What OS does the xbox 360 have? See what “Xbox” is in other dictionaries. New Xbox Live

It should be noted that in the same retail versions of the Xbox 360, slight variations are possible depending on the region in which the console is offered. Thus, the European versions of the Xbox 360 come with an adapter from 5M RCA (component connection) to the SCART connector, which is often found in Europe, and the versions of the Xbox 360 for Australia and New Zealand do not have a headset that allows you to communicate by voice with other Xbox 360 owners.

At the beginning of sales, Microsoft introduced two versions of the Xbox 360 console:

Xbox 360 (Premium System or Premium Package)

A more expensive package that immediately includes a number of separately sold options.

The main functional difference between the more expensive version of the Xbox 360 is the presence of backward compatibility with the Xbox right out of the box, without the need to purchase an additional HDD.

Visually, the more expensive version of the Xbox 360 can be recognized by the chrome cover of the DVD drive tray.

Xbox 360 Core System

A more affordable package, devoid of almost all options in order to reduce the retail price.

The main functional features of the Xbox 360 Core System package are:

• lack of backward compatibility with Xbox “in the box” - backward compatibility can be obtained by purchasing an additional Xbox 360 HDD;
• inability to display images in HDTV modes - for this you will have to purchase one of the HDTV cables (component or VGA cable);
• inability to save user game settings, profiles and so-called “saved games” - for this you need to purchase either an Xbox 360 HDD or an Xbox 360 Memory Unit.

Visually, the cheap version of the Xbox 360 can be distinguished by the white plastic cover of the DVD drive tray.

At the end of March 2007, Microsoft introduced the third version of the Xbox 360:

Xbox 360 Elite

Top-end configuration, equipped with a number of additional features compared to the Xbox 360 Premium System.

Official sales of this version began in the United States and Canada on April 29, 2007; its appearance in Europe is scheduled for the end of summer 2007; Sales of this version of the console are not yet planned in Asia and Japan.

The main functional features of the Xbox 360 Elite package are:

• the presence of a digital HDMI port for video and audio output;
• supplied with the console 120 GB HDD;
• Black color of the console body and accessories supplied with the console.

Optional equipment

Simultaneously with the start of sales of Xbox 360 consoles, Microsoft introduced a number of accessories sold separately from the two main configurations.

Microsoft accessories sold separately from the consoles themselves can be roughly divided into:

1. accessories supplied with the consoles themselves;
2. accessories offered separately from all retail versions of console configurations;

In the lists below, accessories included in any package are marked italics.

Interface and communication devices

	Xbox 360 Wireless Controller Wireless gamepad (with adapter for 2 AA batteries or rechargeable batteries)
	Xbox 360 Controller Regular gamepad (cord length - 3 meters)
	Xbox 360 Headset Regular headset (connects to gamepad)
	Xbox 360 Wireless Headset Wireless headset
	Xbox 360 Chatpad QWERTY mini-keyboard (47 keys) for Xbox 360, connects to a gamepad
	Xbox 360 Wireless Racing Wheel Wireless steering wheel with feedback (feedback only works if the steering wheel is connected to external power)
	Xbox 360 Wireless Gaming Receiver for Windows Allows you to use wireless accessories for Xbox 360 (gamepads, headsets, steering wheels) on your PC.
	Xbox 360 Universal Media Remote Remote control (compatible with Windows Media Center)
	Xbox 360 Rechargeable Battery Pack Special Ni-MH batteries (nickel-metal hydride) for the wireless gamepad
	Xbox 360 Play & Charge Kit A charger for the Rechargeable Battery Pack, which allows you to recharge batteries from a USB port (the gamepad is still operational). The P"n"C Kit includes one rechargeable battery (Rechargeable Battery Pack);
	Xbox 360 Quick Charge Kit Dock for fast battery recharging Rechargeable Battery Pack for wireless gamepads
	Xbox Live Vision Video camera for Xbox 360 (allows you to make video calls (maximum resolution - 640x480) and use your photos in games (resolution - 1.3 megapixels))

Cables

	Xbox 360 Composite AV Cable Cable for composite (SDTV) connection
	Xbox 360 Component HD AV Cable Cable for component (Y, Pr, Pb; HDTV) and composite (SDTV) connection
	Xbox 360 VGA HD AV Cable Cable for connecting to standard DB-15S VGA connectors (computer monitors and HDTV)
	Xbox 360 S-Video AV Cable Cable for connecting via S-Video (SDTV) and composite (SDTV) connections
	Xbox 360 Advanced SCART AV Cable Cable for connection via RGB-SCART connectors
	Xbox 360 D-Terminal HD AV Cable Cable for connecting via D-Terminal (HDTV/SDTV) and composite (SDTV) connections

Information carriers

	Xbox 360 Hard Drive Hard drive for Xbox 360 (required for backwards compatibility with Xbox; allows you to store saved games, demos, videos, music, profiles, etc.; available capacities - 20 and 120 GB)
	Xbox 360 Memory Unit Xbox Memory Card (allows you to store saved games and user profiles; available in 64 and 512 capacity MB)
	Xbox 360 HD DVD External drive for reading HD DVD discs (in particular, HD DVD Video)

network hardware

Cosmetic accessories

1 - the accessory has been announced, but is not yet available for sale.

Photos of the console

Specifications

CPU

The CPU was developed by IBM and Microsoft specifically for the Xbox 360 and consists of three symmetrical cores in one chip.

Video system

The GPU was developed by ATI and Microsoft specifically for the Xbox 360 and consists of two asymmetric cores in one package.

The first core is responsible for executing pixel and vertex shaders and texturing; The second core is a “smart memory” - 10 MB of high-speed DRAM, complemented by logic responsible for generating MSAA, pixel blending and writing the final rendering results to a frame buffer in the console’s system memory.

Shader Core

Memory Core

Other video system characteristics

System memory

Audio system

Information carriers

Interface and communication devices

Input Devices

Networking capabilities

Ports and connectors

physical characteristics

1 - theoretical maximum.
2 - 1080p output mode will be added in an Xbox 360 software update in the fall of 2006.
3 - cables allow you to output not only analog (stereo, 2 RCA), but also digital audio (S/PDIF, DD5.1, an optical cable for connecting to the receiver must be purchased separately).
4 - the list of resolutions available for a VGA connection varies depending on the version of the Xbox 360 Dashboard; Here is a list of permissions available in Dashboard version 2.0.2858.0.

Key dates

Announcement dates and other dates

Sales start dates

1 - “Test” launch: the European version of the console with a non-localized interface (DVD region R2) has officially gone on sale.

Starting game lines

Starting lineups are provided for three main regions: North America, Europe and Japan. Italic exclusive Xbox 360 projects are noted.

The most successful platform games

The most successful projects for the Xbox 360 are given according to the website www.gamerankings.com as of the beginning of March 2007 (only games with the number of reviews equal to or exceeding 5 are taken into account).

The tops do not take into account minigames sold through the Xbox Live Arcade service.

Overall ten most successful projects

Exclusives are marked italics.

Ten of the most successful exclusives

It’s no longer a secret or news that the electronic entertainment market is growing primarily thanks to consoles - game consoles, the main purpose of which is electronic entertainment itself. PC game sales have virtually stagnated over the past five years, and most of the market's recent gains have been driven by the success of a variety of dedicated gaming systems, from large home consoles to handheld gaming computers.

Fixed, standardized gaming platforms are better suited to survive in competition with universal ones - they have lower costs, are easier to sell, are easier to make games for, and are easier to use. Finally, their development is easier to control and direct in the right direction; making serious changes to them does not require many years of coordination of the points of view and positions of dozens of clumsy transnational corporations.

It is not surprising that the market for specialized gaming devices is constantly becoming the object of close attention of companies that have achieved success in any area and are trying to diversify their activities and find new profitable areas and market niches. In the last decade of the last century, such a company was the Japanese corporation Sony, which released the PlayStation game console. And at the beginning of the 21st century, the ubiquitous Microsoft corporation decided to try its hand at this market.

The birth of Xbox

Entering the console market, Microsoft followed its usual path: abundant financial injections, careful copying of the main characteristics of successful competitors' products, reliance on recognized technology leaders in the industry... The Xbox project started like most other projects of the corporation, and therefore no one in particular I was not surprised when it became known that the project was bringing total losses to the company. Microsoft has impressive reserves that allow it to carry out, in essence, dumping campaigns again and again - to penetrate the market by selling (or even giving away) its product at reduced prices. And here the qualities of the product itself are no longer so important - even if they are, as a rule, comparable to or superior to the qualities of competing products.

Since its appearance on sale in the fall of 2001, the Xbox has brought its owner significant profit only once - in pre-holiday December 2004, when the number of consoles sold and the release of a sequel to the platform's main headliner, the shooter Halo, resulted in a kind of New Year's gift for the company. Pretty soon everything returned to normal, and Xbox again became a loss-making product for Microsoft.

Here, however, it is necessary to remember what we talked about a little higher: Microsoft never skimps on financial investments in a new market for itself. And therefore, it is very likely that Microsoft did not expect to make a profit from the first version of the Xbox - it was supposed to “capture a springboard” and serve as a loud, but unprofitable advertising campaign for itself.

In part, this is apparently true, but a number of indirect signs (Microsoft’s reluctance to lower the price in order to increase sales, litigation with component suppliers, as well as some characteristics of the successor console, Xbox 360) suggests that even Microsoft did not count on such unprofitability project.

Therefore, when creating the second version of Xbox, the corporation completely changed the list of companies that supplied components, the relationship with them, and significantly revised the background philosophy of the platform.

The first and most obvious victim of the new marketing philosophy was the name - in order to avoid an unpleasant numerical comparison of the Xbox 2 with its main competitor, the PlayStation 3, they decided to call the second version of the Xbox Xbox 360, which, according to the company’s marketers, should mean something like “all Xbox all around.”

The new console was first presented to the public on the eve of the E3 exhibition in May 2005. Microsoft chose a very aggressive pace of promoting the second version of Xbox to the market: the May announcement was followed by an active campaign in the summer and the start of sales of the new console simultaneously in three “main” regions (North America, Europe and Japan) in the fall, in November 2005. (The reader can find out more in the Xbox 360.) Such an active launch of the new version of Xbox on the market was mainly due to Microsoft's desire to overtake its competitors and be the first to introduce a new generation gaming console.

And, yes, the appearance of the Xbox 360 on store shelves led to the death of the first Xbox - both in terms of sales of the console itself and in the sense of the development of any new games for it.

Comparison of Xbox and Xbox 360 characteristics

First, let's look at how the basic technical specifications of the Xbox and Xbox 360 compare:

We have already mentioned that when creating the Xbox 360, Microsoft decisively severed ties with the two main technology partners involved in the development of the first Xbox - Intel and NVIDIA. And, apparently, in both cases, such a gap was the result of Microsoft’s consistent move to reduce the unprofitability of the entire Xbox project as a whole.

CPU

Intel processors are quite expensive because they carry a lot of functionality that is redundant for a game console - functionality designed to simplify the work of programmers and speed up the execution of many versions of x86 code created over the two decades of the existence of this architecture. And since the console will predominantly run programs created specifically for this console, there was no particular point in “dragging along” the entire legacy of the x86 architecture, and Microsoft turned to IBM with a proposal to create a processor specially “tailored” for the game console.

IBM, of course, did not create a processor from scratch, and instead implemented in silicon a new variation of the long-familiar PowerPC architecture (until recently, processors of this architecture were used in Apple computers). This variation differed from previous “incarnations” of the architecture in its simplicity, thanks to which it was possible to “squeeze” as many as three processor cores into a rather modest number of transistors (the complexity of the crystal of a triple-core Xbox 360 CPU is comparable to the complexity of the crystal of a single-core Pentium 4 on the Prescott-2M core) and significantly increased their clock frequency.

In particular, the blocks that dynamically optimize code execution have fallen victim to simplification; programming for the Xbox 360 processor has become more difficult, but with the right approach, this processor should deliver impressive performance at a relatively low cost. Which, as we said, is exactly what Microsoft needed.

At the same time, when comparing the Xbox 360 processor with modern x86 processors, one should remember that the latter, despite their comparatively lower peak performance, more often approach it than the Xbox 360 processor. Thus, we can assume that this code, being compiled for modern dual-core x86 CPUs (Intel Core 2 Duo, AMD Athlon 64 X2) will generally show no less performance than on a triple-core Xbox 360 CPU.

Video system

With the Xbox 360 video system, the situation is more complicated: it is not entirely clear how much of the decision to abandon NVIDIA’s services was dictated by economic and technological feasibility, and how much by behind-the-scenes political battles. The fact is that, on the one hand, at the time the development of the Xbox 360 began, NVIDIA was in a rather unpleasant technological state - the NV3x architecture could hardly withstand the onslaught of the competing ATI R3x0 architecture. On the other hand, today's confrontation between the 3D technologies of ATI and NVIDIA occurs, rather, with the superiority of the latter's video chips, and it is difficult to judge how technologically the Xbox 360 would lose if it again had a video chip from the Californian company.

Economically, the choice between NVIDIA and ATI also seems rather vague: both companies develop video chips in North America, i.e., R&D costs are comparable; both companies then place orders for the production of video chips at external independent semiconductor factories (TSMC, UMC, NEC, etc.), i.e. production costs are also comparable; both companies are at the same stage of development of 3D technologies, and neither of them is significantly ahead of the other in this.

That is why we are inclined to the version of a “political” choice in favor of ATI. The fact is that at one time Microsoft and NVIDIA were suing each other over the cost of components supplied by NVIDIA for the Xbox console. NVIDIA won the case, dooming Microsoft to further unprofitability of the Xbox project as a whole. It is quite natural that Microsoft did not want to continue cooperation with NVIDIA after this incident. Moreover, the scheme of working with development companies has changed, and Microsoft no longer buys the components themselves, it buys technologies created by partners that allow it to independently order the production of components from independent semiconductor factories. ATI (more precisely, now AMD) agreed to a similar operating scheme, and therefore its video chip found its way into the Xbox 360.

As for the ATI Xenos (or C1) video chip itself, it is the first representative of new unified shader architectures. In such architectures, the same pipelines handle vertex and pixel processing.

According to the unofficial information we have, this video chip was originally developed for computer video cards, but the complexity of creating a unified architecture, as well as its excessive flexibility in the era of the DirectX 9 API, led to the fact that the chip was first released as part of a console from Microsoft. The appearance of computer video cards based on the improved successor to Xenos - the R600 video chip with DX10 support - is expected in the first quarter of 2007.

One of the unique features of Xenos (which, by the way, is unlikely to be inherited by its computer descendants) is its dual-core nature: the ROP unit, which works with the frame buffer (writing values, calculating antialiasing), is placed in a separate chip, which also contains 10 MB of memory, connected to the ROP unit by a wide internal bus. By using a special algorithm for rendering a frame in parts (tiles), the Xenos chip is capable of providing almost free antialiasing, which does not load the system memory bus bandwidth, since it is entirely carried out inside the auxiliary smart memory chip.

According to estimated performance characteristics (it is, of course, not possible to conduct normal testing), the Xenos video chip is somewhere at the level of computer video cards built on NVIDIA G70 and G71 video chips (GeForce 7800 and 7900) and ATI R520 and R580 (Radeon X1800 and X1900) . The functionality of all these video chips is approximately comparable.

HDD

Another comparative surprise was the elimination of the standard hard drive present in the console - comparative, because from the point of view of reducing the cost of the set-top box, it was the elimination of the hard drive that acted as one of the main options. The main problem with the elimination of the HDD from the second version of the Xbox was the loss of the ability to provide backward compatibility with Xbox games - most of them were developed taking into account the ability to access the hard drive available in each console at any time.

Microsoft found a way out of this situation by ensuring backward compatibility with Xbox only if the Xbox 360 has a hard drive, and by simultaneously introducing two versions of the console - cheaper and more expensive - differing, in fact, in the absence and presence of a hard drive. At the same time, owners of the cheap version of the Xbox 360 (the so-called Core System) can later purchase a hard drive separately, after which their console will also be able to provide backward compatibility with some games for the Xbox (the list of these games is constantly growing).

In general, we note that by abandoning most of the architectural solutions used in Xbox, Microsoft doomed itself to constant problems with backward compatibility. Full backward compatibility could not exist in principle, because the Xbox 360 CPU is simply not capable of executing x86 code, and the executable files of Xbox games require recompilation. No fewer problems - admittedly more legal than technical - arose when it was necessary to run games created for the NV2A on an ATI video chip. But, apparently, Microsoft considered that reducing the cost of the console was more important than potential negative reviews of incomplete backward compatibility.

There are, however, some advantages to using software emulation of the old platform that are not available for “hardware” backward compatibility, implemented, for example, in Sony PS2 and PS3. So, in particular, most Xbox games that can be run on the Xbox 360 run in HDTV resolution (1280x720) and with anti-aliasing, which is a direct consequence of software emulation of the Xbox video chip on the significantly more powerful Xenos video chip.

Main storage medium

Another controversial aspect of the Xbox 360 is the use of an outdated dual-layer DVD-ROM with a maximum capacity of 8.5 GB as the main storage medium. It is likely that after some time, games for the Xbox 360 will be released on two or more DVDs, which clearly does not add any advantages to the console in the eyes of ordinary consumers (the need to change the disc in the middle of a game is difficult to count as an advantage of the first console of the new generation). Moreover, one similar game has already been released! So far, however, only in Japan - JRPG Blue Dragon takes up as many as 3 (!) DVD9 discs.

However, Microsoft's decision here was driven by its desire to overtake its competitors in terms of time to market: in November 2005, there were simply no alternatives to DVD, and the company had to take a potentially erroneous step in order to achieve its main goal - to appear in stores significantly earlier than alternative gaming platforms of the same generation.

Key platform innovations

But the main innovations of the Xbox 360 lie not so much in its hardware (it is still hidden from the eyes of the average user, who, by and large, does not care what processor architecture is in the console he purchased, as long as it works normally and does not break down), how much in the new philosophy of the platform.

New design

The first thing that catches your eye, of course, is the new design: instead of an “inflated” black box with light green inserts, there is a “concave” snow-white matte case with silver and gray elements. The design of the Xbox 360 is influenced by the success of Apple's device design. Fewer gloomy technogenic devices; more living, light, organic forms, pleasing to the eye and touch.

In addition to its “neutrality” to living nature, the design of the Xbox 360 is very thoughtful and functional: all buttons and connectors are in their places; the possibility of both horizontal and vertical installation of the console is provided; On the back and side walls there are mounts for some accessories sold separately (hard drive, Wi-Fi adapter).

The only thing that gets negative reviews is the DVD-ROM drive - a mechanism with a retractable tray, familiar to everyone from computer optical drives, is not the best fit for a game console. More successful here is the slot-in mechanism with a shutter that protects the insides of the drive from dirt and dust (a similar mechanism can be seen, for example, in the Nintendo Wii). However, this is not the worst of the options - the top-opening drive used in the Sony PStwo is even less suitable for use in standard racks and cabinets for consumer electronics.

New gamepads

Another innovation that becomes obvious a few seconds after connecting the console to power, screen and speakers is the new gamepads. Microsoft was not afraid to redesign the Xbox 360 gamepads, abandoning the bulky, plump, angular predecessors in favor of sleek, matte white successors that fit comfortably in the hand. At the same time, followers were provided with the ability to wirelessly communicate with the console, the benefits of which become more than obvious within an hour after launching the first game.

Note, however, that wireless controllers are another option that distinguishes the more expensive version of the Xbox 360 from the Xbox 360 Core System. The cheap Core System uses regular wired gamepads that plug into USB ports on the console. But again, no one and nothing prevents the owner of a cheap version of the Xbox 360 from purchasing additional wireless gamepads later.

New Xbox Live!

The latest obvious innovation for the Xbox 360 is the redesigned Xbox Live service! After the Xbox 360 went on sale, Live! was divided into two components - Silver and Gold. The first of them is free and available via the Internet to every Xbox 360 owner. It allows you to communicate with other players (text messages or voice), download updates and additions for the console operating system and games launched on it, download demos, videos and other promotions -materials. This version also allows you to make electronic purchases of small games (the so-called Xbox Live! Arcade), add-ons to your existing “big” games, and in general anything that can be sent via the Internet (in particular, a video file store was launched in the fall of 2006; and in the future, an analogue of Apple iTunes may appear).

Part two, Live! Gold, is paid (subscription for a year) and allows you to play multiplayer games over the Internet in addition to the opportunities listed above.

Xbox Live! at the moment is, perhaps, a unique entertainment service of this scale and scope. At the time of writing these lines, the Xbox Live! was significantly superior in stability and ease of use to the similar service PlayStation Network, launched by Sony along with its new PlayStation 3 console. What will happen next - time will tell, but the consumer, as a rule, benefits from competition;-)

Accessories for Xbox 360

We decided to devote a separate chapter of our review to accessories that Microsoft offers to all owners of the Xbox 360. We, however, will not concentrate on things that are insignificant in our opinion, like the replaceable front panels of the console itself, and will talk about what can be really useful to Xbox 360 owners (For a complete list of all accessories, see Xbox 360.)

The first line to purchase are accessories that distinguish the more expensive version of the Xbox 360 from the Xbox 360 Core System: wireless gamepads, a hard drive and cables for connecting to an image display device.

Wireless gamepads We described it in sufficient detail above. Here we only note that these gamepads, of course, require their own power supply, which is available in two versions: AA batteries (batteries or accumulators) and Microsoft branded batteries. If everything is more or less clear with the first ones, then branded batteries have a number of features that are worth talking about separately.

Firstly, you can charge the branded battery directly while playing by connecting the gamepad with a special cord (Play"n"Charge Kit) to the USB connector on the console. Regular “fingers” will not provide you with this opportunity, but we assume that the price of 4 AA batteries will be lower than the price of one branded battery and a Play"n"Charge Kit for it. We also admit that some people will be quite satisfied with ordinary AA batteries.

Secondly, you can charge branded batteries using the branded Quick Charge Kit, which allows you to quickly charge two batteries at the same time, but to recharge they must be removed from the gamepads and, as a result, it is impossible to play.

HDD for the Xbox 360 is a regular 2.5" hard drive with a SATA interface (the same drives are used in laptops) with a capacity of 20 GB, which is housed in a beautiful metal-plastic case and is connected to the Xbox 360 through a special converter. Despite the fact that the drive itself is quite is standard, as far as we know, it has not been possible to replace it with a larger HDD at the moment.Microsoft itself does not yet offer hard drives with a capacity other than 20 GB for the Xbox 360.

The reader probably understands that 20 GB in our time is quite small (especially considering that about 6 GB of the hard drive is taken up by system files, and no more than 14 GB of disk space is available to the owner of an Xbox 360). Therefore, Xbox 360 owners may well be faced with a situation where there is not enough space on the HDD and the need to delete something from it in order to download from Live! new files. Unfortunately, Microsoft did not even provide the ability for the Xbox 360 to transfer files from the Xbox 360 HDD to other network storage devices - for example, to the hard drives of a PC connected to the same local network.

Concerning video cables, then the Xbox 360 is able to connect to display devices via:

• composite SDTV cable (regular RCA bells, the cable comes with the Xbox 360 Core System);
• component HDTV cable (RGB or Y"PbPr, the cable comes with the more expensive version of the Xbox 360);
• S-Video cable;
• VGA cable;
• all possible local geographical options for connectors for component connection (SCART, D-Terminal).

Please note that the Xbox 360 does not currently support connections to digital DVI/HDMI ports and is unknown whether it will in the future.

Also of note among the accessories available to Xbox 360 owners are:

HD DVD Player, which connects to the console’s USB connector and allows you to play HD DVD video discs. Its main advantage is the price, which is at least half as much as that of full-fledged HD DVD players.

Memory cards at 64 MB. Necessary if you do not have money for a HDD for Xbox 360; are useless if you already have a HDD.

Wi-Fi adapter for connecting to Wi-Fi networks of the 802.11g standard. Installed on the rear panel of the console, above the LAN and USB connectors, connected to USB. Quite a useful thing if you don’t want to clutter your room with unnecessary wires. But we will talk about some of the features of his work below.

Headset and wireless headset for voice communication in games and outside of games via Xbox Live! The thing is absolutely indispensable for multiplayer cooperative games. A regular headset connects to the jack on the gamepad. The wireless one does not connect anywhere - and this, in fact, is its only difference from a wired headset connected to a wireless gamepad.

Universal remote control, with which you can control not only the playback of movies on the Xbox 360, but also, for example, a computer running Windows XP MCE. The usefulness of this remote control is rather questionable in the presence of a wireless gamepad, but white people may have a different opinion ;-)

The last accessory worthy of mention is camcorder, connects to the USB port of the Xbox 360. The video camera allows you to take photos that you can then use in Xbox 360 games. Also in the Live! Arcade has several games available that use this camcorder, similar to the famous Eye-Toy for Sony PS2.

However, enough theory, let's move on to the practical exploration of the new gaming platform.

Xbox 360 experience

So, we have in our hands an expensive European version of the Xbox 360 - with a hard drive, wireless gamepads and a silver DVD tray cover.

In addition to the console itself, we purchased:

• second wireless gamepad (for two-player games);
• Play"n"Charge Kit (battery for the gamepad and a cord for recharging it while playing from the USB port on the console);
• separate battery for the second gamepad;
• VGA cable for connecting to the DSUB connector on the monitor;
• Wi-Fi adapter for wireless connection to your home network and the Internet.

The console comes in a relatively small, but almost cubic box with a convenient plastic handle - the handle allows you to carry the box without much difficulty or thinking about what kind of bag this box will fit into.

Inside the box was the expected set of the standard delivery of the PAL version of the Xbox 360:

• the console itself with an installed hard drive;
• one wireless gamepad with two AA batteries for it;
• wired headset (headphone and microphone);
• HDTV component cable and SCART adapter;
• Ethernet cable for connecting to a local network;
• power supply with two cables (to the mains and to the console).

Installing and connecting the console

Connecting the console is not particularly difficult: all cables and adapters can only be plugged into the correct connectors, each of which is marked with a graphic icon that does not require knowledge of any language at all.

In our case, the gamepad, after installing the battery in it and turning it on, immediately found the switched-on Xbox 360, but if this had not happened, then it would be necessary to press the round button to search for gamepads on the front panel of the console (there are only two of them, one of which is large, with “on” icon), and then press the same button on the gamepad itself (on top, between the left and right shift keys). We had to do a similar procedure to connect a second gamepad to the console.

Note that up to 4 wireless gamepads can be connected to one Xbox 360, and the corresponding indication is available both on the front side of the console itself (a glowing green circle around the console power button) and on the gamepads (a glowing green circle around, um, the gamepad power button) . If several gamepads are connected, several sectors of the circle (a quarter, half, three-quarters or the entire circle) light up on the console, and on the gamepads - the sector next to the number under which this gamepad is registered in the console.

The connection of the console to the audio system deserves special mention. You have two options: either connect to the stereo input of your amplifier or speakers (standard RCA bells); or connect with an optical cable to a Dolby Digital 5.1 digital stream receiver-decoder. In the second case, the Xbox 360 provides 5.1 channel sound in both DVD movies and games. Note that the TOSLINK cable for connecting to the receiver must be purchased separately (but, as a rule, it comes complete with VGA or other HDTV cables, because the optical port for connecting it is not on the Xbox 360 itself, but on these very cables).

After physically connecting and turning on the set-top box, you are taken to the initial console setup wizard, which will sequentially guide you through the basic settings - selecting the interface language, creating your profile, selecting screen resolution, audio signal type, etc. The process is very clear and does not cause any particular difficulties.

Unless you have to struggle with choosing the optimal resolution for your screen later - depending on how and to which screen the console is connected, different options provide different quality. For example, when connecting the Xbox 360 via a component cable to a widescreen HDTV monitor with an SDTV tuner from ViewSonic with a native matrix resolution of 1280x720, we unexpectedly discovered that setting the Xbox 360 settings to 1080i resolution eliminated some image scaling artifacts observed in the game Saints Row when setting the “native” resolution for the matrix to 720p.

Operating system interface

At this stage, the owner of the Xbox 360 is already quite familiar with the interface of the console's operating system. The interface is quite simple and it's not difficult to navigate at all.

Along the horizontal axis of the interface (left to right), you have a choice of four main pages (each with its own background color for easy identification):

• xbox live
• games
• media
• system

Along the vertical axis of the interface (up and down) you select options and sub-items within the main page you have selected.

The xbox live page is where you log in to the Xbox Live services! - here you can chat with friends, from here you can download demos and videos, buy add-ons for your existing games and the games themselves on Xbox Live! Arcade.

The games page contains options related to the games you own - here you can look at your achievements, what games you play most often, launch a game downloaded from Xbox Live! Arcade or demo version of the “big” game.

On the media page, you can launch a video or photo viewer or a music player, and the source can be either a DVD or a portable storage device connected to the console’s USB port, or the console’s hard drive or the hard drive of a computer connected to the console. the same local network as the console itself (the computer must be running Windows XP MCE, Windows XP with Windows Media Connect, or Windows Vista). From the same page you can get to the Xbox Live section! A marketplace that sells a variety of video files.

The system page contains console settings. Most of them do not require frequent changes, so you will rarely look at this page.

It is worth noting that the interface and the location of items on the main pages, not to mention the subsections of these pages, have been slightly modified several times over the year since the Xbox 360 went on sale - Microsoft is constantly improving the console’s operating system, and its updates also affect the interface .

Gamepad ergonomics

After getting acquainted with the interface and the first hours spent studying the games we bought, the owner of the console pays attention to the ergonomics of the new gamepads.

The standard Xbox 360 wireless gamepad fits very comfortably in your hands (its sharpened, rounded shape is evident); you don’t have to form your fingers in a “zy” shape to reach the button you need at that moment.

The minijoysticks have round guides and move smoothly in them with a clear fixation in the center of their holders. It is still somewhat far-fetched, but already traditional for Xbox consoles, to move the left ministick to the top of the gamepad and install the cross-pad in its “traditional” place, but they say that this arrangement of ministicks is better suited for games of certain genres.

Unlike the PlayStation 3 gamepads, the new Xbox 360 gamepads retain the Force Feedback function or, more simply put, vibration motors. Judging by our feelings in comparison with gamepads of other consoles (Sony PS2, Nintendo Wii), as well as with computer gamepads (Logitech RumblePad 2), the Xbox 360 wireless gamepads vibrate quite strongly - your hands shake noticeably, bodybuilders will be happy ;-)

But the digital eight-way cross is disappointing - unlike the four directional buttons that are probably familiar to many readers, available on the gamepads of Sony consoles, the cross on the Xbox 360 gamepad is implemented as one large plastic circle-on-a-leg, pressing on the edges of which you press on the hidden ones underneath There are contact buttons all around.

The advantage of this implementation is that you don’t have to press two buttons at once if you need to get diagonal movement. The downside is that pressing the edges of the circle is not nearly as obvious as pressing regular buttons. When you press on its edge, the circle tilts and moves relative to the vertical axis, which somewhat confuses the person pressing - we press down, and for some reason the circle moves to the side. In this case, the circle often hits its edge against the annular base of the cross, suddenly stopping and causing not very pleasant sounds. In total, all this leads to the fact that clicks on the cross-pad are not tactilely felt - whether the contact button under the circle was pressed or not can only be determined by what is happening on the screen, which is not always convenient.

But the wireless Xbox 360 gamepads also have one significant and unique advantage at the time the console went on sale: they allow you to turn the console on and off, no matter where the console itself is located - there are advantages of radio contact and a special communication protocol between the gamepad and the console.

True, if you don’t touch the gamepad for a while, it turns off to save battery power, and in order to reconnect it to the console you have to press the “X” button in the middle, initiating a relatively long (5-10 seconds) process of the gamepad searching for its base station . And when you have to observe this process ten times a day (say, you went out to have lunch, then drink coffee and finally just smoke, and the gamepad turned off every time), then in the end it begins to irritate.

But in general, the new Xbox 360 gamepads should be considered practically standard in their ergonomics and significantly superior in this regard to their predecessors from the previous generation of Xbox. And wired Xbox 360 gamepads differ from their wireless counterparts only in the absence of a battery compartment “under the belly”, as a result, slightly less weight and, of course, the presence of a long wire.

Noise and heat dissipation

Finally, the last characteristic that is of interest to buyers is the noise of the console and the heat that is always wandering somewhere near the noise. And, unfortunately, the Xbox 360 has nothing special to boast about in this area: the console gets hot and makes noise, and the noise is a very unpleasant “walking” ringing of a spinning small fan (or rather, two) on roller bearings.

This ringing is especially annoying, firstly, against the background of a practically absent stream of “exhaust” hot air. We are ready to forgive the noise if it is caused by fans that cope effectively with cooling, but in the case of the Xbox 360 the noise is great, and for some reason the air flow through the console is rather modest. Secondly, the noise emitted by the Xbox 360 seems excessive compared to the computer case standing next to it with more than ten low-speed fans, which in total provide less noise when the system is loaded with complex modern games than two Xbox 360 fans when the console is completely idle...

Of course, if there is a DVD in the console drive, then the noise of the fans immediately fades into the background, drowned out by the noise of the disc spinning in the drive, which in turn is successfully covered by the soundtrack of a game or movie. But the problem is that the Xbox Live! implies that the console will be turned on quite often even when no one is playing on it - downloading multi-megabyte demo versions, video files and other add-ons is not a quick task, and the ideal night time for this requires silence, which the Xbox 360 does not seem to provide capable.

Other operating features

Among other surprises revealed during the operation of the Xbox 360, we can note some peculiarities in connecting the console to a computer monitor with a 4:3 screen aspect ratio and some unpleasant surprises in the operation of the proprietary Wi-Fi adapter.

The screen connection situation is as follows: all (literally) Xbox 360 games are designed to run on a wide screen with an aspect ratio of 16:9 (standard HDTV resolutions are 1280x720 and 1920x1080). When you connect your console to a VGA connector (note that this is true not only for computer monitors, since many HDTVs have a VGA connector for connecting projectors and computers), you can specify the resolution at which the console will output a signal. These resolutions include both traditional “computer” resolutions (for example, 1280x1024) and “widescreen” HDTV resolutions. Also in the console settings, the aspect ratio is set to 4:3 or 16:9, which has a corresponding effect on the pixel format (in a picture with an aspect ratio of 16:9 on a 4:3 screen, interface elements look elongated vertically).

The problem is that not all games can adequately perceive these settings. Some games (for example, Perfect Dark Zero) run correctly in 1280x1024 resolution with a 4:3 aspect ratio. But there are games (for example, Project Gotham Racing 3) that ignore the settings specified in the console itself and set the pixels to the wrong format, resulting in them appearing stretched vertically. Unfortunately, this annoying feature can only be corrected by adjusting the monitor settings - that is, compressing the image vertically using the monitor, if it allows it.

This feature should be kept in mind for those who plan to connect the Xbox 360 to a 4:3 aspect ratio screen.

The second problem we identified concerns the operation of the “branded” adapter for connecting to Wi-Fi networks. The fact is that when connecting to the Internet through this adapter, for some reason unknown to us, the connection with Xbox Live constantly breaks down! — the connection itself is fine, the Internet works continuously (on a computer connected to the same network, the download is not interrupted during such disconnections), the connection with Xbox Live is lost! Moreover, this is observed only when connecting via Wi-Fi; when connecting with a regular network cable directly to the router, the connection lasts for many days.

It is difficult to say what causes this behavior during a Wi-Fi connection - the features of the Xbox 360 software, the features of the Wi-Fi adapter, or problems in its operation with our access point (Zyxel Prestige 662HW), but for those who plan to connect the Xbox 360 to the network using a proprietary Wi-Fi adapter, it will be useful to know about this problem. Moreover, there are already alternative and less expensive options for wirelessly connecting the Xbox 360 to your home network.

At the same time, we want to express our “feel” to the Microsoft programmers who did not provide an option for the Xbox 360 OS to automatically restore the connection to Live! in case of its loss. Perhaps they should pay attention to this point when developing the next console OS update.

conclusions

Microsoft's new gaming console undoubtedly turned out to be very successful. The combination of hardware specifically designed for the console and the right approach to marketing and positioning will undoubtedly allow the Xbox 360 to win more fans than the first Xbox managed to do.

A fairly powerful and, importantly, non-standard video chip will allow games for the Xbox 360 to stand out graphically among games for other platforms - and we are talking not so much about the quality as about the graphic style of X360 games. However, we will tell you more about this in reviews of the games themselves.

Advanced media capabilities (playing DVD videos, displaying photos, playing music, interacting with personal computers and portable media devices such as iPod) will certainly appeal to those who like to use game consoles for other purposes than their intended purpose.

At the same time, the early entry of the Xbox 360 into the market, although it gave Microsoft almost a year's head start, had a negative impact on its functionality. It is not yet entirely clear how much Microsoft's attempts to supplement the console's functionality with external devices (in particular, an HD DVD drive) will help it in competition with young and innovative rivals (in particular, the PlayStation 3 and Wii).

However, at the moment, Microsoft Xbox 360 is perhaps the best console of the new generation - in a year it has managed to acquire a serious game library, and the projects already announced for it will be of interest to the vast majority of gamers in the future. How can the recently released Nintendo Wii and Sony PlayStation compare to the Xbox 360? We'll talk about this another time.

pros

• The first console of the new HDTV generation on the market
• Several very good exclusive games that have already been released (Gears of War, Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, Saints Row, Dead Rising, Project Gotham Racing 3, Dead or Alive 4)
• Extremely useful, convenient and universal service Xbox Live! Silver - global player profiles, planet-wide achievement lists, voice communication (and fun as hell mini-games Xbox Live! Arcade)
• A thoroughly thought-out and unified Xbox Live service for all games! Gold is a universal environment for multiplayer games and everything for players to communicate with each other
• Gamepads that are standard in their ergonomics
• Very good console design
• Simple and convenient operating system interface
• Advanced media capabilities (displaying video, audio, photos; network telephone; interaction with PCs and mobile devices)
• A large number of various accessories that significantly increase the capabilities of the console
• Two versions of the console, differing in price and functionality

Minuses

• Lack of any major innovations outside of the Xbox Live online services! — most of the changes compared to the first Xbox are purely quantitative
• Relatively few exclusive games - most Xbox 360 games are also released on other platforms (Windows PC in particular)
• Extremely reduced functionality of the cheap version of the console - lack of backward compatibility, hard drive and wireless gamepads
• Console is noisy
• High percentage of breakdowns in the first year of console sales

Processor from IBM
- Three symmetrical cores of 3.2 GHz each
- 1 MB L2-CACHE

Video card from ATI
- 10 MB built-in DRAM
- Unified shader architecture

Gaming Performance (CPU)
- 9.6 billion vector operations per second

Polygonal performance
- 500 million triangles per second

Pixel Performance
- 16 gigasamples per second using 4x MSAA

Shader performance
- 48 billion shader operations per second

Operating system operation with floating point
- 1 teraflop

Memory
- 512 MB GDDR3 RAM, built at 700 MHz
- General structure of memory

Data storage
- Removable hard drive (20,60 or 120 GB)
- Dual-layer DVD-ROM (also available as a separately purchased HDDVD drive)
- Flash cards (from 64 MB)

Available ports
- Four wireless controllers
- Three slots for USB 2.0
- Two slots for flash cards

Internet connection
- Availability of an Ethernet port
- Wi-Fi: 802.11a, 802.11b, and 802.11g
- Availability of a slot for a video camera

Additional media options
- Supports CD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW, WMA CD, MP3 CD, DVD-Video, DVD-ROM, DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW, CD-DA
- Option to download music files to your hard drive
- Playing files from other devices (portable players, computer, etc.)

Widescreen support
- Available resolution 16:9, 720p, 1080i
- Built-in compatibility with Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005
- Interactive full screen 3D effects

Sound options
- 3D audio option available (Multichannel surround sound)
- 32-bit audio processing
- More than 256 audio channels
- Supports 48KHz, 16 bit
- 320 independent decoding channels

physical characteristics
- Height: 83 mm
- Length: 309 mm
- Width: 258 mm
- Weight: 3.5 kg
- Can be installed vertically or horizontally.

There are three editions of the console available: Arcade, Premium and Elite (there was also a Core version, which is no longer produced, it was replaced by Arcade).

Decoding "Three Fires of Death"
Most buyers of the first shipments of the Xbox 360 at least once encountered the problem of overheating of the gaming system. However, this is not always true - there may be several reasons: memory overheating, an error in the GPU, problems with the power supply. To determine exactly what the error is, you should find out the error code, similar to how they do it in service centers. Necessary
Turn on your console and wait for the “three lights of death”.
Simultaneously press two buttons on the console: open the DVD drive and search for a wireless gamepad.

This procedure should be performed four times. Each time a certain number of lights on the front panel of the device will light up. Each position corresponds to a specific number. One light corresponds to 1, two - 2, three - 3 and four - 0. The four resulting numbers make up the error code.

Error code
0001 Problems with the power supply
0002 Problems with the power supply
0010 Overheat
0011 Overheat
0012 Overheat
0013 Overheat
0022 GPU error / GPU overheating
0102 Unknown error

Not a bad set considering that the console came out back in 2005.

Specifications

Without going into deep details, the xbox 360 hardware has the following characteristics:

• 3-core IBM processor with a frequency of 3.2 GHz

• Xenos graphics core (500 MHz) with 10 megabytes of eDRAM

• 512 Mb of RAM, which is also available to the graphics chip

• DVD-ROM

Dimensions xbox 360: height - 83 mm, length - 309 mm, width - 258 mm, weight - from 2.3 to 3.5 kg

At first glance, the characteristics seem very modest. But, it should be taken into account that consoles are created specifically for games, and almost all hardware is used to process a small number of applications, unlike a PC, where there can be several dozen of them.

Xbox 360 supports all common screen resolutions (480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i, 1080p), including Full-HD. As for audio processing, it can produce audio up to 5.1 Dolby Digital Surround.

Depending on the configuration, the set-top box may include a hard drive with a capacity of 4 to 320 GB. It is not possible to replace the hard drive with a regular 2.5 inch, as is the case with the PlayStation 3 - you need to buy a special hard drive. Some versions of the console (slim and later xbox 360 E) are equipped with a Wi-Fi wireless interface. Older ones have to be connected to the Internet with a cable.

It is worth noting that the console architecture is close to a computer and PC games are perfectly ported to the xbox 360. Which is a significant plus.

Gamepad, Kinect for Microsoft consoles

The gamepad for xbox 360 is one of the most convenient devices in the gaming industry. It fits your hands so well that you don’t feel tired at all after a long game. It is powered by two AA batteries and has a wireless interface. There is also a wired controller with a wire length of 3 meters, but it has not gained much popularity. The gamepad also has a headset jack and is equipped with a feedback function.

Another device that revolutionized the digital entertainment market is Kinect. With this device, players can interact with the console using their body. Kinect is capable of recognizing movements in space using built-in cameras. This creates completely new types of games and can provide unforgettable experiences.

Interface

Xbox 360, with later firmware, has a tiled interface, which later began to be used in all new software from Microsoft. However, figuring out what and where is on the menu is not difficult. From the screenshot above you can see that the xbox 360 can be used not only as a game console, but also as a multimedia center. In general, owners of this console are rarely dissatisfied with the inconvenience of the menu.

As for games, so many of them have accumulated over ten years that the choice dazzles your eyes - a list of all games for the xbox 360. In short, absolutely any gamer will find what he needs. Don't forget about the great exclusives, such as the Halo or Forza series. They alone make it worth getting to know the console better.

Conclusion: even at the moment, the hbox 360 is a pretty good console: it has all the necessary connectors for communication with external devices and has the best gamepad of its generation. The power of the console, of course, is no longer the same, but games for it will be released for another year or two (it’s the end of 2014). And the games that came out before this cannot be replayed. In addition, the price for the basic version of the xbox 360 is not bad at all.

In this article we will talk about Microsoft's last hope - protection AP 2.5. Interesting facts and useful things that are good for all of us - users of firmware consoles - to know! What surprises await us in the future and how does this system work!? This is exactly what we will try to talk about...

AntiPiracy 2.5 (AP 2.5)– a copy protection system for XBOX 360 game discs. It is based on identifying the original structure of the licensed disc by comparing delays when moving from one sector to another (in theory, this looks like measuring the angle between sectors - discussed in more detail below) with reference values ​​taken from a specific batch of disks at the factory.
The fact is that when producing the original Xbox 360 disc on industrial equipment, a unique structure of the physical distribution of data on its surface is specified. On a home “cutter”, this structure of the media cannot be reproduced exactly, since when recording, all sectors are written sequentially, one after another.
First of all, this protection system is aimed at recognizing the modified firmware of the drive in the Xbox 360. Since only in the case of identifying a game disc, but refusing to issue AP 2.5 data, we can state with 99.9% confidence that a regular cut disc is being used, and in drive has modified firmware.

When this event occurs (the checks fail, the drive returns empty values), the Xbox 360 writes a label to the secdata.bin file X-Value – Failed AP25 Challenge. That is, Xbox becomes a candidate for a “ban” in XBL. But this does not mean an immediate ban when logging into Live! Since November 2009, the consoles that were not “distributed” are still working online!

Otherwise, if the drive firmware is factory firmware and a self-written disk is inserted, the test simply will not start.

Autumn 2010
Officially, Dashboard 2.0.12611 (unofficially from beta 2.0.12416), released on November 1, initiated the AntiPiracy 2.5 (AP2.5) check for the first time. Then, upon startup, the message “Disk is unreadable” appeared on three games: Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, Fable III.
The new Dashboard initiated as many as 13 (!) additional disk checks before launching the game as part of AP 2.5 protection. If the checks fail (the drive returns empty values), then the modified firmware is guaranteed to be used and the console is marked as Failed AP 2.5 Challenge. Checks can be presented in the form: “question-answer”, “question-answer”, etc. All questions became known when studying the structure of the defense. But answers can only be obtained from the original disc of the game itself. To complicate the security analysis, these “question-answers” ​​are also encrypted using AES encryption. Naturally, since checks were never carried out, only service sectors and game data were “removed” from licensed disks.

At the end of November, C4eva figured out how to bypass AP 2.5 protection - modified LT+ drive firmware appeared. The bottom line was that the drive would wait for AP 2.5 “questions”. And if any appear, then the “firmware drive” takes “answers” ​​from certain, previously known, sectors on the disk. If the drive does not find any “answers,” it will freeze the drive to bypass the Failed AP 2.5 Challenge entry. Instead of the game, a black screen will appear, if the console is not turned off, after 3 minutes it will still leave a note Failed AP 2.5 Challenge in secdata!

At the moment, the process of removing AP 2.5 responses is owned by C4eva and K3rn3l. They “record” these responses and record them in the very places from which a modified LT+ drive can easily take them. Those same PATCHES for AP 2.5 disk images are the set of the same answers that the dashboard will “feed” so that it thinks that a licensed disk is inserted.
I would like to note that AP 2.5 checks are removed almost exclusively by a narrow group of people. This is where most of the problems arise, namely with the release of patches for localized versions and different regions. That is, first a patch is released for the most common, for example, English Region Free image. In our case, the release date of the patch for the Russian PAL version, for example, Modern Warfare 2 or Black Ops postponed for an indefinite period of time. The bottom line is that to remove AP 2.5 responses K3rn3l'u and C4ev'e require an original licensed disk. That is, the whole paradox is that in order to play an AP 2.5 game on the latest version of Dashboard, you need to buy a license, send the disk to the authors and wait for the patch to come out, after applying which you can play on a homemade disc.
K3rn3l and C4eva do not want to disclose the method for removing AP 2.5 responses, citing the fact that if the method becomes widely known, Microsoft will try to close the vulnerability they found. Accordingly, in the future you may be left without AP25 patches altogether.
An attempt to apply damaged/incorrect patches that do not match this Media ID may result in the X-Value – Failed AP25 Challenge flag. Output of incorrect AP 2.5 responses is equivalent to no AP25 responses. The game still won't launch.
Support AP 2.5 drives:

Checks supported: LiteOn, BenQ, Hitachi 78/79

Checks not supported: Samsung, Hitachi up to 59 inclusive.

Every Xbox 360 (since 2007) is supplied with information at the factory about which drive it was released with. The OSIG section specifies the drive model and its firmware version. Spoofing is when a “non-native” drive is installed, which pretends to be “native”.

To successfully pass AP 2.5 checks on “non-native” (spoofed, substituted) drives, several rules apply.

Rule 1. You cannot use a drive without AP 2.5 support instead of a native drive that supports AP 2.5 (the set-top box will send requests, the drive will not be able to respond to them).

Rule 2. Instead of Hitachi with AP 2.5 support, you cannot install LiteOn (due to the features of the LT+ firmware)

Support for issuing AP 2.5 responses was introduced only from version LT+. All previously released drive firmware versions do not support issuing AP 2.5 responses, respectively An attempt to launch AP25 games on early versions is doomed to failure and a possible ban later.

TableDAE

The DVDAuthEx (DAE) table appeared with 12416 beta versions of Kinect-Dasha. It is located in the NAND console in the DAE.bin file. It provides a list of Media-IDs of all versions of AP 2.5 games. Each regional instance contains the necessary information to pass AP 2.5 checks. This table is used to compare the results of the drive responses to the AP 2.5 test. Each regional instance of the game with its own Media ID is unique and contains unique AP 2.5 responses. For each specific game there are about a dozen different regional Media ID instances.

Example challenge – test example, PSN1 and PSN2 (PSN – Physical Sector Number) numbers of sectors between which the measurement is made, Target Angle – obtained angle value

At the time of writing, the latest version of Dashboard 12625 contains 101 Media IDs, 40 of which are completely unknown and may be assigned to future games. Currently, each Media ID contains 13 checks. But the total number of possible checks is 50. Therefore, at any time, Microsoft with a new version of Dashboard can increase both the number of supported Media IDs and the number of checks. Thus, even images “patched” for LT+ that work now may no longer be relevant in the near future. Everything will depend on how aggressively Microsoft implements AP 2.5 checks.

General operating principleAP 2.5

You insert the disc into the drive. The XBOX 360 operating system performs initial disk identification. The disk is pre-checked, namely, the disk files are checked for compliance with the original ones. If the verification fails, the console displays the message “Start game”, but the game logo is not shown. After passing the pre-check, the name/logo of the game appears in the “open-close tray” field. At startup, game disc authentication is activated. At this moment, if this Media ID is present in the DAE table, a series of angle measurements are taken between specific sectors. The values ​​received from the drive are compared with the reference ones in the table and if the values ​​match, the game starts. In practice, all this takes a few seconds and is carried out unnoticed by the user.

In general, the principle of measuring angles to unambiguously determine the authenticity of a disk has been used since the days of floppy disks. A similar protection principle was even patented by a Russian developer called StarForce.

The spiral track of laser discs is very similar to a gramophone record, only it starts not from the outside, but from the inside, that is, it is wound from the center to the edge. The laser head, held in a magnetic field (much like the voice coil in speaker systems is held), moves on a sled across a spiral track. The track itself consists of data sectors and subcode channels. Sector numbers are located both in the headers of the sectors themselves and in the subcode channels “smeared” along the spiral track. For rough targeting of the required sector, sleds and subcode channels are used, and for precise targeting, deviation in the magnetic field and sector headers are used.

You can’t just take and measure the structure of a spiral track, but you can do this. Let’s say the head reads sector X, followed by sector Y. If the angle XOY formed by the center (O) of the disk and sectors X, Y is ~15 degrees, and the sectors themselves are located in adjacent turns of the spiral track, then the drive will only need just tilt the head a little and in a moment sector Y itself will fall into his hands, like an overripe apple - the disk rotates! If the angle is less than 15 degrees, then during the movement of the head the Y sector will already “float away” and the drive will have to wait a whole revolution of the laser disk!

When the angle between sectors X and Y is ~15 degrees. when moving to the next turn, sector Y immediately “flies up” to the optical head (figure on the left), with a smaller angle value, sector Y manages to float away and the head is forced to wait a whole turn.

Thus, by measuring the reading time of various pairs of sectors, we can approximately determine their relative position on the spiral track. Each batch of disk will have its own (after all, the density of sectors per 1 mm and the steepness of the spiral are not the same and vary from batch to batch). To overcome read-ahead (which many drives suffer from), the protection must read sectors in descending order of their numbers. It must also measure the speed of rotation of the drive in order, firstly, to determine the constancy of time measurements (whether they are dancing like drunken little men or not), and secondly, to adjust the formula for calculating the angle, because it is easy to show that the faster the disk rotates, the faster The sector “floats away”.

It is believed that AP 2.5 also includes a more complete OSIG (Original drive Signature) identification. Apparently, this is due to the fact that different drive models produce slightly different command data. Based on these data, it is apparently possible to track whether the drive in the console has been replaced or not. But in practice such checks can be carried out in XBL. Offline, only the presence of AP 2.5 support is determined.

Hacking theories

Let us once again return to the fact that in order to remove AP 2.5 responses from K3rn3l and C4ev, an original licensed disk is required. That is, it is not yet possible to remove AP 2.5 responses directly from Nand. The data is encrypted to the maximum. It is not entirely clear what method they use. But the requirement to remove the original disk indicates some possible interception. On the other hand, the authors do not want to publish the method due to the fact that supposedly disclosure would entail closing the “holes” used for interception.

1. Directly from the Dashboard using any debugging applications signed by Microsoft for testing, analyzing logs, etc.

2. Theoretically, it is possible to use a certain device, something like a SATA sniffer, connected in series between the drive and the XBOX 360 motherboard.

3. There is a possibility of data being intercepted from the RAM drive, but again, this is all guesswork.

In conclusion, I would like to note the following. If Microsoft begins to completely implement AP 2.5 checks on all disks, K3rn3l and C4eva will not be able to effectively remove AP 2.5 checks from hundreds of disks. Accordingly, either we will get a withdrawal method or the last bastion of independence will remain PHAT-freeboot. There is, of course, a cosmic theory that someday Microsoft’s digital signature will be hacked and then we will have a complete collapse of the XBOX 360’s protection.

Materials, statements, FAQs and chat remarks were used in compiling the material:

Commodore4eva, K3rnel, Dofosho, from the Russian community I would like to thank HOMiE7 And RichY, and Chris Kaspersky aka mice.