I'm in the application development business, more specifically performance testing of applications and hardware.  I've worked both sides of the fence having developed apps and tested them...

You're 100% right.  The development tools available for the Xbox are LIGHT YEARS ahead of the tools (if you can call them that) available for the PS2.  Coding games for the PS2 is a freaking NIGHTMARE.  Plus, the Xbox uses DirectX 8 which is a huge bonus.

Developers are jumping up and down now that the Xbox is on the market.  The dev tools are just as robust as traditional MS dev tools are such as VB and Visual C and Java.  This will inspire great things.

Unless Sony pulls its head out and follows suit with Microsoft and uses a standard platform with real development tools, they will go the way of the DreamCast, Intellivision and Atari.

Yup, just about all of them will be.  And if these guys do their work properly (not just a simple port but actually rewrite the code to take advantage of the Xbox's superior power) the PS2 games will look and play FAR better on the Xbox.

Resident evil is hyped up shit!! how many times can a person play a game with no replay value. shoot slow moving zombies and find the next key? the only Resident evil game that kept me on edge was RE3. and that was only because of the tyrant who was tough to beat. Half-life on the PC and PS2 has made me jump out of my skin more than a target practice shooter ever could.

survivor horror indeed. the only horror is that i wasted about $50 bucks on code veronica when i had a dreamcast. these types of games are renters only. done in two setting

You can't find them  anywhere here in Houston.  I told myself that I wasn't going to get one, but after seeing Halo and the other cool games I want one now.  However, that's half of a new pistol, and guns hold their value a lot better than console games do.



Years?  It's only been released for 1.5 years if you're counting from it's introduction in Japan.



Which parts are upradable?  The CPU and GPU are both attached to the motherboard.  There is no upgrading as far as those two key components are concerned.  Not to mention that the GPU output would still have to be fed out through the Conexant video RGB to TV video converter onboard.

CPU
[img]http://www.icrontic.com/review_images/Hardware/X/xboxmod/PICT0031_1.jpg[/img]

GPU
[img]http://www.icrontic.com/review_images/Hardware/X/xboxmod/PICT0001_1_1.jpg[/img]

After a year of my PS2, I'd really like to get an XBOX.  The games look awesome.

God Bless Texas

Well, you guys convinced me. Santa is bringing the Boomer family an Xbox for Christmas. My nephew has a PS2 and it's pretty cool, but I think ultimately the Xbox will prove to be the better system. Halo looks really good. What also helped seal it for me was seeing that MX 2002 either already is or will soon be available for Xbox. I love playing that game with him but am getting pretty tired of him kicking my ass so bad because he plays it all the time.

yeah i know but im just saying intendo is trying to get away from the kitty image

You're internet savvy, give online shopping a try.  [:)]  If you're real nice, I might help you out by picking one up for you here.  Unlike the PS2 (which was impossible to get) the Xbox is sitting around if you look.

At 1.5 you round up, simple rule we learned back in elementary school I believe.  [:)]  The PS2 is about 2 years old, hence the word "years" which denotes more than one.

Just this week some guys goofing around inside their Xbox's discovered you could upgrade the HDD ribbon cable to a ATA/100 cable and significantly improve performance.  Here's a link to the website: [url]http://www.icrontic.com/index.php?page=public/articles&articleId=106[/url]

I haven't tried this and probably won't.  My personal opinion is that simply replacing a cable wouldn't do much if the bus and HDD didn't support that ATA/100 standard.  If it does support the higher throughput, then why didn't MS include a high datapath cable from the factory?  I don't know... but read the article, it's good.

Aside from that, you'll see people swapping out HDD's, perhaps memory and maybe even BIOS.  Who knows, but it's nothing more than a PC running a version of the XP kernel so all sorts of things are possible.

Do it, you'll LOVE it... I LOVE mine.  Right after Enterprise I'm going to fire up mine.  I might even run up and pick-up the new Star Wars StarFighter game which just hit the streets yesterday.