net -

The XBox 360 CPU is said to have 3 symmetrical cores running at 3.2 GHz a piece, 1MB of L2 Cache and single VMX-128 vector unit per core. The ATI graphics processor will run at 500MHz with 10 MB embedded DRAM and contain 48 parallel floating-point shader pipelines. System memory is expected to be comprised of 512MB GDDR3 RAM and have a FSP capable of shunting data around at 21.6GB/s.

Imagine this kind of system selling for 300-400$ a piece. @-)

XBMC installed successfully without any problems. Now I can play MP3s and whatnot on my XBOX. I also been able to stream audio/video from my laptop to the XBOX through XBMS (streaming protocol for XBMC). Nice. Also installed DosXbox emulator and it was really nice to relive my experience with the first game I ever played (Prince 1) on the console. Kewl.

Eureka! Eureka! I have modded my xbox successfully. After around 6 hours of toiling (in the weekend) which included opening the xbox, soldering and re-soldering of the chip, trying it out (it failed to recognize the chip 3 times) and assembling it back together, I am now one of the select few who have modded their xboxes. The excitement is tremendous and there are still many things to do before the whole system (mainly XBMC and XBOX-Linux) works, but still. It reminded me of my childhood days of tinkering and soldering electronic equipment (such as my grandma's old radio). I had even started an amplifier project (must have spent around Rs. 1500 back in the early 90s), but could not complete it. And now the excitement is so much I feel as if I should start it again. Anyways, back to work. Will update on the installation of bios and software (which I hope should not be that difficult).