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."
and this folks (Score:5, Interesting)
How widespread is this? (Score:5, Interesting)
For example, I have a day-of-release PS2 that's still going strong, and I never experienced any of the problems that were reported here and elsewhere with these units. In this case, I assume that my machine is the norm and not the exception, but if I based my opinion on the naysayers at the time it would appear that my PS2 would be in the minority of working units instead.
Re:Look to the power my son (Score:5, Interesting)
Limiting numbers at release (Score:2, Interesting)
Doesn't it strike you as a bit odd (Score:5, Interesting)
But give how common these problems are, doesn't it strike you as odd? This is almost like there was no testing at all, which doesn't make sense. The developers surely would have caught these weeks, if not months ago.
Error right out of the box (Score:2, Interesting)
Welcome to Windows Update (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Track record (Score:3, Interesting)
You're combining things here. There were 3 flaws in the boot code. This is MS' fault.
That has nothing to do with the overflows in those games. Unless MS wrote those games, they aren't responsible, unless they're auditing the code before signing it.
Rushed to market? (Score:5, Interesting)
In the case of PDZ, I'd question the stability of the game from the fact they were stamping the damn thing before running it through Microsoft's test regime. The problem is with both parties frankly, because if you're stamping it before final testing, the you probably didn't do your OWN testing to make sure things were working properly. Or, I bet Rare was biting its fingernails hoping Microsoft didn't find known issues.
Admittedly, this is version 1 of the 360. You can never find all the problems until a product is put out to market and widespread use finds all sorts of issues you never thought of. For all we know, some people having issues maybe have their 360 plugged into a dizzying array of power bars hooked up behind their home theaters. Power issue, maybe? Inadequate cooling? Time will tell.
In any case, I'm pretty glad I'm not an early adopter this go-around. I'm still considering picking one up, but I think I'll wait until the game library's a little less sports-heavy, and maybe for the 65nm chipped versions to hit the shelves.
/. crap (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:And in todays news... (Score:4, Interesting)
I predicted in
Re:Well... (Score:5, Interesting)
this sort of stuff happens with lots of rushed to market consumer electronics. no big deal to me; its what you would expect. all i can say is that ive had my fair share of consoles do weird stuff, but no playstation or nintendo product ive ever owned has repeatedly crashed on me within the first 24 hours of owning it.
the postings are on xbox-scene. if they are biased against microsoft, i cant tell. its an xbox modding/fan site! would multiple users go out and spend $400 plus games, peripherals, etc. on x360s just so they can post screenshots of self-inflicted crashes?
Re:I wish I had a dollar (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Look to the power my son (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Heat (Score:1, Interesting)
What kind of outcry do you think there will be if microsoft releases a patch via live which reduces the clock speeds of the gpu/cpu, thus making games even more choppy? When I saw my friend playing Morrowind on the xbox for the first time, and saw the constant, dismal 15-20 fps, I knew I would probably never buy a console again. This crashing buisness with the 360 only reinforces that thought.
This is why I'm a PC guy. With a PC, you can tweak your hardware to get the most stable, highest performance configuration. You can also change graphics settings within any game to get similar results. If a console game runs slow or the console itself crashes due to overheating or overclocking, you are out of luck.
I harshly object (Score:3, Interesting)
This is a most rephrehensible comment to make. You claim that since a company wants to make a profit, they will, therefore, by definition, do ANYTHING that might make them money. For instance, if kidnapping children and selling them into sexual slavery in Southeast Asia is profitable, then ANY for-profit company would have no compunction at all in doing so. This is a wrong-headed, insulting, and stupid idea. Perhaps you believe it because you believe axiomatically that the profit motive is evil.
Welcome to Capitalism, enjoy your stay.
You and I have very different understandings of capitalism. To me, capitalism is when people trade value-for-value as free individuals. It is immoral to make money through force or fraud, and those who do it should be punished. Capitalism is merely that which exists by default when individual property rights are protected by the state, free people are allowed to trade, and force and fraud are punished. It is the celebration of individual excellence. It allows companies like Ben & Jerry's and Starbucks to exist which, despite their leftist lip-service, are actually shining monuments to the success of capitalism over older, inferior competitors.
To you, capitalism is probably the source of all the world's misery. I think that's an article of your faith as opposed to observations of reality.
If you read the forums (Score:2, Interesting)
Hardware problems (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, where I work has used a 3rd-party embedded network processor card which has had problems with both the DRAM timing, and incompatibities with specific types of SRAM chips that were ordinarily within spec. We found this out pretty quickly because I wrote a better memory test than anyone else was using with this board. And we have other PC-based equipment that has had a couple of incidents with bad motherboard DIMMs.
Hard crashes that affect a single digit percentage of users all running identical hardware and software, especially when some of those crashes are during boot.
[tinfoilHat]Now we know why Microsoft wanted to limit quantities on the launch day![/tinfoilHat] Ha, ha, it's not cool that the customers with these problems probably had to buy a couple hundred bucks of accessories and games just to move to the front of the line. This is not where you want to find out that your brand new expensive game system suffers from dodgy RAM chips.
This better not be happening in Japan, or they'll be stuck as the "DOABox" like the original XBox was. (Ha ha, that's funny, DOA, ha ha.) And if it is, they're probably going to have to send field service guys to people's houses to bow and gomennasai profusely as they swap out equipment to satisfy pissed off Japanese customers.
Slashdot Editorializing (Score:1, Interesting)
Simple problem, simple solution (Score:3, Interesting)
The obvious solution aside, I'm surpried that people are actually taking this story seriously, at least this early on. Does the overheating Xbox story of the last launch ring any bells? Exactly how over-hyped was that again? I'm holding off on buying a 360 myself, but not for this reason.
Re:What is this? A tabloid? (Score:3, Interesting)
Those two hours of supposed 'automated testing' are hands-off, burn-in time only (no loaded media)...no system testing involved, only logging the device id and power consumption while it sits on the burn rack. The five minutes 'manual' is more like two, with 'testing' being nothing more than voltage leak checks and on/off stabs.
"It's broke, Jim, and since my expertise is limited to human anatomy, there's no way in hades you're going to use any damn xbox until we get back to earth....sorry."
90% of everything is crud (Score:2, Interesting)
Quality is not some auxiliary adjunct property of an item, it is the SOLE value of the item. Consider, for instance, a pair of roller skates. We can abstractly quantify their quality from 0 to 100. Skates that do not work, or, perhaps, a couple of rocks, would have Skate Quality = 0. Skates that glided effortlessly, with zero chafe, are light and breezy (or warm if ice skates), would have Skate Quality = 100 (being the perfect pair of skates).
Now, if you buy an item with Skate Quality = 0, anticipating skating value, you just got robbed. Selling a product of low quality is actually, in my opinion, misrepresentation and fraud.
You buy things for their utility. If you do not receive that utility, you have been robbed. This is the state of affairs today--you are being systematically robbed. For instance, I paid for an eyeglass prescription THREE TIMES, once from an opthamologist, and 1) they all varied considerably, and 2) I still don't have a good prescription for my left eye. That's money stolen from me as far as I'm concerned because I have received little value for my money. Will I have to buy a dozen prescriptions and do a mathematical average of them? WTF is wrong with this world?
Capitalism is broken.
Re:Doesn't it strike you as a bit odd (Score:3, Interesting)
For instance, if the development kits arrived in desktop-PC-style cases, then they may have had much better airflow than the production boxes - maybe the production boxes are overheating? (which sounds like a reasonable explanation for the problems experienced)
Re:1699 parts ok (Score:5, Interesting)
On the XBox-360 poll, my answer was Never / X-Mas 2006. Launch prices are too high, I do not care about the coolness factor of having 0-dayz new stuff and I had doubts about how well the initial hardware would work. Quitting the bleeding-edge to stick with mature mainstream stuff has saved me quite a bit of cash and trouble, I'll stick to that.
My conspiracy theory (Score:4, Interesting)
Tech support response (Score:5, Interesting)
One thing that is worth sharing is the answer 'makaveli87' (post #79 in the Xbox Forums [teamxbox.com]) gave about his contact with MS Support:
You're wrong about the power supply (Score:3, Interesting)
The beta version is significantly larger (30-40%) than the production version.
The PS2 has been plagued with reliability problems, both at launch and afterwards. It had similar heating issues and a lot of the same problems were reported. It's a mix of people not understanding that higher powered consoles are more sensitive to placement and heat ventilation, and the production issues that comes with first mass producing something.
All these same rumors were present at the Xbox launch. Units being returned in droves, DVDs being scratched by the disc player, and all other kinds of malarkey. It ended up being untrue and just a couple of problems being blown out of proportion, and this will as well.
I think there are more iPOD nanos having problems than there are 360s at the moment, but we're not jumping all over our sacred cow Apple, now are we?
Memo says 1 in 3 xbox 360 defective (Score:1, Interesting)
My girlfriend works for a big box electronics store.
They received a memo yesterday stating that 1 in 3 xbox 360's were defective. A warning I guess.
Anyway she swore me to secrecy as she was herself.
Believe me if you like, but I bet before long this memo will be circulating the net.
Re:Have you tried.. (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:1699 parts ok (Score:3, Interesting)
They don't have a supply problem. They knew quite well that they'd sell out. They want the news coverage stating their consoles sell out on the first day. Vendors have been complaining about this for weeks.
Re:Console problems. (Score:3, Interesting)
So you've got a friend who abuses his consoles. That's certainly not representative. My release day PS2 is still working just fine.
Sony is betting the farm on a lot of market untested technologies, Specifically Bluray. Bluray doesn't nearly have the 5+ years of refinement that DVD has had, and I can bet that looking at a bluray disk funny let alone getting fingerprints or a scratch on the disk will make it very susceptible to read failure.
They did the same with the DVD drive in the PS2 in 2000. And this is a Sony technology we're talking about, it would be saying a lot more if they didn't trust Blu-ray enough to include it.
Speaking of Bluray, Yes 50GB is great, but show me a game that uses more than 8.5GB. The only one that comes to my mind is the Everquest series with every expansion they have. Even HL2 and Quake4/Doom III with their mind blowing graphics doesn't crack a single layer of a dual layer DVD, so my guess is that most of that storage will be used for "Sega CD" uses like audio and video, instead of just using the high powered graphics hardware to do the cut scenes for you. Simply put, the only reason they put Bluray in the PS3 is to stronghold the movie industry to make Bluray the High Dev Movie standard, and in doing so, Sony is risking the relibility of the hardware.
HL2 and Quake4/Doom III have next to do content. Of course they don't take up much space. Now go look at RPGs which actually do require a large amount of storage space for content. Several of the RPGs released in the past year have required multiple DVDs. StarOcean: Till the End of Time is, to the best of my knowledge, the first PS2 game released which required 2 DVDs.
As for the rest of your comment, blu-ray is a Sony technology. Why wouldn't they be using it?
My experience with the first 5 hours of use (Score:5, Interesting)
After getting the old Xbox out of the way and hooking up the component cables, surround sound optical cable, wireless adapter, and ginormous power brick, the first thing I saw on the screen turning it on was an error screen. Black, with E74 in the center bottom - there was some other text as well, but I don't remember what it said and most of it was in another language. Not a great first impression, to say the least. I think the problem was the wireless adapter - I was using the one I bought for my original Xbox. I guess they don't play nice together. I'm not sure why really, I thought it was pretty much equivalent to a wireless bridge. Starting up the console without it plugged in resulted in the startup screen. A big error screen is a pretty harsh welcome - they could have at least set it up to start up the system as normal and then display a friendly error message about having to pony up more money for new accessories: "Sorry. Although your shiny new Xbox 360 might be able to play over 200 legacy Xbox games, the wireless adapter you bought is now just a paperweight with lights." That would be better than E74.
After getting the Xbox on finally, I discovered that turning on the controller is less than intuitive. Batteries are included, and simple enough to insert. There is a nice sticker with the finger-pointing-hand icon pointing right at the Xbox 360 semisphere button. The message was clear enough: "Press this button to make this thing work." Nope. I pressed it. I pressed it again. Nothing. I unwrapped the second controller that EBGames so kindly packaged for me, and had the same result. Those damned things wouldn't turn on - no lights, no nothing. It was several minutes before I discovered that you need to hold the button down for several seconds before controller will turn on. I even resorted to RTFM, and still didn't find this crucial tidbit of info. That sucked for a while.
Played PD0 first - no real issues. When I first inserted Project Gotham Racing, however, I saw a nice error screen that told that in order to play this game I must insert it into a Xbox 360 console. I thought that was what I did, but I ejected it and inserted it again just in case. It played the second time around, but when I was done and ready to try out Call of Duty 2, the Xbox 360 just went to a black screen, not the dashboard. Inserting a new disc did nothing - I tried all 4 of them. I had to turn the console off and back on again before it would recognize a game. What the hell? I felt like blowing on the disc and in the tray for old time's sake.
I could gripe a bit about how counterintuitive it is to get a second player to join in games, but I'll chalk that up to my lack of experience with the new interface...
After wading through most of the nonesense, I had a pretty good time my first night with the new system, but damn was it a rough start. The games are pretty fun (PDZ, PGR3, CoD2, Kameo), but at no time did I feel completely blown away by the graphics or the gameplay. Kameo is probably the best of the bunch. I fully expect to encounter more glitches, but there is little chance that I'll send the system away for repairs at this point when most people can't even get their hands on one until next year. That would just be insensitive.
Xbox 360 a piece of crap (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:And in todays news... (Score:2, Interesting)
I guess when I read the above posts, the parts I think about debugging are exactly the parts the other posters are skipping over by saying "the PPC code has a nice beautiful interface to call prepackaged libraries written and well debugged by someone else". I'm talking about being that someone else who has to write those nice prepackaged libraries that will be called from the PPC. Even worse is a fine grained problem that has to incorporate multiple SPUs AND the PPC core in order to do the calculations. Those are the type problems that the Cell programmers face and are some of the problems that made the MAP1310 very difficult to program.
I think the Cell will certainly make one type of software popular among games and that's shared engine code, which will fit the model described in the top few posts. Much like various PC games use the Halflife or Doom engines (so they don't have to write an engine which is both time consuming and "difficult"), making their game not much more than a mod, I think the PS3 will increasingly make this a requirement as writing the various engines (physics, sound, visualization, etc.) on the Cells is not something that most game houses will have the time/skill to do. Unfortunately, to me at least, this means even more cookie-cutter games with even less innovation.... Oh look, this brand new game is just Game123 with different textures [joy].