rosoft was taking a major loss on the sales on Xbox consoles.
Presently, Xboxen are a dime a dozen at my local thrift store. And since the Xbox I had originally bought was having problems playing Shenmue II (which, I should add, is one of the few games that gave me motivation to spend an entire nine dollars for the system in the first place), I figured I would tear it apart to see how it works. I'm not a stranger to console repairs thanks to common laser proble
ms in PS2 consoles, and I've probably opened every console I've ever owned. So with my experience as a 'tech guy', I offer you a list of the design failures of the original Xbox console.
Problem 1 - The Power Supply
The first thing I want to say about the power
supply is that I have seen it before. It's almo
st identical to the power supplies I've taken out of Tandy T1000 series computers, all the way down to the internal power connectors. The only difference is that there's extra logic in there to turn it off when the system is in a standby power state. The T1000 computers are 20 years older than the Xbox.
That's not really a bad thing, honestly, since most of the components used in that style of power supply have not really changed all that much. The only thing I can really say is bad about the design is that it's an old transformer-based design, which isn't as efficient as a switching power supply.
But the real problem is that Foxlink built it. Which is not to say that Foxlink makes bad power supplies. An outsourced power supply does make logistical sense, since you can just purchase them en masse and if you need more than they can supply, you can get them from other manufactured. But, as a rule of thumb, whenever you buy something from someone else, they have put a markup on the product so they can make a profit. In other words, using this power supply made their console more expensive.
Something else could be said about the positioning of the power supply - it's inside the console. It's not really too bad a decision in this case, since overheating was uncommon on the platform, and not needing to add extra cable and shielding saved them a couple cents in the process.
Problem 2: The Case
When the Xbox first came out, I was given a magazine that tried to sell Xbox consoles by it's technical merit. One of the things it said the console had was that you could take off the green XBOX emblem from the top and use it as a coaster. It
turns out they lied. Oddly enough, you can almost do it with the Gamecube, though.
Coaster issues put aside, the case for the Xbox is a plastic and steel mess. While everything was relatively easy to take apart (the system was designed with servicability in mind), it is, plainly, ridiculous. Someone in the year 2000 decided "SLOTS ARE FUCKING AWESOME" and told everyone the news slightly before joining microsoft and adding hundreds of useless fins to the design. But that's just the aesthetics, so it doesn't make that much of a difference (besides the extra plastic costs, which is trivial at best). The real problem is how damned wasteful the whole thing is. In fact, there's even a piece of plastic that covers the buttons in the front, even though there's already a layer of plastic covering them.
Underneath the ~1/2 inch plastic veneer is an entire goddamn faraday cage. Don't get me wrong, the electronics do emit radio noise, so some degree of shielding is absolutely necessary. But in this case, they literally include an entire complete faraday cage around everything in the entire console.What's worse is that they actually include it over the DVD and HD drives, which are already shielded. It's just unnecessary waste.
But wait, it gets worse! Holding up those two drives are two more cases! So what you've got there is two cases, held in a cage, held in a case. Yo dog....
As an unexpected upside, I found when I opened the case, the insides of the plastic parts all had internal Flextronics part numbers that started with MSX (which is, for the record, Microsoft's only economically successful computer). Sadly, there is nowhere for you to plug in your Knightmare cartredge.
Problem 3: The DVD Drive
The DVD drive is another set of problems entirely. The main part of it is that it's designed to be very simelar to standard PC DVD drives.Reliability issues aside, my personal problem with it is that it has a side-loading tray, which are generally fragile.
For some reason, Microsoft felt the need to connect the DVD drive to the system through good old PATA. This is a horrible solution. That DVD drive was custom-made and could have been made any way they wanted it to. In practically any other console, the hardware would be wired directly to the logic board which would drive the equipment directly.
While using the ATA standard made the design easier for the Logic board and software designers, it did make the console a bit more expensive. If you remove the shielding from that drive, you'll see that there is two seperate boards in there, increasing complexity and costs. One one of those boards there's a gigantic QFP microchip that takes about half the width of the board. What you may not know about devices connected via ATA is that they actually have to have essentially a seperate computer built-in to the device that knows how to drive the actual hardware. Add that cost to the unnecessary shielding and the cable itself, and you're losing quite a lot of money.
Problem 4: The Logic Board
1. There's a 'Hot Area'
Another word for "Hot Area" is "Power Supply". While it's not uncommon to have a bit of power management done on the logic board, the Xbox takes it to an extreme - a result of using a generic power supply. If the power supply was generating the correct levels to begin with, this would not be a problem. Thankfully, the biggest potential problem is solved by that power supply - the levels coming in are too low to start a fire.
2. Breakout boards
Breakout boards do not make a project more expensive because the board is expensive - it's because they need extra connectors and support. There are, in total, four breakout boards on the Xbox (actually six, including the power supply and HDD board, but that's a bit unfair). Two are in the CD drive, one is a simple backplane for the buttons and lights at the front (a pretty standard fare), and the other one... is something of a mystery.
This breakout board contains two 12-pin connectors to the logic board, and two 12-pin connectors that connect directly to the four controller ports. This breakout board has no reason to exist at all. It's a bastard board.
I'm completely baffled by this board. There's enough pins on the logic board itself to support the controller ports, but what's baffling about it is that the only chip on it is a Texas Instruments USB hub. If it's got that many pins going into it, why does it need a hub?! And that's completely ignoring the fact that they could have put that chip on the logic board in the first place.
My personal theory about their reasoning is that because the signals go through the hot area (Yes, seriously), they wanted to minimize the number of signals going up there, so they only put in the signals for a single USB connection and put a hub inline for it to support the other devices. They just put in the two connectors to make the breakout more stable.
But this theory doesn't even make sense. Those two connectors are marked "Game 1&2" and "Game3&4", respectively, which means they should just fit directly in theory. Plus those connectors are not used anywhere else in the system, so it couldn't be just for support.
3. Something Like Video
I would love to assign the blame to the Conexant video encoder, but having seen it on other consoles, I know it's not the problem. It's probably because they put too much resistance on one of the lines. Worse, this problem is still evident on the Xbox 360 despite the fact that they don't share a design, so they really havn't learned from their mistakes.
4. NitPICking
Then there's the issue of the heatsinks. Both are generic. But if they had made their own, they could have replaced both with a single heatsink, saving money while simplifying construction. They could probably have gotten rid of the GPU Fan while they were at it.
Also on the list of "Why is this here?" is an ICS 10/100base-T Ethernet PHY controller. There's no reason for this to exist - it should be integrated into the custom chips. That's kind of the point of custom chips - they save you money.
And that's about it for the logic board.
Problem 5: All the Other Shit
The Xbox is the only console I would have actually prefered to see with a single controller port on it. It would have made the console look a lot better and saved money on costs. Why? Because of the damned breakaway cables on the controllers. Instead of packaging every controller with a stupid adaptor cable that can be lost pretty easily, the console would have come with a single controller port and a two- or four-player multitap. The multitap would have the hub built-in, thus making the breakout board and a lot of plastic unnecessary, plus it would have had those quick-disconnect connections on them, so they would eliminate that crappy breakaway adaptor. Microsoft would have made more money on selling these multitaps, and you could combine them to have more than four players.
The Intel chip was probably a bad decision as well. There are only two manufacturers who are making the most highly competitive microprocessors on earth, so those prices must have been truely premium. There were quite a lot of competing chips from many manufacturers that would have done as good a job as the Pentium III chip they put in there - especially because that was around the time that AMD's CPUs were the better performers. I wouldn't doubt that there were people out there who didn't buy an Xbox because they already had a PC, especially when the Xbox was "PC-based" (which, to be fair, it really isn't).Problem 0: The Good Parts
It's really not impossible to please me. I was just a little surprised to see what's inside this thing. Microsoft's products have always seemed to fall a little short for me, and all the design shortcuts they take are pretty apparant in this particular product.
Even with all the faults I listed, you can't deny that the console is very sturdy. You could probably put it to the 10ft drop test, and it would still work (though the cynic in me wants to say that the breakout board would probably fall out of place).
Perhaps the best part of the console is how service-centric it is. It's designed to be as simelar to a PC as possible so that developers have minimal skills to learn. There is a non-attached 15-pin connector on the logic board marked LPC debug, making the console a development platform as well (though it looks like it would be more useful for hardware debugging than anything else - which would make it useless to software developers). The actual build is designed for it to be as easy as possible to service - every screw can be removed with a T10 bit on a slotted screwdriver, and the only recessed screws have a lot of clearance so you don't have to buy a dedicated screwdriver just to open it.
I hear Xbox Live is nice. Seeing it now, though, I don't really believe the accounts.
Problem -1: The Xbox 360
Forget it. I still play that thing.
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