6:36 - look ma, I made it in a LTT video! lol A few notes: - The alpha units were put together in a rush just so early game developers could have a chance to start working on their games for the Xbox's launch in 2001. The plan was to give devs a more polished dev kit, like the clear one seen at 6:36. Production was delayed, and they scrambled to get dev units into game developers' hands in the early days, hence the janky "off the shelf" nature of these early alpha 1 and 2 units. It wasn't originally supposed to be a PC, but they had to rush to put something together so launch titles could be made in time, despite production delays. - The entire case is basically a re-branded PC case. It's not custom-built for Xbox, including the front (other than the "powered by directx" jewel in the center). You could have walked into a store and bought a PC that looked almost identical to the Xbox alpha units in the early 2000's. I forget the make/model, but there are similar looking cases out there that are generic. - The BIOS doesn't load from the hard drive. Linus remarked at how fast it booted up "from a slow hard drive", but the BIOS is stored on the motherboard, similar to a PC's BIOS. The boot animation exists to give the system time to spin up the HDD and initialize other components. - The prototype units were not ever meant to go into production. The line about "Xbox needed something cheaper than an $18k block of aluminum" is partially correct. Yes, it would have been ridiculous to build the giant metal X consoles for developers, but that was never the goal. The big metal "X" prototype units were only meant to grab people's attention in the unveiling. The real reason why these alpha units were made was due to production delays in getting devs the more polished dev kits (which actually looked like Xboxes). Alpha units are extremely rare. I really hope LTT stores/archives these things well. There's so few left in the wild!
If I remember correct, that PC cost the company several grand to be one of the first to have one. Over time we got the clear units for coders and green units for artists. Now I wish I looked inside of that PC when we had it.
I believe the remark about booting from a slow hard disk was in regards to the operating system, not the BIOS. Linus was comparing boot times between normal Windows 2000 and this stripped down OS, which felt comparatively instant. I think Linus was only mentioning how cool the custom BIOS logo was and how it didn't feel like that was commonplace at the time for pc builds like this.
I recognize that case. It was a YCC-802 by Globalwin. We used to sell those like hotcakes for custom build computers. They were one of the first cases with beveled edges, complete thumb screw mounting for everything but the motherboard, a system built in for holding video cards in place, a removable/washable case fan filter, removable motherboard rack, and room for a whopping 7 hard drives. For a case from 2001 they were way ahead of their time.
The case is a Globalwin 802 with a custom metal front. I had one, it held one of my first custom built PCs back in 2002. Recognised it as soon as you showed the the rear :)
Yep! I think it was the only PC case Global Win ever made, And they often got re-branded and sold by others too.. It was a great case for the time, A dream for PC builders! Global Win normally just make cooling solutions/fans for all manner of computer devices in industry.. And still do to this day.
I did testing on this back in the day, so cool to see them again. Thanks Linus for the video. The reason the floppy drives are inside is that these were used in semi public testing so you would have like 20 random semi public people who had access to these machines in a test room.
i was also a tester on the original hardware rollout team and worked with these units extensively. after the form factor switch from these PC dev units to the recognizable translucent dev kits, the majority of them were quietly and unceremoniously scrapped. it's nice to see that some them survived not only intact (mostly) but functional (mostly). i miss dolphin :(
Remember how absolutely wild the OG Xbox UI was? The color scheme, the animations, the sound effects. You could rip CDs to the 10GB HDD and then in some select games, play that music instead of the game's soundtrack "Custom Soundtracks" Playing Black with my own heavy metal music was peak
Yep I just got my old xbox running last night and it's hard to believe how focused and pure the experience is Modern consoles and games have lost their way and are packed with ads
@@CouchPotator Credit wasn't needed, we do this for education/history sake anyway. The fact another towers restored is all that matters end of the day.
@ 5:48: this is called a CRIMM ( Continuity Rambus Inline Memory Module ) Linus. it was a pass through to connect the 2nd slot in series to make the other slot complete ( 2 modules = 1 bank ). I have been building and repairing systems since 1987, btw.
7:05 And there is another reason: While developing your builds (normally) have attached debug symbols which take up A LOT of space. But you don't have these when you ship your software.
This is fun. I actually owned a couple of Xbox 360 alpha dev kits which were literally PowerMac G5's using ATI Radeon X800 XT's.. While it would have been a door stop, I would have appreciated keeping one of them! They were decent machines for the era! And the GPU was quite rare to be honest.
I have both models, 970 and 970fx pci-x and pcix2 fire gl flashed with toms reduced rom. Frequency’s are set perfect no artifacting after my second flash. Played halo all through and made a compatible list. The older sdk for og Xbox works best for its emulation if you plan on running og Xbox home brew. Also there are about 9 diff recoveries out there for it with symbols iso and remote. Frankenstein unit or not I could moch up some ms stickers but it’s the software which is illegal to own especially the internal copy I imagine. Check out xenonwiki and if u see bowser tell him to come out of hiding
This was such a wonderful blast of nostalgia from my early game development days. The Xbox dev kits I used just looked like regular Xboxes but bulkier and with clear plastic shells.
@@a4e69636b It was all C++, using the DirectX libraries. This was well before XNA Game Studio brought the .NET Framework to Xbox, which I was really excited about and wished Microsoft leaned into more. They had an “App Store” before Apple did, and they squandered it (in my opinion).
I played Simpsons Road Rage on PS2 so I'm not sure how it usually performed on Xbox but on PS2, the load screens were ridiculously long. It felt like I was staring at Bart playing an Atari for 2-3 minutes everytime I loaded a level lol
I grew up on the PS2 ver. as well so I can testify to how long it takes there. The final version on Xbox only takes about 10 seconds which makes sense. Usually OG Xbox had better load times in general because of the beefier CPU and ability for games to automatically cache data to the hard drive.
The unfortunate side effect of the ps2 being significantly weaker is cross platform games generally defaulted to the capabilities of the ps2. The grand theft auto series is a great example of how much more powerful the xbox was. Rockstar released all three games on xbox with upgraded graphics.
Well, the drive read speeds were different. DVD read speed on PS2 was something like 2x while on Xbox or GameCube it was much higher. GameCube games seemed to have a pretty fast load time and part of it was the small capacity but I think Nintendo also tried to optimize the game discs so it didn't take forever to load. The Wii was respectable but as the Wii U hit, it was a good system in its own right but took forever to load, didn't matter the media. The OS was the same way. I owned my Wii U since launch and even though the load times were improved, it still took its sweeta** time. I have a 1 TB hard drive on the Wii U and the bottleneck there was quite possibly the USB2 ports.
@@b1llygo4t My favorite example for OG Xbox's superior tech was Ninja Gaiden 04/Black. That was a game you almost certainly couldn't run at 60fps on a PS2 at its intended resolution, and it could easily be mistaken as a early Xbox 360 game. Hell, its remake on the PS3 only looked marginally better (if at all; in some ways it actually looked worse). Honestly, the OG Xbox was so damn powerful that in retrospect, the 360 felt like a pretty modest improvement compared to the jump from the PS2 to the PS3, something that became more apparent as the PS3 matured.
It's worth mentioning that the final product wasn't far from "commodity" itself. Just the other day I repaired an original Xbox, and when I removed the CPU heat sink, it was quite literally an off the shelf Pentium III/733, except soldered onto the board. Most of my favorite games of that era were from the PS2, but the Xbox has a particularly special place in my heart due to how unique it is.
And like Linus said, this was not particularly high-end hardware for the time at all. It was low-end, in fact, but they got away with it, because the other consoles with their custom hardware were even less powerful in order to be cheap to make. These low-end PC components ended up being far costlier (because PCs were expensive in those days), explaining the high price of the original Xbox compared to the competition.
@@no1DdC The GPU was pretty good, it was based on the Geforce3 which released earlier the same year. Obviously it was more than powerful enough anyway, particularly when releasing after all the other consoles.
@@no1DdC I think the GameCube kept a really respectable power equality to the Xbox, in fact, it used quite a bit less power coming in. PowerPC processors were pretty powerful compared to Intel's 86 line. Added to that was the incredibly high bandwidth memory used on GameCube made it do things that a system with, at the time, standard SD memory had GameCube doing circles around the PS2. Also, the GameCube model DOL-001, with the help of a $50-200 plug in adapter is now compatible with modern displays. I had both GameCube and Xbox consoles, and I played them both. GameCube had some pretty good games in its day and the Xbox had multimedia features and software I liked to play as well. I enjoyed playing Oddworld: Munsch's Odyssey, Jet Set Radio Future, Halo, Sega GT and others as well as having the advantage of playing music back as well as DVD video on my Xbox. My current Xbox is the One S console I bought at the end of the One's sales period and am looking to get a Series X when and if I see it being sold.
The original Xbox really seemed like a "we have a hammer, and everything looks like a nail" thing. It wasn't particularly clever, quite obviously being designed by a group of engineers who really knew PCs and not much else. The other consoles may have been on-par (or even under) from a raw performance standpoint, but they were much more tightly integrated devices. Just look at the hulk of a box that the OG Xbox is. It was expensive because it was a grossly inefficient design, hacked together as a small form factor PC with slight customization, and very little room to scale as they sold more of them during its lifespan. I had a lot of contempt for that whole project at the start, seeing as how many times Microsoft thought they were smart enough to corner various markets, only to limp away and axe the project shortly thereafter when they learned that venturing too far out of the core competencies is, like, _really hard..._ I figured it would be yet another one of those -- a "rich kid thinks he can be a video game console company" kind of debacle. It was touch-and-go for a while, and I'm surprised it survived at all. But it did, and despite that they had no business being there, they ended up as a first-class console vendor ... eventually. Although, I still think Sony has always had a much more refined UX than any of the Xboxen. But, close enough is close enough I guess, and you can go a long way on a vibrant software library. Right, Nintendo?
Old habits die slowly. At the time, many PCs only had USB 1.0 or 1.1 on the motherboard, but would commonly get upgraded with a USB 2.0 PCI card, so if you had a USB peripheral that didn't need the speed of USB 2.0, you would always plug it into the slower built-in port.
The back story of Xbox was posted in its entirety by Microsoft itself, in a stunning bout of honesty, and it's all on TH-cam on the Xbox account. It's VERY interesting!
Later optimization is not the only reason devkits have more memory - debug tools (logs and etc) require additional overhead and are (usually) completely removed for the shipping version of the game.
@@MaddTheSane AFAIK none, but the CPU still boots in 16-bit real-mode. The issue is that AMD Athlons reset when executing code that rolls around at 1MB when the A20 gate is in its default setting, while intel Pentiums and Celeron continue executing ... which is a bit of a problem if you wrote your boot-firmware assuming the CPU would reset in such a situation (like an AMD CPU) and then switched to a CPU that doesn't (intel)
I watched video about how OG Xbox got hacked, and apparently the original security design relied on the fact that if you execute code against the top of the memory it would triple fault and halt the CPU. So they literally executed code towards the end of address space to halt in case something goes wrong. But Intel processors back then could start from either near top or very bottom of the memory. The CPU would always start at high addresses, but when it reaches the end of the address space, it goes back to 0 and continues execution. So if you could somehow put executable code at lower memory, you gained arbitrary code execution by causing intentional boot failure. And I believe this did happen on Xbox 😂
Those are the demos included in the DirectX 8.1 SDK. DolphinClassic was called DolphinVS and demonstrated vertex shaders, BumpLens was called SphereMap Sample and showcased spherical environment mapping.
Fun fact about RDRAM - both the Nintendo 64 and Playstation 2 used RDRAM. If you're wondering why your N64 came with a Jumper Pak, it's for the same reasons Linus stated with the Alpha II devkit's filler card.
@@volvo09 I didn't realize how rare it was at the time until I went to see about upgrading my RAM. I ended up selling it on eBay and the money I got for it was almost enough to pay for an entire new computer. (They was back when eBay fees were like a dollar and they weren't required to collect tax.)
The sound card that plugs into the CNR slot actually doesnt contain ANY processing chips, the slot was mostly dedicated to expanding onboard chips that had limited ports for example, adding a 2nd network port to your motherboards NIC or when your soundcard didnt have 5.1 7.1 you could add those.
Back in those days, many CD writers were SCSI because they had better through put and didn't suffer from buffer under runs due to the ATA bus timing out. One of the places I worked at in the mid-1990s had a setup just like that for that purpose.
What's this about the ATA bus timing out? AFAIR, using SCSI was really advantageous when the source and destination drives (a HDD and CD-R, e.g.) were on the same bus. ATA devices hang out on the bus for a while, whereas SCSI devices grab their data and go do their own thing offline. Beyond that, any advantage to using SCSI was more that it might just be a more performant chipset than whatever IDE bridge was on your motherboard. Ditto drivers. Ditto the hard drives where the source image was coming from. At any rate, originally, CD-R drives were SCSI for the same reason CD-ROM drives were: The older IDE specification didn't really support generic media, having been adapted from MFM drive controllers that were basically very large floppy drives. So, your options were either SCSI, or a proprietary interface like the 40-pin MKE or Mitsumi interface, or the 34-pin Sony interface, etc. But once ATAPI showed up to the party, things moved rather swiftly in that direction, with SCSI hanging around for the Mac / Amiga / UNIX workstation market, and the handful of PC enthusiasts that felt inclined to spend $300 on a controller card. (Guilty.)
@@nickwallette6201 Back in the old days, the ATA bus was much slower than SCSI. The devices themselves couldn't keep up with the data throughput required for continuous writes necessary to burn a CD-R. This may also have had to do with the amount of RAM, cache, and other things associated with the machines back then. The other issue back then was the quality of the hard drives. The ATA drives weren't necessarily the highest quality compared to the SCSI drives. The early drives used to use speed compensation tricks to allow for quick reads and writes on one part of the drive compared to the other. A good example of this was the really crappy Conner drives. (Does anyone remember those? ;-) ). During this time, even Western Digital and Seagate ATA drives were crap compared to the SCSI drives of the times. I witnessed many disk timeouts during a CD-R burn. At $15 each per CD-R it got pretty expensive when writing a disk in the mid-1990s.
Looks a lot like the Gateway tower I had back in 2000-ish. I had upgraded from a dusty old Pentium 233 (oc'd to 266!!!) straight to the latest 1ghz Athlon with a 256mb Geforce card. That thing was a BEAST. It had a similar metal support in the middle, so who knows?
Yeah, it's snappy. It was not uncommon to have "I'll go to the coffee machine" boot times back then. Especially on a machine with multiple apps running at startup.
It wasnt windows by then. Windows-running builds stopped around December 2000, possibly November. By then, they were running code much more similar to the Xbox.
@@pessoaanonima6345 It barely had anything left of Windows at that point. You can go look at the leaked source code if you would like. Early Alpha 1 recoveries literally booted a stripped down Windows 2000.
The fact a computer os company used pc components to build their gaming system is shocking to some is surprising tbf. They where trying to make a gaming system not as powerful as the best gaming system but could play games developed specifically for it well
I can remember when I opened my XBox to replace the DVD drive and case fan being surprised by how similar the inside looked to a PC, but I certainly wasn't shocked that it was PC parts, even if it was Microsoft.
@@bmxscape the weren't like that in the past, each had custom cpus, custom graphics, custom sound chips.... Then someone thought "why design different chips, lets just mod what its currently available" then microsoft just thought "why even mod the hardware, use what its already available and mod the OS" Nowadays, its heading towards "Why even use hardware, run it on our servers via cloud" and that it's actually kinda genius.
Wait until you find out what the first Xbox 360 dev kits were using. Technically they weren't PCs and the company they got them from is named after a fruit.
The flow of your vids is so good. The ad lengths, placements, and segues are so dialed that not only do they not interrupt the flow, I guarantee the viewers all actually Enjoy everything about them, rather than tolerate👌🏼
Now you should take a look at the nodding scene: - xbmc (which later became Kodi) - bioses - HD games - and last year we got 8tb hdd support, project stellar and Insignia!
You can add a 16TB, probably more, but I haven't tested. Also, XBMC (Previously XBMP) became Kodi because it had been ported to so many devices it just didn't make sense to continue using XBOX MEDIA CENTER for the name and support for the XBOX was holding it back so support for the XBOX was dropped, however it's releases on the OG XBOX are still referred to as XBMC or XBMC4XBOX. A lot of people don't even realize just how many devices use XBMC/KODI today and that both Boxee and Plex software's are both forks of the project.
I'm a big fan of weird dev kits and prototype hardware. I've got an Intel Atom Bay Trail-T dev kit (called Bay Lake CRB) that I'm still trying to get working reliably.
Glad you mentioned about the sudden CPU change, although it would have been nice if you mentioned that the change was pretty much the core reason why the Xbox got hacked, and could never be patched out. AMD dealt with how memory works in such a way that any attempt to write past the end of memory would cause it to fault out, and eventually crash if it happened again. Intel however just went from end of memory and started writing at the beginning of memory.
I remember Jade Empire on XBOX actually rebooted the machine every time you loaded a new level to get around a memory leak. The user never even knew :P Super fast boots.
@@benwu7980 I meant as in how to install and run builds, I am a QA Analyst in the industry and all of this sounds super familiar even though the tech is 20 years old
That is indeed 100% true! I'm a QA tester and often have to use XBox/PS4-5/Nintendo software to load software into the console. You also have to use the software to get your logs, crash dumps and other important telemetry stuff such as memory usage, performance data, etc.
A fun story on AMD and Intel: AMD and Intel x86 processors are doing the same thing and can be interchanged without issues - Usually. However, they do have some usually insignificant differences in their implementation. As I heard a long time ago, these slight differences caused one of the first (of many) security issues the Xbox had, breaking it wide open quickly for modders. The XBMC (Xbox Media Center) originated here, which changed its name some years back to Kodi :)
@@tOSdude Yes, Intel had to license the rights to the socket 7, socket 5 and I think previous to that was the socket 3. IBM forced Intel to have other manufacturers to make sure there was no interruption in production, starting with the 8086 era. So, there was Cyrix, AMD, IDT that also made x86 CPUs.
@dataabort It was in how Intel and AMD handled overflowing the memory boundry. So when you'd get to the end of the 32 bit address space they'd do different things. AMD would halt at the end, Intel would wrap around to the start. The issue was the the boot ROM was mapped to the end of the address space and the devs were relying on the AMD behaviour to stop the CPU from executing any more code in certain cases.
@dataabort They're trolling and not being good at that. In any case, you're right, x86/x64 processors start in 16-Bit (Real Mode), then switch into 32-Bit (Protected Mode, called because it can protect resources using a MMU which wasn't really possible in 16-Bit), and x64 can go on into 64-Bit (Long Mode). To make things more complicated, each mode has an "emulation" layer which allows you to downgrade a task (process, ...) into the lower mode, that's used when you run a 32-Bit app on a 64-Bit machine.
@@xmine08 I don't think modern cpu's even have the capability to boot into 16-bit (Protected Mode) especially with UEFI (And both intel and amd having another whole computer basically inside the cpu it's self)
I remember the VC820 Motherboard very well! I was a system integrator and Intel reseller at the time. I sold a bunch of Intel CC820 motherboards with SDRAM that we later found out had a fatal flaw in the hardware (machines would constantly blue screen). Intel replaced ALL CC820 motherboards with VC820 motherboards and included 64 MB (I think... it's been 23 years, lol) of RAMBUS with every board so the system integrators didn't have to purchase new RAM for every machine. The VC820 boards were very stable and ran great! I was glad Intel backed their product when it had such a bad issue. I still have one of the VC820 boards in storage! Fun times. Knowing this technology was 23 years ago is making me feel old!
Also, out of all the games I've owned and then sold..Simpsons Road Rage is the only game that I still have from this era of gaming. How I still have it..idk, but probably because it was worth pennies at Gamestop
You're right, your internal hardware is a mess, from the CPU and up. I could help out, I have it working from Alpha I and up. The case is out there too, just arent common to find. And it wasn't at e3 2001 that they found out about the Intel processor. Green discs have nothing to do with the alpha kit games, at least none that I have ever seen. They tend to show up around September 2001 for final hardware. And glad you liked The Simpsons and Dark Summit ;)
Oh boreman hoarding shit as usual for is museum…of dust. This is old news. And now your sharing leaked software and everyone says “they don’t care about old stuff” the law is the law my man
@@PtoPOnline He finished adding all the missions 2 months ago. It's getting close! Sure, it's a UE4 project but it's looking great! I see in the latest video he added VR support 😅 The TH-cam channel is called "Reubs" I think. They are trying to hunt down the original Devs. If you were involved with hit and run in any way, please hit them up!
9:54 They already solved GPU sag 20 years ago? Guess since most GPU shrouds are plastic, I could litterally put a bolt across through a peice of wood to support my modern GPU 13:08 How do I detemine if that's local or not? 14:59 The way he phrased that I will emulate
Oh man, reminds me of early work days. The xdk explorer had lots of useable features when testing :D Could explore the games content when it is loaded, could check when certain files are loaded, so you know if the right videos/audios are loading, how saves are being handled, etc.
So a remote debugger… even some ms employees made their own software to manage Xbox’s it’s called Xbox home or something I have it saved somewhere but you can manage up to unlimited amount of Xbox’s on a network
I'll never forget my first experience of the original Xbox. Some game called 'Halo' which nobody ever heard of blew me away and I was hooked. I also got a game called Project Gotham Racing which I didn't play for ages, cos I thought it was some racing/batman kinda weird thing, but it also was amazing! Included with the console was a DVD called Pitch Black. Never heard of it, didn't play it for weeks, but when I did... wow! This console cost me I think about £400-450 from Currys, and damn it was worth every penny back then :)
I thought that about PGR at first, too. But quickly realized that wasn't the case by... Reading the case. But for real, that was one of the most fun racing games I've ever played. I loved the radio stations. I wish the series would come back
What's wild is those demos you show with the plane showing real-time shadows and the distortion blob are both things I had to program at uni (We had xbxo 360/PS3 by then). The fact they were the technical demos on the original xbox is crazy.
Hey man I had a Thermaltake full sized tower kind of like the Kandalf but with mesh on front, that had those sweet flip out stabilizer feetsies! Those were the days! I don't miss the 100 pounds that system weighed with lugging that to Lan parties.
You need a lot of skill its not like there are pins on the side, they are replaced with solderballs underneath, any tiny pressure can rupture the solderball and flood the whole chip with solder it aint as easy buddy, go watch some reballing then you know 🤦
I love the edited version of your videos - but also loveee seeing longer videos! suggestion: release also more of a "Raw" version of the video! I feel like I can spend 2 hours just watching content of this project
A reason dev kits have so much more memory is because they use a LOT of proprietary in-house software alongside the games themselves. You can end up running a half dozen programs at once on top of the game for various purposes of monitoring and testing. Retail models obviously have most if not all of that stripped away so they don't need anywhere near as much RAM.
The metal used in the case; the fan cut outs in the rear; front fan shroud at the bottom; the hardware inside; and even the metal bar used for PCI card retention; reminds me of old schools cases like the Antec SX630 and InWin a500 or q500. OMG! Linus you made me feel old. LOL
RDRAM was probably used in Silicon Graphics machines as well as the first game system to have it was the Nintendo 64. Even in it you had to have a jumper pack as Nintendo did something unprecedented at the time by making the N64 RAM upgradable. As much as it was underappreciated, the Nintendo GameCube had some features the others at the time lacked. Digital video and audio, super fast 1TSRAM, PowerPC processing and some advanced particle effects on the custom ATi processor. The mod scene for the GameCube now seems to have brought it to the forefront of vintage gaming. I have my GameCube from December 2001 still and have upgraded it with a GCHD Mk.II, LaserBear BlueRetro Bluetooth adapter and plan to put a PicoBoot on it at some point as well.
This is an extremely insignificant point to make, but I'm slightly familiar with Xbox modding and I think at 11:49 when Tanner mentioned loading an "XDK", he misspoke and meant to say XEX. XDK stands for Xbox Development Kit, and XEX stands for Xbox Executable which are the files that it runs (like an EXE file in windows).
You can also do this using a PowerMac G5. As they were used as dev kits for the 360 very early on. They require a specific model of the G5, a specific (Mac compatible because PPC Macs won’t see PC GPUs at all) graphics card, and I believe an Ethernet card as well since Microsoft used it as a kind of DRM.
You actually can use a PC Card in there no problem just not for xenon os. Any r420 card can be flashed w a reduced x800xt rom flashed using graphiccelerator or atiflash. You also need a 160gb hdd or higher. 512 ram or more and an Intel Ethernet card. You can also kernel debug through FireWire. The models you speak of are the 2.0ghz A1047 model pci-x alpha 1 with Radeon 9800 pro or alpha 2 is a 970fx with different cpu housing and is pci-x2. Suprised nobody has made any home brew for either machine. The g5 has a lot of potential with sdk 1888. 1529 is out there than the other builds… also that AmR sound card isn’t worth building an alpha 1 the cases are too hard to come by the terminator ram card and the mobo is 700 dollars. The 1529 hdd image or iso has a blades dash and og Xbox emulator. I played Halo all the way through and have a compatibility list.
It's fun to see Linus go through the same discoveries I did when I first started QA testing. And im happy to say installing test builds in last gen consoles still deliver the same dev experience of 20 to 30 min wait times. Glorious!
This reminded me about building back in the early 2000's and having to shop for parts. There were a lot of small dev shops around where you could pick up various parts to assemble into a build, but what I remember most is that many of these small shops had a significant investment in memory modules and processors, and most of them kept them locked into a vault or safe! And when a new shipment of something arrived, there'd be a que out the door as people stood around waiting to buy 16, 32, or 64 MB memory! And they weren't cheap either! 20 years later and all of that is so much dinosaur dust.
The original Xbox software was actually not Windows 2000, but a mixture of Windows NT 4.0 Embedded and early Windows NT 5.0 (NT 5.0 would later become Windows 2000) code. The Xbox kernel is basically an embedded minimal NT 5 beta kernel, the boot loader is likely a modified NT4 boot loader. And it runs DirectX 8. The next generation, Xbox 360 dev kit is also quite interesting. This time MS switched to PowerPC, and guess who makes the most PowerPC workstations back then? The very first dev kit is actually just an off the shelf PowerMac G5🤣. MS formatted the drive and installed xbox software on them. Therefore it is possible to recreate a Xbox 360 dev kit with PowerMac G5 (model A1047 PCI-X or PCI-X-2). After the work is done, these early dev kits got Mac OS X reinstalled and sold. I think the fact that they switched to PPC so quickly must have something to do with early Windows NT having a PPC version, and the dev work didn't stop internally, despite NT4 being the last Windows to officially support PPC.
And being an embedded NT kernel optimized for low memory is probably why it boots so fast. Also it doesn't load the win32 subsystem like most windows do, but the xbox subsystem, and only some win32 api were used for booting up and running directX. The recovery disc is based on regular Windows 2000 SP1 though.
@@stickiedmin6508 Remember the N64, even though it had 4MB of RDRAM and had tons of bandwidth for its time, it was absolutely horrible to work with it due to its super high latency. Even PS2 used RDRAM, but I have never heard of latency issues from PS2. Anyways good that Xbox got rid of that RDRAM.
I had it on Gamecube and I loved it. It was just a blatant rip off of Crazy Taxi for the Dreamcast, but the Simpsons theme gave it charm that Crazy Taxi never had.
Linus, why not play a dice and make weird setups for building a pc? Ranging from low end to high end units. Example roll a dice for cpu, roll again for gpu etc and the hardest part is you need to make them work as a pc.
Videos like this are why I keep comign back to LMG. the colelctor in me wants to put this on a shelf never to be touched and displayed with love and care and to brag to friends and family with. the only Dev kit I have is for an Xbox one (Scorpio) and If I ever got the chance I would add more. Thanks for sharing this nerdy gaming history. keep up the great work.
That's the same PC case that I used when I built my first PC, except for the face plate. I recognized the swing-out feet and the plastic drive housing right away. I built a system using an AMD K6III 300 mhz in a socket 7 mobo if I remember right.
“Bill doesn’t really want to review your spec, he just wants to make sure you’ve got it under control. His standard M.O. is to ask harder and harder questions until you admit that you don’t know, and then he can yell at you for being unprepared. Nobody was really sure what happens if you answer the hardest question he can come up with because it’s never happened before.”
Probably because he progressively came up with something more and more ridiculous to even bother asking about on the fly. Bill seems like the kind of nasty person to use his employees as free frustration vents.
Thank you for this. Now, there´s one holy grail: How well does the original Halo CE perform on the DevKit with the faster GPU?? Follow up video, please?
Dev kits can't run commercial games, ie the versions of games that actually shipped to consumers. So you'd have to find a leaked dev build that was close to release.
@@CouchPotator Which in this case, would likely stop around May 2001, as it cant run beta or final hardware games, development or not. Still months prior to release :)
It was good because it was a blatant copy of Crazy Taxi. Sega filed a lawsuit, which was quickly settled, albeit that was apparently on a specific patent even though the whole game seems the same (I'd assumed they just licensed the engine)
Where's the minivan Linus? You gonna leave it in the dust like the power supply tester? We haven't forgot. Please continue the minivan series, it's a pretty good idea, love to see more of it.
@@DoodleDonkey45 Oh no, that was second from the bottom of the GeForce FX series when I got it. The FX 5950 Ultra would've been the top end, but if my memory serves me correctly, the Radeon cards at the time were doing better. But at the time, even at the bottom of the product stack, you could game reasonably well on almost any dedicated GPU.
it worked ok, after put a fan/vram kit on it, but drivers problem going between New game to old game, as new game needed the new and for long time old games didn't work on the no new driver. give up and got a 5770 and another one later on and game after that, just worked.
I recently started using an Xbox classic emulator. Some games I remember loving were actually terrible lol. I still have my original Xbox (mt dew one from sweepstakes) but emulator is more convenient
i remember owning my first xbox in around 2008. it was a second-hand xbox original that my step dad gave both me and my sister to play on. a short while after we went to blockbuster to get some games. one we weren't allowed to play that my dad bought, metal gear solid 2, and my sister bought timesplitters 2 which we used to play split-screen (bring back splitscreen microsoft) and i bought need for speed underground 2. amazing console. very fond memories. the xbox died about a year later and i was given a boxed xbox 360, a white one with HDMI. i played that thing all the way up until 2013 when the power supply would take up to 50 unplug attempts to get it to work right again, and then in 2014 i upgraded to a slim. only in 2017/2018 did i upgrade to next gen, which i don't have nearly as many fond memories about. xbox gang :)
FYI the point of extra RAM on a devkit is to load debugging tools, and to run builds without optimizations, so that you can get useful call stacks on a crash. Modern devkits allow you to toggle it off and on, or give you warnings when you exceed regular system memory, too! And if you think that waiting 10 minutes to copy a build to a dev kit was an early 2000s game dev experience... well... I guess it was. It can take up to 30 minutes to copy over a game to the switch dev kit these days. We definitely do get a lot of coffees lol.
I remember selling my n64 with like 15 games and 4 controllers just so I could buy an Xbox after playing halo for the first time at my cousins house. I got the bundle pack with fusion frenzy and ralli sport challenge 2 and extra controller from Costco for around $300? Can’t really remember the cost but it was so with it!
our first "new" computer we bought was similar to this. a monster ONE GHZ PROCESSOR, 128mb of ram. and an unheard of 100gb hard drive and a dvd rom. it was something like $2000 in the year 2000 when my father worked in the tech industry. i still have the case which i installed multiple different motherboards in it over the years.
ปีที่แล้ว +2
I had a system very similar to that one in those days. The rambus module I had was 256mb and the raid card was amazing. I was able to burn CD's and use the computer at the same time.
IBM had customized BIOS splash screens and POST screens all the way back in the early days of home computing. It's always been possible, just annoying and expensive to code in, so most companies didn't bother until it became more trivial to do so. HP had some lovely splash and POST screens on their Proliant products.
I remember being in awe of some Xbox games when it came out first. Mainly Halo and Ghost Recon for the size of the free roaming game worlds, and Splinter Cell for the life-like graphics, especially the shadows and the night vision mode.
I got to play around with some computers of that era last year. My friend recorded an album at a recording studio and was looking for lost tracks that he thought would be on a hard drive associated with one of 3 Power Mac G4 MDD towers. I got ahold of the computers but they were way too old to work anymore. I ended up getting an ide drive caddy that just plugged into my PC with usb and used a Mac disk reading emulator, (from MacOS 9 mostly). It was quite a journey, I backed up everything I could find but no sign of my friend's lost data. I asked the producer if I could keep the G4 towers but he said he wanted them back... 2002 I think they were from.
Wow whoever owned that computer before must have dropped it more than Linus for it to look that banged up.
I didn't even know it was possible lmao
Nah it was pristine condition, it looked like that after Mr Linus carried it a whole 10 meters from the truck to the table (and dropped it 12 times)
@sarikakumari4047 It's a scam bot, please don't be dumb and fall for this.
@@YawnMK1 hahaha savage 🤣🤣🤣
@Sarika Gaming its not a part 2 to this video. It's just you or someone else playing a video game with Indian music over it.
6:36 - look ma, I made it in a LTT video! lol
A few notes:
- The alpha units were put together in a rush just so early game developers could have a chance to start working on their games for the Xbox's launch in 2001. The plan was to give devs a more polished dev kit, like the clear one seen at 6:36. Production was delayed, and they scrambled to get dev units into game developers' hands in the early days, hence the janky "off the shelf" nature of these early alpha 1 and 2 units. It wasn't originally supposed to be a PC, but they had to rush to put something together so launch titles could be made in time, despite production delays.
- The entire case is basically a re-branded PC case. It's not custom-built for Xbox, including the front (other than the "powered by directx" jewel in the center). You could have walked into a store and bought a PC that looked almost identical to the Xbox alpha units in the early 2000's. I forget the make/model, but there are similar looking cases out there that are generic.
- The BIOS doesn't load from the hard drive. Linus remarked at how fast it booted up "from a slow hard drive", but the BIOS is stored on the motherboard, similar to a PC's BIOS. The boot animation exists to give the system time to spin up the HDD and initialize other components.
- The prototype units were not ever meant to go into production. The line about "Xbox needed something cheaper than an $18k block of aluminum" is partially correct. Yes, it would have been ridiculous to build the giant metal X consoles for developers, but that was never the goal. The big metal "X" prototype units were only meant to grab people's attention in the unveiling. The real reason why these alpha units were made was due to production delays in getting devs the more polished dev kits (which actually looked like Xboxes).
Alpha units are extremely rare. I really hope LTT stores/archives these things well. There's so few left in the wild!
Wow ..thanks so much for all of the extra history / info!
thanks for the excellent tidbits of info !
If I remember correct, that PC cost the company several grand to be one of the first to have one. Over time we got the clear units for coders and green units for artists. Now I wish I looked inside of that PC when we had it.
@@BeerMoneyGames Interesting
I believe the remark about booting from a slow hard disk was in regards to the operating system, not the BIOS. Linus was comparing boot times between normal Windows 2000 and this stripped down OS, which felt comparatively instant.
I think Linus was only mentioning how cool the custom BIOS logo was and how it didn't feel like that was commonplace at the time for pc builds like this.
I recognize that case. It was a YCC-802 by Globalwin. We used to sell those like hotcakes for custom build computers. They were one of the first cases with beveled edges, complete thumb screw mounting for everything but the motherboard, a system built in for holding video cards in place, a removable/washable case fan filter, removable motherboard rack, and room for a whopping 7 hard drives. For a case from 2001 they were way ahead of their time.
The case is a Globalwin 802 with a custom metal front. I had one, it held one of my first custom built PCs back in 2002. Recognised it as soon as you showed the the rear :)
Damn dude, nicely spotted
I had that same case (or one extremely similar), but branded as a Chieftec
Not a bad looking case for that era actually
Yep! I think it was the only PC case Global Win ever made, And they often got re-branded and sold by others too.. It was a great case for the time, A dream for PC builders! Global Win normally just make cooling solutions/fans for all manner of computer devices in industry.. And still do to this day.
I did testing on this back in the day, so cool to see them again. Thanks Linus for the video. The reason the floppy drives are inside is that these were used in semi public testing so you would have like 20 random semi public people who had access to these machines in a test room.
That’s super interesting on its own merit, thanks man
i was also a tester on the original hardware rollout team and worked with these units extensively. after the form factor switch from these PC dev units to the recognizable translucent dev kits, the majority of them were quietly and unceremoniously scrapped. it's nice to see that some them survived not only intact (mostly) but functional (mostly). i miss dolphin :(
Remember how absolutely wild the OG Xbox UI was? The color scheme, the animations, the sound effects. You could rip CDs to the 10GB HDD and then in some select games, play that music instead of the game's soundtrack "Custom Soundtracks"
Playing Black with my own heavy metal music was peak
I really do miss the music features of Xbox
Yep I just got my old xbox running last night and it's hard to believe how focused and pure the experience is
Modern consoles and games have lost their way and are packed with ads
You could even plug in an iPod and listen to it, it was fantastic.
Having your own radio stations in GTA games was awesome too. Wish GTA5 for PC could do the same, I'm sure there might be a mod for it tho
@@combatwombat594 You can do it on GTAV PC without mods, I’ve done it several times before, unless they’ve changed it recently for some reason
Happy we could help you restore these Linus!
@Menti Capti LTT did say VGPM provided the disk images for the dev kits
@@CouchPotator Credit wasn't needed, we do this for education/history sake anyway. The fact another towers restored is all that matters end of the day.
@@videogamepreservation awesome way of looking at it. Thanks for all of your hard work to preserve these!
Hi
AG/OG For The Win! 😎
@ 5:48: this is called a CRIMM ( Continuity Rambus Inline Memory Module ) Linus. it was a pass through to connect the 2nd slot in series to make the other slot complete ( 2 modules = 1 bank ). I have been building and repairing systems since 1987, btw.
Great to know at LAN parties, but no fun at normal ones.
7:05 And there is another reason: While developing your builds (normally) have attached debug symbols which take up A LOT of space. But you don't have these when you ship your software.
This is fun. I actually owned a couple of Xbox 360 alpha dev kits which were literally PowerMac G5's using ATI Radeon X800 XT's.. While it would have been a door stop, I would have appreciated keeping one of them! They were decent machines for the era! And the GPU was quite rare to be honest.
I have both models, 970 and 970fx pci-x and pcix2 fire gl flashed with toms reduced rom. Frequency’s are set perfect no artifacting after my second flash. Played halo all through and made a compatible list. The older sdk for og Xbox works best for its emulation if you plan on running og Xbox home brew. Also there are about 9 diff recoveries out there for it with symbols iso and remote. Frankenstein unit or not I could moch up some ms stickers but it’s the software which is illegal to own especially the internal copy I imagine. Check out xenonwiki and if u see bowser tell him to come out of hiding
I always wondered what it would be like to build a computer and install the Xbox version of Windows on it
@Love Gaming what were you doing before it broke
@Love Gaming "My PC broke!!!" (10 minutes later) **posts spam comments after account was taken over by a bot**
Clever bot
@Airpixel Imagine making a program to link to a year old video.
🤯🤯🤯
This was such a wonderful blast of nostalgia from my early game development days. The Xbox dev kits I used just looked like regular Xboxes but bulkier and with clear plastic shells.
Which language did you use to write games?
@@a4e69636b It was all C++, using the DirectX libraries. This was well before XNA Game Studio brought the .NET Framework to Xbox, which I was really excited about and wished Microsoft leaned into more. They had an “App Store” before Apple did, and they squandered it (in my opinion).
@@vargonian BlackBerry had an app store early too (among other things like nfc) and squandered it. Makes me sad.
@@vargonian nowadays, MonoGame offers much the same as XNA did, but has the benefit of being cross-platform.
I played Simpsons Road Rage on PS2 so I'm not sure how it usually performed on Xbox but on PS2, the load screens were ridiculously long. It felt like I was staring at Bart playing an Atari for 2-3 minutes everytime I loaded a level lol
I grew up on the PS2 ver. as well so I can testify to how long it takes there. The final version on Xbox only takes about 10 seconds which makes sense. Usually OG Xbox had better load times in general because of the beefier CPU and ability for games to automatically cache data to the hard drive.
I had it on xbox and remember it taking ages too
The unfortunate side effect of the ps2 being significantly weaker is cross platform games generally defaulted to the capabilities of the ps2. The grand theft auto series is a great example of how much more powerful the xbox was. Rockstar released all three games on xbox with upgraded graphics.
Well, the drive read speeds were different. DVD read speed on PS2 was something like 2x while on Xbox or GameCube it was much higher. GameCube games seemed to have a pretty fast load time and part of it was the small capacity but I think Nintendo also tried to optimize the game discs so it didn't take forever to load. The Wii was respectable but as the Wii U hit, it was a good system in its own right but took forever to load, didn't matter the media. The OS was the same way. I owned my Wii U since launch and even though the load times were improved, it still took its sweeta** time. I have a 1 TB hard drive on the Wii U and the bottleneck there was quite possibly the USB2 ports.
@@b1llygo4t My favorite example for OG Xbox's superior tech was Ninja Gaiden 04/Black. That was a game you almost certainly couldn't run at 60fps on a PS2 at its intended resolution, and it could easily be mistaken as a early Xbox 360 game. Hell, its remake on the PS3 only looked marginally better (if at all; in some ways it actually looked worse).
Honestly, the OG Xbox was so damn powerful that in retrospect, the 360 felt like a pretty modest improvement compared to the jump from the PS2 to the PS3, something that became more apparent as the PS3 matured.
It's worth mentioning that the final product wasn't far from "commodity" itself. Just the other day I repaired an original Xbox, and when I removed the CPU heat sink, it was quite literally an off the shelf Pentium III/733, except soldered onto the board.
Most of my favorite games of that era were from the PS2, but the Xbox has a particularly special place in my heart due to how unique it is.
And like Linus said, this was not particularly high-end hardware for the time at all. It was low-end, in fact, but they got away with it, because the other consoles with their custom hardware were even less powerful in order to be cheap to make. These low-end PC components ended up being far costlier (because PCs were expensive in those days), explaining the high price of the original Xbox compared to the competition.
@@no1DdC The GPU was pretty good, it was based on the Geforce3 which released earlier the same year.
Obviously it was more than powerful enough anyway, particularly when releasing after all the other consoles.
@@no1DdC I think the GameCube kept a really respectable power equality to the Xbox, in fact, it used quite a bit less power coming in. PowerPC processors were pretty powerful compared to Intel's 86 line. Added to that was the incredibly high bandwidth memory used on GameCube made it do things that a system with, at the time, standard SD memory had GameCube doing circles around the PS2. Also, the GameCube model DOL-001, with the help of a $50-200 plug in adapter is now compatible with modern displays.
I had both GameCube and Xbox consoles, and I played them both. GameCube had some pretty good games in its day and the Xbox had multimedia features and software I liked to play as well. I enjoyed playing Oddworld: Munsch's Odyssey, Jet Set Radio Future, Halo, Sega GT and others as well as having the advantage of playing music back as well as DVD video on my Xbox. My current Xbox is the One S console I bought at the end of the One's sales period and am looking to get a Series X when and if I see it being sold.
The original Xbox really seemed like a "we have a hammer, and everything looks like a nail" thing. It wasn't particularly clever, quite obviously being designed by a group of engineers who really knew PCs and not much else. The other consoles may have been on-par (or even under) from a raw performance standpoint, but they were much more tightly integrated devices.
Just look at the hulk of a box that the OG Xbox is. It was expensive because it was a grossly inefficient design, hacked together as a small form factor PC with slight customization, and very little room to scale as they sold more of them during its lifespan.
I had a lot of contempt for that whole project at the start, seeing as how many times Microsoft thought they were smart enough to corner various markets, only to limp away and axe the project shortly thereafter when they learned that venturing too far out of the core competencies is, like, _really hard..._ I figured it would be yet another one of those -- a "rich kid thinks he can be a video game console company" kind of debacle. It was touch-and-go for a while, and I'm surprised it survived at all. But it did, and despite that they had no business being there, they ended up as a first-class console vendor ... eventually.
Although, I still think Sony has always had a much more refined UX than any of the Xboxen. But, close enough is close enough I guess, and you can go a long way on a vibrant software library. Right, Nintendo?
No way?! Very cool. I didn't know off the shelf CPUs made it into consoles of that era. Awesome.
Linus: points at USB add-in card
Also Linus: plugs keyboard into the motherboard’s USB ports.
Old habits die slowly. At the time, many PCs only had USB 1.0 or 1.1 on the motherboard, but would commonly get upgraded with a USB 2.0 PCI card, so if you had a USB peripheral that didn't need the speed of USB 2.0, you would always plug it into the slower built-in port.
Did he switch one Logitech K120 for the other K120? A4tech had a keyboard looking exactly like the Logitech. I used more A4 mouse back then.
@@no1DdC I feel called out 😭
The back story of Xbox was posted in its entirety by Microsoft itself, in a stunning bout of honesty, and it's all on TH-cam on the Xbox account. It's VERY interesting!
Any pointers as to where to start?
@@Ryuzaki_Koizumi_Legacy I saw it a while ago in one go, super interesting.
Later optimization is not the only reason devkits have more memory - debug tools (logs and etc) require additional overhead and are (usually) completely removed for the shipping version of the game.
Fun fact: there's a bug in the original Xbox software because it assumed an AMD CPU and Intel CPUs act a bit different in 16-bit mode
What games/software even used 16-bit mode?
@@MaddTheSane AFAIK none, but the CPU still boots in 16-bit real-mode. The issue is that AMD Athlons reset when executing code that rolls around at 1MB when the A20 gate is in its default setting, while intel Pentiums and Celeron continue executing ... which is a bit of a problem if you wrote your boot-firmware assuming the CPU would reset in such a situation (like an AMD CPU) and then switched to a CPU that doesn't (intel)
@@sundhaug92 And that's how it got hacked :D
I watched video about how OG Xbox got hacked, and apparently the original security design relied on the fact that if you execute code against the top of the memory it would triple fault and halt the CPU.
So they literally executed code towards the end of address space to halt in case something goes wrong.
But Intel processors back then could start from either near top or very bottom of the memory. The CPU would always start at high addresses, but when it reaches the end of the address space, it goes back to 0 and continues execution.
So if you could somehow put executable code at lower memory, you gained arbitrary code execution by causing intentional boot failure. And I believe this did happen on Xbox 😂
@@sundhaug92 hey man Iam in awe of your knowledge. May I know how you became so good at this stuff.
Those are the demos included in the DirectX 8.1 SDK. DolphinClassic was called DolphinVS and demonstrated vertex shaders, BumpLens was called SphereMap Sample and showcased spherical environment mapping.
Fun fact about RDRAM - both the Nintendo 64 and Playstation 2 used RDRAM. If you're wondering why your N64 came with a Jumper Pak, it's for the same reasons Linus stated with the Alpha II devkit's filler card.
I had an old desktop with RDRAM and I sold the memory for like $500 when I upgraded my computer. That was in like 2004.
I remember the days of that stuff being unobtanium. Thankfully I never had any or had to search for any.
@@volvo09 I didn't realize how rare it was at the time until I went to see about upgrading my RAM. I ended up selling it on eBay and the money I got for it was almost enough to pay for an entire new computer. (They was back when eBay fees were like a dollar and they weren't required to collect tax.)
The sound card that plugs into the CNR slot actually doesnt contain ANY processing chips, the slot was mostly dedicated to expanding onboard chips that had limited ports for example, adding a 2nd network port to your motherboards NIC or when your soundcard didnt have 5.1 7.1 you could add those.
Thats not CNR it is AMR and the card actually has an Codec Chip on it.
CNR & AMR this is great to learn about
16:48 that's actually pretty similar to the 2023 developer experience
Imagine if there was no loading bars....
@@x0vg5hs1 is this a rust criticism?
@@ioneocla6577 oh god I feel like as time passes a bigger and bigger part of internet content is Rust debates. It's terrifying.
@@pavelkalugin4537 Do people even use Rust for game development on a large scale? I thought mostly C++?
17:14 I'm pretty sure that thought is a mandatory part of working for you, Linus
Back in those days, many CD writers were SCSI because they had better through put and didn't suffer from buffer under runs due to the ATA bus timing out. One of the places I worked at in the mid-1990s had a setup just like that for that purpose.
What's this about the ATA bus timing out?
AFAIR, using SCSI was really advantageous when the source and destination drives (a HDD and CD-R, e.g.) were on the same bus. ATA devices hang out on the bus for a while, whereas SCSI devices grab their data and go do their own thing offline.
Beyond that, any advantage to using SCSI was more that it might just be a more performant chipset than whatever IDE bridge was on your motherboard. Ditto drivers. Ditto the hard drives where the source image was coming from.
At any rate, originally, CD-R drives were SCSI for the same reason CD-ROM drives were: The older IDE specification didn't really support generic media, having been adapted from MFM drive controllers that were basically very large floppy drives. So, your options were either SCSI, or a proprietary interface like the 40-pin MKE or Mitsumi interface, or the 34-pin Sony interface, etc. But once ATAPI showed up to the party, things moved rather swiftly in that direction, with SCSI hanging around for the Mac / Amiga / UNIX workstation market, and the handful of PC enthusiasts that felt inclined to spend $300 on a controller card. (Guilty.)
@@nickwallette6201 Back in the old days, the ATA bus was much slower than SCSI. The devices themselves couldn't keep up with the data throughput required for continuous writes necessary to burn a CD-R. This may also have had to do with the amount of RAM, cache, and other things associated with the machines back then.
The other issue back then was the quality of the hard drives. The ATA drives weren't necessarily the highest quality compared to the SCSI drives. The early drives used to use speed compensation tricks to allow for quick reads and writes on one part of the drive compared to the other. A good example of this was the really crappy Conner drives. (Does anyone remember those? ;-) ). During this time, even Western Digital and Seagate ATA drives were crap compared to the SCSI drives of the times.
I witnessed many disk timeouts during a CD-R burn. At $15 each per CD-R it got pretty expensive when writing a disk in the mid-1990s.
Looks a lot like the Gateway tower I had back in 2000-ish. I had upgraded from a dusty old Pentium 233 (oc'd to 266!!!) straight to the latest 1ghz Athlon with a 256mb Geforce card. That thing was a BEAST. It had a similar metal support in the middle, so who knows?
I was thinking the same thing, 1999 Gateway I have is so similar and I actually have RDRAM but it clearly isn't meant for the board included
Man the optimization of that Windows build is a marvel of engineering for the time and the hardware specs it's running on
Yeah, it's snappy. It was not uncommon to have "I'll go to the coffee machine" boot times back then. Especially on a machine with multiple apps running at startup.
It wasnt windows by then. Windows-running builds stopped around December 2000, possibly November. By then, they were running code much more similar to the Xbox.
@@PtoPOnline Even the final build was based on windows.
@@pessoaanonima6345 It barely had anything left of Windows at that point. You can go look at the leaked source code if you would like. Early Alpha 1 recoveries literally booted a stripped down Windows 2000.
@@PtoPOnline so your'e saying it was windows?
The fact a computer os company used pc components to build their gaming system is shocking to some is surprising tbf. They where trying to make a gaming system not as powerful as the best gaming system but could play games developed specifically for it well
what why?
I can remember when I opened my XBox to replace the DVD drive and case fan being surprised by how similar the inside looked to a PC, but I certainly wasn't shocked that it was PC parts, even if it was Microsoft.
gaming consoles are just small form factor pc's with very restrictive operating systems lol
@@bmxscape the weren't like that in the past, each had custom cpus, custom graphics, custom sound chips.... Then someone thought "why design different chips, lets just mod what its currently available" then microsoft just thought "why even mod the hardware, use what its already available and mod the OS"
Nowadays, its heading towards "Why even use hardware, run it on our servers via cloud" and that it's actually kinda genius.
Wait until you find out what the first Xbox 360 dev kits were using. Technically they weren't PCs and the company they got them from is named after a fruit.
The flow of your vids is so good. The ad lengths, placements, and segues are so dialed that not only do they not interrupt the flow, I guarantee the viewers all actually Enjoy everything about them, rather than tolerate👌🏼
Now you should take a look at the nodding scene:
- xbmc (which later became Kodi)
- bioses
- HD games
- and last year we got 8tb hdd support, project stellar and Insignia!
early wireless controllers are kinda wild too sometimes
And Project Stellar, Insiginia
@@xtobyplayz5946 yep, added to the OP, thank you!
You can add a 16TB, probably more, but I haven't tested. Also, XBMC (Previously XBMP) became Kodi because it had been ported to so many devices it just didn't make sense to continue using XBOX MEDIA CENTER for the name and support for the XBOX was holding it back so support for the XBOX was dropped, however it's releases on the OG XBOX are still referred to as XBMC or XBMC4XBOX. A lot of people don't even realize just how many devices use XBMC/KODI today and that both Boxee and Plex software's are both forks of the project.
KODIIIIIIIIIII
I'm a big fan of weird dev kits and prototype hardware.
I've got an Intel Atom Bay Trail-T dev kit (called Bay Lake CRB) that I'm still trying to get working reliably.
I'd love to see LTT actually go hunt parts and build a Xbox dev kit
That would mostly comprise of clips of him trawling ebay for weeks.
Wow, all the devkits are so amazing little pieces of history!
Glad you mentioned about the sudden CPU change, although it would have been nice if you mentioned that the change was pretty much the core reason why the Xbox got hacked, and could never be patched out.
AMD dealt with how memory works in such a way that any attempt to write past the end of memory would cause it to fault out, and eventually crash if it happened again. Intel however just went from end of memory and started writing at the beginning of memory.
I remember Jade Empire on XBOX actually rebooted the machine every time you loaded a new level to get around a memory leak. The user never even knew :P Super fast boots.
What's weird is that this is still how Dev Kits and Test Kits still work, nothing has pretty much changed at all!!! XD
actually, they do tend to change, when telemetry / call back got way more intrusive
@@benwu7980 I meant as in how to install and run builds, I am a QA Analyst in the industry and all of this sounds super familiar even though the tech is 20 years old
That is indeed 100% true! I'm a QA tester and often have to use XBox/PS4-5/Nintendo software to load software into the console. You also have to use the software to get your logs, crash dumps and other important telemetry stuff such as memory usage, performance data, etc.
@@FloodExterminator question is: do you prefer Ps4's Neighbourhood or Xbox XDK? 👀
@George Beswick Didn't work much woth Neighbourhood so I'd say GDK Manager 😅
Even before you mentioned the floppy drive is backwards, I kind of assumed everyone was rocking these with the panel off anyway 🤣
A fun story on AMD and Intel: AMD and Intel x86 processors are doing the same thing and can be interchanged without issues - Usually. However, they do have some usually insignificant differences in their implementation. As I heard a long time ago, these slight differences caused one of the first (of many) security issues the Xbox had, breaking it wide open quickly for modders. The XBMC (Xbox Media Center) originated here, which changed its name some years back to Kodi :)
Up until the Pentium 2/Slot 1 era, you could even run AMD and Intel in the same motherboard (although probably not at the same time).
@@tOSdude Yes, Intel had to license the rights to the socket 7, socket 5 and I think previous to that was the socket 3.
IBM forced Intel to have other manufacturers to make sure there was no interruption in production, starting with the 8086 era.
So, there was Cyrix, AMD, IDT that also made x86 CPUs.
@dataabort It was in how Intel and AMD handled overflowing the memory boundry. So when you'd get to the end of the 32 bit address space they'd do different things. AMD would halt at the end, Intel would wrap around to the start. The issue was the the boot ROM was mapped to the end of the address space and the devs were relying on the AMD behaviour to stop the CPU from executing any more code in certain cases.
@dataabort They're trolling and not being good at that. In any case, you're right, x86/x64 processors start in 16-Bit (Real Mode), then switch into 32-Bit (Protected Mode, called because it can protect resources using a MMU which wasn't really possible in 16-Bit), and x64 can go on into 64-Bit (Long Mode). To make things more complicated, each mode has an "emulation" layer which allows you to downgrade a task (process, ...) into the lower mode, that's used when you run a 32-Bit app on a 64-Bit machine.
@@xmine08 I don't think modern cpu's even have the capability to boot into 16-bit (Protected Mode) especially with UEFI (And both intel and amd having another whole computer basically inside the cpu it's self)
I remember the VC820 Motherboard very well! I was a system integrator and Intel reseller at the time. I sold a bunch of Intel CC820 motherboards with SDRAM that we later found out had a fatal flaw in the hardware (machines would constantly blue screen). Intel replaced ALL CC820 motherboards with VC820 motherboards and included 64 MB (I think... it's been 23 years, lol) of RAMBUS with every board so the system integrators didn't have to purchase new RAM for every machine. The VC820 boards were very stable and ran great! I was glad Intel backed their product when it had such a bad issue. I still have one of the VC820 boards in storage! Fun times. Knowing this technology was 23 years ago is making me feel old!
This is one of the best vids on LTT in ages, I love vids like this and the Sony CRT vids and what not, cheers LTT crew.
Agree
lmfao. Linus' face when the dev kit didnt boot and you hear the beeping. His face was pure "YUP, been here before and NOPE, don't miss it"
Also, out of all the games I've owned and then sold..Simpsons Road Rage is the only game that I still have from this era of gaming. How I still have it..idk, but probably because it was worth pennies at Gamestop
You're right, your internal hardware is a mess, from the CPU and up. I could help out, I have it working from Alpha I and up. The case is out there too, just arent common to find. And it wasn't at e3 2001 that they found out about the Intel processor.
Green discs have nothing to do with the alpha kit games, at least none that I have ever seen. They tend to show up around September 2001 for final hardware.
And glad you liked The Simpsons and Dark Summit ;)
The Rock was at CES 2001 too...
Are you following the guy remaking the Simpsons game? He's doing a decent job!
Oh boreman hoarding shit as usual for is museum…of dust. This is old news. And now your sharing leaked software and everyone says “they don’t care about old stuff” the law is the law my man
This has been online since like 2007 😂
@@PtoPOnline He finished adding all the missions 2 months ago. It's getting close! Sure, it's a UE4 project but it's looking great! I see in the latest video he added VR support 😅
The TH-cam channel is called "Reubs" I think. They are trying to hunt down the original Devs.
If you were involved with hit and run in any way, please hit them up!
9:54 They already solved GPU sag 20 years ago?
Guess since most GPU shrouds are plastic, I could litterally put a bolt across through a peice of wood to support my modern GPU
13:08 How do I detemine if that's local or not?
14:59 The way he phrased that I will emulate
Oh man, reminds me of early work days. The xdk explorer had lots of useable features when testing :D Could explore the games content when it is loaded, could check when certain files are loaded, so you know if the right videos/audios are loading, how saves are being handled, etc.
So a remote debugger… even some ms employees made their own software to manage Xbox’s it’s called Xbox home or something I have it saved somewhere but you can manage up to unlimited amount of Xbox’s on a network
When I got to 2:33 i realized this is one of the most interesting pieces of content I've watched recently. Awesome stuff.
Just seeing those case designs, floppy drives, ribbon cables brings back memories of when I built my first rig in 2002
I'll never forget my first experience of the original Xbox. Some game called 'Halo' which nobody ever heard of blew me away and I was hooked. I also got a game called Project Gotham Racing which I didn't play for ages, cos I thought it was some racing/batman kinda weird thing, but it also was amazing! Included with the console was a DVD called Pitch Black. Never heard of it, didn't play it for weeks, but when I did... wow! This console cost me I think about £400-450 from Currys, and damn it was worth every penny back then :)
I thought that about PGR at first, too. But quickly realized that wasn't the case by... Reading the case.
But for real, that was one of the most fun racing games I've ever played. I loved the radio stations. I wish the series would come back
I very much enjoy any video looking over dev units for consoles and other hardware alike. Please keep doing these!!
What's wild is those demos you show with the plane showing real-time shadows and the distortion blob are both things I had to program at uni (We had xbxo 360/PS3 by then). The fact they were the technical demos on the original xbox is crazy.
What are you working on these days? Super interesting!
Hey man I had a Thermaltake full sized tower kind of like the Kandalf but with mesh on front, that had those sweet flip out stabilizer feetsies! Those were the days! I don't miss the 100 pounds that system weighed with lugging that to Lan parties.
I'm digging the backwards installed floppy in that tower lol
I say this everytime there is one of these videos, I Absolutely LOVE all the debug and dev kit content.
You can upgrade the cpu and I guess ram too in the Xbox, butit involves soldering. That would be a nice follow up video, trying to upgrade the devkit.
You need a lot of skill its not like there are pins on the side, they are replaced with solderballs underneath, any tiny pressure can rupture the solderball and flood the whole chip with solder it aint as easy buddy, go watch some reballing then you know 🤦
I love the edited version of your videos - but also loveee seeing longer videos!
suggestion: release also more of a "Raw" version of the video! I feel like I can spend 2 hours just watching content of this project
A reason dev kits have so much more memory is because they use a LOT of proprietary in-house software alongside the games themselves. You can end up running a half dozen programs at once on top of the game for various purposes of monitoring and testing. Retail models obviously have most if not all of that stripped away so they don't need anywhere near as much RAM.
Damn that ginger beard deserves an upvote by itself
Lol
The question is, can you point the mouse cursor to the volume icon to turn it down before Linus starts talking...
The case looks to be a GlobalWin 802. Source: I still have one which I bought in the late 90s.
It appears so! That’s awesome!
Sill using mine today, best case I ever bought.
The metal used in the case; the fan cut outs in the rear; front fan shroud at the bottom; the hardware inside; and even the metal bar used for PCI card retention; reminds me of old schools cases like the Antec SX630 and InWin a500 or q500. OMG! Linus you made me feel old. LOL
RDRAM was probably used in Silicon Graphics machines as well as the first game system to have it was the Nintendo 64. Even in it you had to have a jumper pack as Nintendo did something unprecedented at the time by making the N64 RAM upgradable. As much as it was underappreciated, the Nintendo GameCube had some features the others at the time lacked. Digital video and audio, super fast 1TSRAM, PowerPC processing and some advanced particle effects on the custom ATi processor. The mod scene for the GameCube now seems to have brought it to the forefront of vintage gaming. I have my GameCube from December 2001 still and have upgraded it with a GCHD Mk.II, LaserBear BlueRetro Bluetooth adapter and plan to put a PicoBoot on it at some point as well.
This is an extremely insignificant point to make, but I'm slightly familiar with Xbox modding and I think at 11:49 when Tanner mentioned loading an "XDK", he misspoke and meant to say XEX.
XDK stands for Xbox Development Kit, and XEX stands for Xbox Executable which are the files that it runs (like an EXE file in windows).
XEX is the file format for the Xbox 360. XBE is the file format that the original Xbox uses. 😉
XEX is 360, XBE is Xbox, though both will run some EXE files (not Windows ones, obviously).
XEX is for the xbox 360, an XBE is for the og xbox, either way, xdk is wrong
@@InternetStorm Ahh yeah I only have experience with the 360
The internals of the case @ 3:25 (minus that vertical strut) looks oddly like my old Antec case without the lever releases for the 2 front drive bays.
You can also do this using a PowerMac G5. As they were used as dev kits for the 360 very early on. They require a specific model of the G5, a specific (Mac compatible because PPC Macs won’t see PC GPUs at all) graphics card, and I believe an Ethernet card as well since Microsoft used it as a kind of DRM.
You actually can use a PC Card in there no problem just not for xenon os. Any r420 card can be flashed w a reduced x800xt rom flashed using graphiccelerator or atiflash. You also need a 160gb hdd or higher. 512 ram or more and an Intel Ethernet card. You can also kernel debug through FireWire. The models you speak of are the 2.0ghz A1047 model pci-x alpha 1 with Radeon 9800 pro or alpha 2 is a 970fx with different cpu housing and is pci-x2. Suprised nobody has made any home brew for either machine. The g5 has a lot of potential with sdk 1888. 1529 is out there than the other builds… also that AmR sound card isn’t worth building an alpha 1 the cases are too hard to come by the terminator ram card and the mobo is 700 dollars. The 1529 hdd image or iso has a blades dash and og Xbox emulator. I played Halo all the way through and have a compatibility list.
It's fun to see Linus go through the same discoveries I did when I first started QA testing. And im happy to say installing test builds in last gen consoles still deliver the same dev experience of 20 to 30 min wait times. Glorious!
This reminded me about building back in the early 2000's and having to shop for parts. There were a lot of small dev shops around where you could pick up various parts to assemble into a build, but what I remember most is that many of these small shops had a significant investment in memory modules and processors, and most of them kept them locked into a vault or safe! And when a new shipment of something arrived, there'd be a que out the door as people stood around waiting to buy 16, 32, or 64 MB memory!
And they weren't cheap either!
20 years later and all of that is so much dinosaur dust.
Try buying that stuff now a days it’s even more expensive
The original Xbox software was actually not Windows 2000, but a mixture of Windows NT 4.0 Embedded and early Windows NT 5.0 (NT 5.0 would later become Windows 2000) code. The Xbox kernel is basically an embedded minimal NT 5 beta kernel, the boot loader is likely a modified NT4 boot loader. And it runs DirectX 8.
The next generation, Xbox 360 dev kit is also quite interesting. This time MS switched to PowerPC, and guess who makes the most PowerPC workstations back then? The very first dev kit is actually just an off the shelf PowerMac G5🤣. MS formatted the drive and installed xbox software on them. Therefore it is possible to recreate a Xbox 360 dev kit with PowerMac G5 (model A1047 PCI-X or PCI-X-2). After the work is done, these early dev kits got Mac OS X reinstalled and sold. I think the fact that they switched to PPC so quickly must have something to do with early Windows NT having a PPC version, and the dev work didn't stop internally, despite NT4 being the last Windows to officially support PPC.
And being an embedded NT kernel optimized for low memory is probably why it boots so fast. Also it doesn't load the win32 subsystem like most windows do, but the xbox subsystem, and only some win32 api were used for booting up and running directX. The recovery disc is based on regular Windows 2000 SP1 though.
the xbox 360 devkits have a specific gpu too though right
Interesting! The alpha 1 and 2 dev kits had RDRAM, while the final console had switched to SDRAM.
Ouch!
RDRAM?
That's a painful memory . . .
@@stickiedmin6508 Remember the N64, even though it had 4MB of RDRAM and had tons of bandwidth for its time, it was absolutely horrible to work with it due to its super high latency.
Even PS2 used RDRAM, but I have never heard of latency issues from PS2.
Anyways good that Xbox got rid of that RDRAM.
The Simpsons Road Rage was actually legit fire. I had it on PS2 and now you're making me want to play it.
I had it on Gamecube and I loved it. It was just a blatant rip off of Crazy Taxi for the Dreamcast, but the Simpsons theme gave it charm that Crazy Taxi never had.
Linus, why not play a dice and make weird setups for building a pc? Ranging from low end to high end units. Example roll a dice for cpu, roll again for gpu etc and the hardest part is you need to make them work as a pc.
Videos like this are why I keep comign back to LMG. the colelctor in me wants to put this on a shelf never to be touched and displayed with love and care and to brag to friends and family with.
the only Dev kit I have is for an Xbox one (Scorpio) and If I ever got the chance I would add more. Thanks for sharing this nerdy gaming history. keep up the great work.
That's the same PC case that I used when I built my first PC, except for the face plate. I recognized the swing-out feet and the plastic drive housing right away. I built a system using an AMD K6III 300 mhz in a socket 7 mobo if I remember right.
“Bill doesn’t really want to review your spec, he just wants to make sure you’ve got it under control. His standard M.O. is to ask harder and harder questions until you admit that you don’t know, and then he can yell at you for being unprepared. Nobody was really sure what happens if you answer the hardest question he can come up with because it’s never happened before.”
Based.
@@dexter111344 What a deep, meaningful comment.
@@DoubleMonoLR AF.
Probably because he progressively came up with something more and more ridiculous to even bother asking about on the fly. Bill seems like the kind of nasty person to use his employees as free frustration vents.
Thank you for this. Now, there´s one holy grail: How well does the original Halo CE perform on the DevKit with the faster GPU?? Follow up video, please?
Dev kits can't run commercial games, ie the versions of games that actually shipped to consumers. So you'd have to find a leaked dev build that was close to release.
@@CouchPotator Which in this case, would likely stop around May 2001, as it cant run beta or final hardware games, development or not. Still months prior to release :)
10:48 Linus casually using the word “Netizen” in a sentence unironically in 2023 gives me great joy for some reason…
Knowing exactly what components are in these, it's pretty unbelievable the Xbox can run some games in 1080i.
i love these development kit videos, just so interesting to see :D
Always making great vids Linus! Love you and your team
@lovegaming4114 🤖🤖🤖
@Love Gaming why not hold your breath for 69 minutes under water, you complete dredge of humanity
i love how linus just spends way too long appreciating what a good game simpsons hit and run is lmao
It was good because it was a blatant copy of Crazy Taxi. Sega filed a lawsuit, which was quickly settled, albeit that was apparently on a specific patent even though the whole game seems the same (I'd assumed they just licensed the engine)
Where's the minivan Linus? You gonna leave it in the dust like the power supply tester? We haven't forgot. Please continue the minivan series, it's a pretty good idea, love to see more of it.
Oh man, a GeForce FX 5200? I played SO much Unreal Tournament 2004 and Half-Life 2 on one of those things.
I’m curious, what was considered “overkill” specs at the time? Was it the GeForce FX 5200 that you had?
@@DoodleDonkey45 Oh no, that was second from the bottom of the GeForce FX series when I got it. The FX 5950 Ultra would've been the top end, but if my memory serves me correctly, the Radeon cards at the time were doing better. But at the time, even at the bottom of the product stack, you could game reasonably well on almost any dedicated GPU.
it worked ok,
after put a fan/vram kit on it,
but drivers problem going between New game to old game, as new game needed the new and for long time old games didn't work on the no new driver.
give up and got a 5770 and another one later on and game after that,
just worked.
I wonder how far away we are from this being even remotely possible for the Xbox 360.
Depends on how many developers the lmg team know. This is how all these dev kit videos start. Someone knows a guy who has X dev system.
microsoft used powermac G5's as early xbox 360 devkits so it's probably possible.
I can't believe Linus managed to get ahold of ONE of these, let alone TWO. These things are legendary.
13:13 I love those mini Noctua Chaos stars in the background.
I recently started using an Xbox classic emulator. Some games I remember loving were actually terrible lol. I still have my original Xbox (mt dew one from sweepstakes) but emulator is more convenient
Have you done the capacitor fix m
Linus has sound like he is sick for a few videos
Is it just me or does Linus's voice sound weird?
His face looks weird too. 😅
i remember owning my first xbox in around 2008. it was a second-hand xbox original that my step dad gave both me and my sister to play on. a short while after we went to blockbuster to get some games. one we weren't allowed to play that my dad bought, metal gear solid 2, and my sister bought timesplitters 2 which we used to play split-screen (bring back splitscreen microsoft) and i bought need for speed underground 2. amazing console. very fond memories. the xbox died about a year later and i was given a boxed xbox 360, a white one with HDMI. i played that thing all the way up until 2013 when the power supply would take up to 50 unplug attempts to get it to work right again, and then in 2014 i upgraded to a slim. only in 2017/2018 did i upgrade to next gen, which i don't have nearly as many fond memories about. xbox gang :)
FYI the point of extra RAM on a devkit is to load debugging tools, and to run builds without optimizations, so that you can get useful call stacks on a crash. Modern devkits allow you to toggle it off and on, or give you warnings when you exceed regular system memory, too!
And if you think that waiting 10 minutes to copy a build to a dev kit was an early 2000s game dev experience... well... I guess it was. It can take up to 30 minutes to copy over a game to the switch dev kit these days. We definitely do get a lot of coffees lol.
This video sounds like someone dubbed over Linus with AI
Pretty sure he's sick.
to be totally honestly I don’t ALWAYS find the videos that interesting but watch them just to support but this is actually really cool!!
I remember selling my n64 with like 15 games and 4 controllers just so I could buy an Xbox after playing halo for the first time at my cousins house. I got the bundle pack with fusion frenzy and ralli sport challenge 2 and extra controller from Costco for around $300? Can’t really remember the cost but it was so with it!
The Waffle House Has Found Its New Host
The waffle house has found it's new host
The Waffle House has found it's new host
our first "new" computer we bought was similar to this. a monster ONE GHZ PROCESSOR, 128mb of ram. and an unheard of 100gb hard drive and a dvd rom. it was something like $2000 in the year 2000 when my father worked in the tech industry. i still have the case which i installed multiple different motherboards in it over the years.
I had a system very similar to that one in those days. The rambus module I had was 256mb and the raid card was amazing. I was able to burn CD's and use the computer at the same time.
The Waffle House has found a new host
The Waffle House has found its new host
The Waffle House has found it's new host
Wow this is such a blast from the past! Thanks linus
IBM had customized BIOS splash screens and POST screens all the way back in the early days of home computing. It's always been possible, just annoying and expensive to code in, so most companies didn't bother until it became more trivial to do so. HP had some lovely splash and POST screens on their Proliant products.
I remember being in awe of some Xbox games when it came out first. Mainly Halo and Ghost Recon for the size of the free roaming game worlds, and Splinter Cell for the life-like graphics, especially the shadows and the night vision mode.
This seems like a passion project for Tanner. Love it!
I got to play around with some computers of that era last year. My friend recorded an album at a recording studio and was looking for lost tracks that he thought would be on a hard drive associated with one of 3 Power Mac G4 MDD towers. I got ahold of the computers but they were way too old to work anymore. I ended up getting an ide drive caddy that just plugged into my PC with usb and used a Mac disk reading emulator, (from MacOS 9 mostly). It was quite a journey, I backed up everything I could find but no sign of my friend's lost data. I asked the producer if I could keep the G4 towers but he said he wanted them back... 2002 I think they were from.
19:10 Well, worth mentioning that specially Sega was their partner in this endeavor that was XBox.