The Xbox is a sixth-generation The sixth-generation era refers to the computer and video games, video game consoles, and video game handhelds available at the turn of the 21st century. Platforms of the sixth generation include Sega's Dreamcast, Sony's PlayStation 2, the Nintendo GameCube, and Microsoft's Xbox. This era began on November 27, 1998 with the release of the video game console A video game console is an interactive entertainment computer or modified computer system that produces a video display signal which can be used with a display device to display a video game. The term "video game console" is used to distinguish a machine designed for consumers to buy and use solely for playing video games from a personal manufactured by Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is a public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions. Established on April 4, 1975 to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8. It was released on November 15, 2001 in North America, February 22, 2002 in Japan, and March 14, 2002 in Australia and Europe and is the predecessor to the Xbox 360 The Xbox 360 is the second video game console produced by Microsoft, and the successor to the Xbox. The Xbox 360 competes with Sony's PlayStation 3 and Nintendo's Wii as part of the seventh generation of video game consoles. It was Microsoft's first foray into the gaming console market, and competed with Sony Sony Corporation (TYO: 6758, NYSE: SNE), or commonly referred to as Sony, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan and the world's fifth largest media conglomerate with revenue exceeding ¥ 7.730.0 trillion, or $78.88 billion U.S. (FY2008). Sony is one of the leading manufacturers of electronics,'s PlayStation 2 The PlayStation 2 is a sixth-generation video game console manufactured by Sony. The successor to the PlayStation, and the predecessor to the PlayStation 3, the PlayStation 2 forms part of the PlayStation series of video game consoles. Its development was announced in March 1999 and it was released a year later in Japan. Its primary competitors, Sega Sega Corporation is a multinational video game software and hardware development company, and a home computer and former console manufacturer headquartered in Ōta, Tokyo, Japan. The company is famous for its SEGA! chant that appeared on both commercials and games like Sonic the Hedgehog. The company had success with both arcades and home consoles,'s Dreamcast The Dreamcast is a video game console made by Sega, and is the successor to the Sega Saturn. The Dreamcast was the first entry in the sixth generation of video game consoles and was released in late 1998, before its contemporaries — Sony's PlayStation 2, Microsoft's Xbox and the Nintendo GameCube, and Nintendo Nintendo Co., Ltd. is a multinational corporation located in Kyoto, Japan. Founded on September 23, 1889 by Fusajiro Yamauchi, it produced handmade hanafuda cards. By 1963, the company had tried several small niche businesses, such as a cab company and a love hotel's GameCube The Nintendo GameCube , officially abbreviated as GCN in Western regions[citation needed] and as NGC in Japan, is Nintendo's fourth home video game console and is part of the sixth generation console era. It is the successor to the Nintendo 64 and predecessor to the Wii. The integrated Xbox Live Xbox Live is an online multiplayer gaming and digital media delivery service created and operated by Microsoft Corporation. It is currently the only online gaming service (on consoles) that charges users a fee to play multiplayer gaming. It was first made available to the Xbox system in 2002. An updated version of the service became available for service allowed players to compete online An online game is a game played over some form of computer network. This almost always means the Internet or equivalent technology; but games have always used whatever technology was current: modems before the Internet, and hard wired terminals before modems. The expansion of online gaming has reflected the overall expansion of computer networks.^[4]

The Xbox was discontinued in late 2006, although the final Xbox game, Madden NFL 09 Madden NFL 09 is an American football video game based on the National Football League that was published by EA Sports and developed by EA Tiburon. It is the 20th annual installment in the Madden NFL video game franchise. This game is known for realistic graphics and big hits. The game was released for the Nintendo DS, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, was released in August 2008. Support for out-of-warranty Xbox consoles was discontinued on March 2, 2009; any in-warranty repair now needed will not be undertaken and faulty consoles will replaced with an Xbox 360 instead. Xbox Live support was discontinued on April 15, 2010.^[4]

History

The console was Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is a public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions. Established on April 4, 1975 to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8's first product that ventured into the video game console market, after having collaborated with Sega Sega Corporation is a multinational video game software and hardware development company, and a home computer and former console manufacturer headquartered in Ōta, Tokyo, Japan. The company is famous for its SEGA! chant that appeared on both commercials and games like Sonic the Hedgehog. The company had success with both arcades and home consoles, in porting Windows CE Windows CE is an operating system developed by Microsoft for minimalistic computers and embedded systems. Windows CE is a distinctly different operating system[citation needed] and kernel, rather than a trimmed-down version of desktop Windows. It is not to be confused with Windows XP Embedded which is NT-based. Windows CE is supported on Intel x86 to the Dreamcast The Dreamcast is a video game console made by Sega, and is the successor to the Sega Saturn. The Dreamcast was the first entry in the sixth generation of video game consoles and was released in late 1998, before its contemporaries — Sony's PlayStation 2, Microsoft's Xbox and the Nintendo GameCube console. The Xbox first edition was initially developed by a small Microsoft team that included game developer Seamus Blackley After entering Tufts University to study jazz piano, Blackley switched to study physics and graduated Summa cum Honore en Tesis. As a sophomore, he published his first paper in the Journal of Magnetic Resonance. After college, he studied High Energy Physics at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, until the Superconducting Supercollider. Microsoft repeatedly delayed the console, which was first mentioned in late 1999 during interviews with then-Microsoft CEO Bill Gates. Gates stated that a gaming/multimedia device was essential for multimedia convergence in the new times, confirmed by Microsoft with a press release A press release, news release, media release, or press statement is a written or recorded communication directed at members of the news media for the purpose of announcing something claimed as having news value. Typically, they are mailed, faxed, or e-mailed to assignment editors at newspapers, magazines, radio stations, television stations, and/.^[5] When Bill Gates unveiled the Xbox at the Game Developers Conference in 2000, audiences were impressed by the console's technology. At the time of Gates' announcement, Sega's Dreamcast was diminishing and Sony's PlayStation 2 was just hitting the streets in Japan.^[6]

Concentrating on making a big splash in Japan, Microsoft delayed its European launch, though Europe later proved to be the more receptive market.^[6] Two of the original members of the Xbox team, Seamus Blackley After entering Tufts University to study jazz piano, Blackley switched to study physics and graduated Summa cum Honore en Tesis. As a sophomore, he published his first paper in the Journal of Magnetic Resonance. After college, he studied High Energy Physics at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, until the Superconducting Supercollider and Kevin Bachus, left the company early on. The other founding members, Otto Berkes and Ted Hase, are still with Microsoft, but by 2004 were no longer working on the Xbox project.

Some of Microsoft's plans proved effective. In preparation for its launch, Microsoft acquired Bungie and used Halo: Combat Evolved Halo: Combat Evolved is a first-person shooter video game developed by Bungie. The first game of the Halo series, it was released on November 15, 2001 as a launch title for the Xbox gaming system, and is considered the platform's "killer app." With more than five million copies sold worldwide as of November 9, 2005, Microsoft released as its launch title. At the time, Goldeneye 007 GoldenEye 007 is a 1997 first-person shooter video game developed by Rare for the Nintendo 64 video game console, based on the 1995 James Bond film GoldenEye. The game received overwhelmingly positive reviews, and sold over eight million copies. It has been praised for the quality of its multiplayer deathmatch mode, and its incorporation of for Nintendo 64 had been one of the few hit FPS First-person shooter is a video game genre which centers the gameplay around gun- and projectile weapon-based combat through the first person perspective; i.e., the player experiences the action through the eyes of a protagonist. Generally speaking, the first-person shooter shares common traits with other shooter games, which in turn fall under games to appear on a console, some of other ones being Perfect Dark and Medal of Honor. Halo: Combat Evolved proved a good application to drive the Xbox's sales.^[6] In 2002, Microsoft overtook Nintendo Nintendo Co., Ltd. is a multinational corporation located in Kyoto, Japan. Founded on September 23, 1889 by Fusajiro Yamauchi, it produced handmade hanafuda cards. By 1963, the company had tried several small niche businesses, such as a cab company and a love hotel to capture the second place slot in consoles sold in North America.

Popular launch games A launch game is a video game released to consumers synchronously with the release of its respective video game console, meaning they are the only available games at the time of the console's launch. Several of these games are also packaged with the console. Because launch games provide first impressions of the console's features and technical for the console included Dead or Alive 3 Dead or Alive 3 is a fighting game in the Dead or Alive series. It was released exclusively on the Xbox as a launch title, Amped: Freestyle Snowboarding Released during the Xbox's launch, Amped is a snowboarding game focused on the tricks, instead of the racing style of play given by Electronic Art's SSX which launched with the PlayStation 2 in the previous year. The success of Amped was solidified by the successful launch of the sequels, Amped 2 and Amped 3, Halo: Combat Evolved Halo: Combat Evolved is a first-person shooter video game developed by Bungie. The first game of the Halo series, it was released on November 15, 2001 as a launch title for the Xbox gaming system, and is considered the platform's "killer app." With more than five million copies sold worldwide as of November 9, 2005, Microsoft released, Fuzion Frenzy Fuzion Frenzy is a launch title for the Microsoft Xbox. At its core, Fuzion Frenzy is a four-player party game featuring 45 different mini-games . A demo of the game was included with some other launch titles in the US, including Halo, Munch's Oddysee and Amped. The title was among the first to be released as a part of the Xbox Originals program and Project Gotham Racing Project Gotham Racing is a racing game, the first in its series, developed by Bizarre Creations and published by Microsoft Game Studios for the Xbox gaming console. The first title in the franchise, Project Gotham Racing, is an Xbox launch title that quickly became the second best-selling game for the console after Halo. PGR is a spiritual.

The name for the Xbox was originally the DirectX box as it came from a group of Microsoft DirectX developers, but later changed to Xbox after focus testing. The marketing team apparently "created this whole, long list of better names for the machine", former Microsoft VP of game publishing Ed Fries said in a interview with Gamasutra.^[7]

Xbox 360

Nvidia Nvidia is a multinational corporation which specializes in the development of graphics processing units and chipset technologies for workstations, personal computers, and mobile devices. Based in Santa Clara, California, the company has become a major supplier of integrated circuits (ICs), designing graphics processing units (GPUs) and chipsets ceased production of the Xbox's GPU in August 2005, which marked the end of Xbox production and the quick release of the Xbox 360 The Xbox 360 is the second video game console produced by Microsoft, and the successor to the Xbox. The Xbox 360 competes with Sony's PlayStation 3 and Nintendo's Wii as part of the seventh generation of video game consoles on November 22, 2005. The Xbox 360 had superior storage, audio and video capabilities compared to the original Xbox.

When equipped with a removable hard drive add-on, the Xbox 360 supports a limited number of the Xbox's game library A list of Xbox games that are compatible with the Xbox 360 stands at the heart of this article. This list has experienced significant fluctuations over time and many of these are noted below. Additionally, the manner in which compatibility is achieved and the software errors associated with it are discussed in brief through emulation. Emulation adds support for anti-aliasing In digital signal processing, spatial anti-aliasing is the technique of minimizing the distortion artifacts known as aliasing when representing a high-resolution image at a lower resolution. Anti-aliasing is used in digital photography, computer graphics, digital audio, and many other applications as well as upscaling of the still standard definition image. These emulators are periodically updated to add compatibility for older games and are available free through Xbox Live or as a file download to be burned to a DVD-R from the Xbox web site. These updates are also available monthly as part of the demo disc that comes with each issue of Official Xbox Magazine Official Xbox Magazine is a monthly video game magazine which started in November 2001 around the launch of the original Xbox. A preview issue was released for E3 2001, with another preview issue for November 2001. The magazine is bundled with a disc that includes game demos, preview videos and trailers, and other content, such as game or Xbox. As the architectures are different between Xbox and Xbox 360, software emulation is the only way to have compatibility without including hardware from the original Xbox.

Hardware and accessories

Hardware

The Xbox was the first to wield a hard disk drive Host adapter of system, in PCs typically integrated into motherboard. via one of:, used primarily for storing game saves and content downloaded from Xbox Live. This eliminated the need for separate memory cards A memory card or flash card is an electronic flash memory data storage device used for storing digital information. They are commonly used in many electronic devices, including digital cameras, mobile phones, laptop computers, MP3 players, and video game consoles. They are small, re-recordable, and they can retain data without power (although some older consoles, such as the TurboGrafx-CD The TurboGrafx-16 , known in Japan as the PC Engine, is a video game console developed by Hudson Soft and NEC, released in Japan on October 30, 1987, and in North America on August 29, 1989, Sega CD and Sega Saturn The Sega Saturn is a 32-bit video game console that was first released on November 22, 1994 in Japan, May 11, 1995 in North America, and July 8, 1995 in Europe. The system was discontinued in North America, Europe, and Australia in 1998, and in 2000 in Japan had featured built-in battery backup memory prior to 2001). An Xbox user could rip Ripping is the process of copying audio or video content to a hard disk, typically from removable media. The word is used to refer to all forms of media. Despite the name, neither the media nor the data in it is damaged after extraction music from standard audio CDs Red Book is the standard for audio CDs . It is named after one of a set of color-bound books that contain the technical specifications for all CD and CD-ROM formats to the hard drive, and these songs were used for the custom soundtracks in some games.^[8]

The Xbox was the first gaming product to feature Dolby Interactive Content-Encoding Technology, which allows real-time Dolby Digital encoding in game consoles. Previous game consoles could only use Dolby Digital 5.1 during non-interactive "cut scene" playback.^[9]

The Xbox is based on commodity PC hardware and is much larger and heavier than its contemporaries. This is largely due to a bulky tray-loading DVD-ROM DVD, also known as Digital Video Disc or Digital Versatile Disc, is an optical disc storage media format, and was invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Time Warner in 1995. Its main uses are video and data storage. DVDs are of the same dimensions as compact discs , but are capable of storing just under seven times as much data drive and the standard-size 3.5 inch hard drive. The Xbox has also pioneered safety features, such as breakaway cables for the controllers to prevent the console from being pulled from the surface it rests on.

Several internal hardware revisions have been made in an ongoing battle to discourage modding Modding is a slang expression that is derived from the verb "modify". Modding refers to the act of modifying a piece of hardware or software or anything else for that matter, to perform a function not originally conceived or intended by the designer. The term modding is often used within the computer game community, particularly in (hackers continually updated modchip A modchip is a small electronic device used to modify or disable built-in restrictions and limitations of computers, specifically videogame consoles. It introduces various modifications to its host system's function, including the circumvention of region coding, digital rights management, and copy protection checks for the purpose of running designs in an attempt to defeat them), to cut manufacturing costs, and to make the DVD-ROM drive more reliable (some of the early units' drives gave Disc Reading Errors due to the unreliable Thomson DVD-ROM drives used). Later generation units that used the Thomson TGM-600 DVD-ROM drives and the Philips VAD6011 DVD-ROM drives were still vulnerable to failure that rendered the consoles either unable to read newer discs or caused them to halt the console with an error code usually indicating a PIO/DMA Direct memory access is a feature of modern computers and microprocessors that allows certain hardware subsystems within the computer to access system memory for reading and/or writing independently of the central processing unit. Many hardware systems use DMA including disk drive controllers, graphics cards, network cards and sound cards. DMA is identification failure, respectively. These units were not covered under the extended warranty.

In 2002 Microsoft and Nvidia Nvidia is a multinational corporation which specializes in the development of graphics processing units and chipset technologies for workstations, personal computers, and mobile devices. Based in Santa Clara, California, the company has become a major supplier of integrated circuits (ICs), designing graphics processing units (GPUs) and chipsets entered arbitration over a dispute on the pricing of Nvidia's chips for the Xbox.^[10] Nvidia's filing with the SEC The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is a federal agency which holds primary responsibility for enforcing the federal securities laws and regulating the securities industry, the nation's stock and options exchanges, and other electronic securities markets in the United States. In addition to the 1934 Act that created it, the SEC enforces indicated that Microsoft was seeking a US$13 million discount on shipments for NVIDIA's fiscal year 2002. Microsoft alleged violations of the agreement the two companies entered, sought reduced chipset pricing, and sought to ensure that Nvidia fulfill Microsoft's chipset orders without limits on quantity. The matter was privately settled on February 6, 2003.^[11]

Launch-era Xbox gaming units were made in Hungary and the controllers made mostly in Indonesia.

Controllers & Accessories

The Xbox controller features two analog sticks, a pressure sensitive directional pad, two analog triggers, a Back button, a Start button, two accessory slots and six 8-bit analog action buttons (A/Green, B/Red, X/Blue, Y/Yellow, and Black and White buttons).^[12] The standard Xbox controller (also known by many nicknames, such as the "Duke", the "Fatty", and the "Alarm Clock")^[who?] was originally the Xbox controller for all territories except Japan. The controller has been criticized for being bulky compared to other video game controllers (it was awarded "Blunder of the Year" by Game Informer in 2001^[13] and a Guinness World Record for the biggest controller in Guinness World Records Gamer's Edition 2008, as well as being ranked the second worst video game controller ever by IGN editor Craig Harris.^[14]). The "Controller S", a smaller, lighter Xbox controller, was originally the standard Xbox controller only in Japan (codenamed "Akebono"),^[15] designed for users with smaller hands.^[16][17] The "Controller S" was released in other territories by popular demand and eventually replaced the standard controller in the Xbox's retail package, with the larger original controller available as an accessory. An 8 MB removable solid state memory card can be plugged into the controllers, onto which game saves can either be copied from the hard drive when in the Xbox dashboard's memory manager or saved during a game. Most Xbox games can be copied to the memory unit and to another console but some Xbox saves are digitally signed, each console has a unique signing key, and some games (e.g., Ninja Gaiden and Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball) will not load saved games signed by a different Xbox, limiting the utility of the memory card. Some game saves can be tagged as uncopyable or simply padded to over 8 MB (Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic). The signing mechanism has been reverse-engineered by the Xbox hacking community, who have developed tools to modify savegames to work in a different console, though the signing key of the recipient Xbox (the "HDkey") and the ramped-up title key of the game (the "authkey") must be known. It is also possible to save an Xbox Live account on a memory unit, to simplify its use on more than one Xbox. The Xbox includes a standard AV cable which provides composite video and monaural or stereo audio to TVs equipped with RCA inputs. European Xbox's also included an RCA jack to SCART converter block as well as the standard AV cable.

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