Xbox 360 Very Unstable 1113
fmwap writes "There have been several postings over at Xbox-scene complaining of crashing Xbox's on new games, with default settings on single player. Crashes on Xbox Live and on startup have been reported too, and Project Gotham Racing 3 crashes before finishing the first lap. Screenshots and Video are available showing the crash."
Not the only site reporting failures (Score:5, Informative)
Fortunately (Score:3, Informative)
Sony has had its moments too... (Score:5, Informative)
In fact, there has been a class action over the issue:
http://www.ps2settlement.com/ [ps2settlement.com]
Unstable? (Score:5, Informative)
As a note, the system is very thermally unstalbe. I have mine vertical, and every vent is needed. If you were to block any of the airholes for any reason, or to trap the air exiting via the rear of the sytsem, the system potentially could overheat. The exhaust was very high temperature when I checked it after an hour or two of PGR3.
My rig (for reference) was running at 720P for part of it, 1080i for the other part (to compare whose transcoder was better, my TV or the XBOX). I'm on XBOX live, and upon boot, the system updated itself and restarted. This could have been a critical update that fixed the problem that people are talking about.
All and all, I'm quite impressed with the hardware. The emulation works better with some XBOX games than others. For instance, Forza motorsport runs sluggishly on the 360, yet Dead or Alive 3 runs flawlessly.
The live marketplace is impressive. They have HD downloads available, such as music videos and trailers. In addition, you can download new games such as bejewled from Microsoft. There are also themes that can be purchased via live, and as Penny Arcade themes are available, many people should be able to get their themes for sale on Live.
If I see crashes, I'll repost. However, so far, after 10+ hours of operation, most of which with PGR3, I have no crashes or errors to report.
Re:"Several posts" on a few boards = "very" unstab (Score:2, Informative)
Once you get the rules down it won't bother you so much.
Re:The error message (Score:3, Informative)
in 9 languages.
Re:Have you tried.. (Score:4, Informative)
/worked on the old PS
Video Mirror (Score:3, Informative)
http://69.93.36.237.nyud.net:8090/xbox-scene/xbox
Overheating! My experience. . . (Score:5, Informative)
Since the machine is pretty loud I put it in my home-entairtainment cabinet, which it shares with a receiver, DVD player, and an old VHS. While the cabinet is relatively large, when I close the glass door and play the XB360 it gets very hot in there after playing (and I've been playing alot).
Quake 4 seems to really stress the XB360 out since there is an aggrevating amount of slow down in the game. Several times when Quake 4 got too hectic my XB360 froze up on me. After I felt how hot it is I took it out of the cabinet and so far (being since last night) I haven't had any problems with crahes so far.
Polls (Score:2, Informative)
http://forum.teamxbox.com/showthread.php?t=392599 [teamxbox.com]
Re:I wish I had a dollar (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What is this? A tabloid? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:And in todays news... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Heat (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I wish I had a dollar (Score:5, Informative)
Sounds like its likely a combination of out-of-spec power conditioning and overheating. The two can reinforce each other AND combine to contribute instability... parts that are hot are less likely to be tolerant to poor power conditioning, and parts that are experiencing power fluctuations tend to produce more heat on the surge cycles.
Re:Heat (Score:5, Informative)
Re:And this is a surprize because? (Score:5, Informative)
I've lost many hard drives and three computers (one Linux, one Mac and one Windows,) to "heat prostration". Sometimes the cases are not really capable of handling everything we can shove in there.
I hate the monolith in Redmond as much as the next guy but... heat is the enemy here.
I bet NOBODY who lives in a frozen food section at Safeway is reporting a crash.
>>First off, my other consumer electronic devices (including my 600W receiver) have absolutely no problems with over-heating. As do, I'm assuming, most electronic devices made today.
>>Secondly, as mentioned in my first post the cabinet is relatively large, and my VHS and DVD are obviously turned off when playing my XB360; there is ample space and ventilation in the cabinet, I put it on the shelf where my old Xbox used to sit.
>>Thirdly, MS should obviously design their "home entertainment" device to be put in, well, a "home-enteirtainment" cabinet. Its unresonable to expect every person to use their XB360 in "frozen food section at Safeway" .
It should also be mentioned that even outside the cabinet it's incredible hot. When I eject the DVD to the machine I can feel the heat of radiating from it, and the game is suprising hot to the touch. I've never had this problem with my original Xbox (that sat in the same cabinet), which I also bought on lauch day, and has been incredibly reliable since the day I got it. Personally, I think MS caved into the critism of the size of the original Xbox and stuffed the hardware into too small a place relative to heat disapation.
Re:And in todays news... (Score:5, Informative)
This article [theinquirer.net] has responses from a few game devs stating that their launch titles are multi-threaded and a M$ threading person said: "Six months ago, we had only looked at a handful of games. Most of those games were single-threaded. Today, we've evaluated most launch titles and the majority are using multiple threads."
Re:And in todays news... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:And in todays news... (Score:4, Informative)
Anyway, try this search [google.com].
Re:Polls (Score:2, Informative)
ATI GPU & IBM CPU Problematic (Score:4, Informative)
By all accounts, the system produces ~180W of heat while playing games. That's a lot to handle with only two 60mm fans.
Microsoft is not alone with this problem - the PS3 has an NVIDIA GeForce 7800GTX derivitive that is clocked very high; it will produce at least 80W, and Cell will likely produce ~80W. More problematic for Sony is the fact that the current PS3 case has very few vent holes.
Make no mistake - heat is an issue that will be problematic for all next generation consoles. The days of 25W desktop CPUs are over, as are the days of 30W performance GPUs.
I'm just surprised that no one was smart enough to put a bloody Sempron in one of these consoles...
Power Supply? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What's your silver bullet? (Score:3, Informative)
It is called "experience", which Microsoft has plenty of.
Seriously, after a few years of designing and developing a certain kind of systems, I have become pretty good at estimating how much time a new system will take to build. I start by dividing the development process into tasks, estimate the time needed for each task (each task will take no more than 2 weeks, so you can plan it fairly well), sum everything, and then add 20-50% margin, depending on the size of the project (20% for small projects, 50% for very large ones). Usually when I look at the end total, I get a feeling that I might have calculated a bit too much, but I know I have that feeling every time, and I leave it like it is. I am accurate with a margin of about 5%.
My experience is that after I have made my estimation, I get lots of pressure from clients, sales managers, and higher-up staff, to reduce the needed time. Some of them even want to see all my estimates for smaller tasks, and try to remove a few days here and there. It is not difficult to argue "You estimate this task to be 10 days, but I think you can do it in 8, please tell me why you think you need 10." In the past, I have seen many of my colleagues buckle under the pressure and reduce their estimates. I don't. I simply point to my track record, and say "Perhaps this task might take a few days less, but other tasks might take a few days more. You can't be accurate on each single task, but the overall picture will be correct." The net result is that I manage to deliver good software on the deadlines, while my co-workers (at least those who have given in) are either late, or deliver crap. Some of them even got burn-outs.
So the answer is: estimates should be made by people who have to do the work, not the people who have to sell it.
How many of you have it on the carpet. (Score:4, Informative)
A defect caused by a poor design, and only in the early models. Sounds familiar! A moving part was made of plastic and it wore a groove down in it over time. This messed up the lens alignment as it wasn't hitting the disk at 90 degrees. Turning it upsidedown meant that that gravity did the same job as the plastic sled. You could fix it by filling the groove with glue or some other filler to level it off.
My main point: How many of the people with problems have the machine sitting on a carpet? I see this at friends places all the time. Most devices have vent holes on the bottom and passive ventilation is essential from bottom to top. If you place it on a carpet, you cover half of the vents and remove most of the airflow. If the xbox 360 is already a hot potato, this could even lead to a fire hazard. However, it should not be crashing. If it's overheating, the BIOS should notice and shutdown long before you start to get random glitches.
If you don't have a desk to put it on, put a hard-back book between it and the floor.
Re:And in todays news... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:What's "a trace of a crash?" (Score:2, Informative)
Re:And this is a surprize because? (Score:2, Informative)
First, just because you don't see any symptoms, does not mean your equipment is not suffering from the excess heat. You could just be shortening the lifespan of your components without any current noticable clues.
Second, the problem with most consumer AV cabinets is that they are designed for form, not function. IOW, they are made to look pretty in your living room, not safely house your equipment. Sure, a DVD Player, cable box (non-DVR), cd player, and basic receiver will live just fine in one of these cabinets, but you start putting things that generate real heat in there, and you're asking for trouble!
To fix the heat issue in an AV cabinet, just cut a hole in the back of the cabinet, and stick a 30-40mm CPU fan over the hole. Did that in mine, and everything stays comfortably cool and stable!
Re:What's "a trace of a crash?" (Score:2, Informative)
AAAAARRRRRRGGGHHHH
Say it with me:
intents and purposes
intents and purposes
intents and purposes
Then do at least semi-accurate discovery (Score:3, Informative)
Re:And in todays news... (Score:5, Informative)
Yep. I've done this type of work and it's possible for it to not be a big deal -- provided that the developers stick to a robust set of patterns and protocols for interacting with the DSP compute hardware. For sanity's sake, all of the sync code should be wrapped up into frameworks so that various sub-teams never end up wandering off and generating buggy one-off low-level synchronization code. Devs coding for the specialized hardware (DSP/Cell) write to interfaces that are clean and purely single-threaded. Clients on the main hardware threads never need to screw around with low-level sync code. The framework itself can be instrumented to assist in finding and debugging any odd concurrency issues that come up, but for the most part a well-designed framework allieviates a lot of annoying concurrency bugs in the first place. When bugs are found they get quashed once and for-all in the framework, instead of being distributed willy-nilly (and sometimes in non-obvious ways) around the system.
To folks looking for further reading, I suggest starting with Pattern Oriented Software Architecture, Vol 2: Patterns for Concurrent and Networked Objects by Douglas Schmidt, et. al. A number of these patterns are also available as papers from Schmidt's website -- see Google. I also recommend checking out the Future(s) pattern, not covered in POSA2. The idea is to have an asynchronous operation return a Future object that represents the result of the async computation. When the result in needed, the object either returns it (if the async computation is done) or blocks (if the async computation isn't done). This allows both batching of multiple parallel async activities, as well as result/input dependency management. A somewhat simple example:The nice thing is that the work requests (here, loading or transforming data) can (potentially) all run in parallel. Note that LoadTexture, LoadModel, and Transform all return instantly -- we'll only wait for a result when it's called for, and we only wait if the result is not already available.
Can't show you many because there is no space (Score:3, Informative)
First of all, Blu-Ray (and HD-DVD) discs have become nigh-invulnerable due to a new coating. Supposedly you can literally take steel wool to the discs and not scratch them. Fingerprints also do not hold well on the new material, but even if they did generally they do not cause a problem for readers.
I would also note that DVD technology was still rather new when Sony put it in the PS2, not much further ahead of where the Blu-Ray players will be in six months or so.
Speaking of Bluray, Yes 50GB is great, but show me a game that uses more than 8.5GB.
As noted by another poster, there are a few already. However there is a good reason why you do not see more - because it costs a lot of money to add another disc! The package is more expensive, you double the burning cost, and of course it's a pain to switch discs and most game makers will do anything they can to fit on one disc.
With more space aviliable developers will naturally start using it. How? Don't forget the new consoles support HDR (high dynamic range) which means larger textures. Furthermore with more space you cna ease up on compression (assuming you were compressing some things like audio a lot just to conserve space and not processor power). You can have more FMV (yeah, I know it doesn't really add to a game but still) and more extras like "making of" videos (which are cool).
Now here's the problem facing Microsoft. Next year, game makers will start releasing games that make use of the space availiable on a Blu-Ray disc. Now what happens when a game maker wants to port that to the 360? They have to cram it in a smaller space which means either taking out some stuff or compressing the hell out of it. So shortly after the PS3 launch you will see some game comparisons for cross-platform games noting the 360 looks slightly worse and interpreting that to mean a less powerful system, when in fact all it might be is compression issues!
A console has to stand out for about fpur years, and so generally has some very advanaced technology in it. To use sort of "old" components is to invite system deprication after only a year or so. Just imagine the marketing leverage Sony will have by touting the PS3 as having the next generation of DVD playing in addition to a world-class console that can play the vast library of the PS2 and PS1. How can Microsoft really counter? My guess is they will release an HD-DVD version of the 360 shipping with Halo 3 (on HD-DVD) around the launch of the PS3, but that's going to anger a lot of people if they do so.
Re:Cool crash screens though. (Score:2, Informative)
M$ those idea stealing bastards, I guess their all to popular BSD (blue screen of death) wasn't cutting it.
mine works great. (Score:3, Informative)
I agree the thing about having to log in two people to play two-players games is very very weird. It sure wouldn't work in a kiosk at the store! It does work once you do it though.
All in all, I'm very impressed. The Live integration is great.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)