Early Xbox
The Xbox is a video game console that was originated by Microsoft Corporation in 2001. The first video game console by the software giant, Xbox was designed as direct competition with the PlayStation 2 by Sony. It also competed with GameCube by Nintendo as well.
North American stores debuted the Xbox console November 15, 2001, after which it emerged in Japan the next February and finally in Australia in Europe a month later.
This first rollout of the Xbox console is the Xbox 360 predecessor. Some of its noteworthy and highly popular games include Halo: Combat Evolves, Project Gotham Racing, Amped: Freestyle Snowboarding and Dead or Alive 3.
The Xbox console initiated the hard drive console format. It was used mostly to store game saves by compressing them into Zip archives and to download content from its Xbox Live. This Xbox hard disk drive console idea eliminated any need for external memory cards. Most of the Xbox games use the console’s hard drive to cache, which loads games faster. Some Xbox console games support customized soundtrack, a feature that is highly unusual and made possible for the Xbox console hard drive. Anyone who owns the Xbox console can rip to its hard drive any music from any audio CD of standard format. In this way the gamers can play their own Xbox custom soundtrack in addition to what the Xbox console originally supplies as a standard feature of its games.
Running a version of the kernel of Windows 2000 that has been stripped down, the Xbox console is also based on commodity hardware for a PC. It uses an API that is largely based on DirectX version 8.1 but still includes changes that are optimized for games. It also incorporates restrictions that prevent non-Microsoft uses.
The original Xbox console was considerably heavier and larger than the Xbox 360. The culprit was the DVD-ROM drive that had to be bulky due to its tray-loading feature and its standard hard drive.
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