Contents tagged with Xbox
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RROD - Our Xbox 360 Finally Gave Up
UPDATE: And this morning it works again! Amazing. Yesterday I tried everything together with the support guy on the phone - unplugged power, hard drive, network, everything - but it was RROD still after 8-10 retries. And now, 20 hours later it works again? Weird. I'll let the box run for a few hours today and tomorrow. If nothing crashes I'll call Xbox support again and hear what they've got to say about it.
ANOTHER UPDATE: And a few days later it really, really died so I sent it in for repairs. :) I just got it back today - it took about 2 weeks "door-to-door", which is not too bad considering it travelled to Germany for repairs and back again to Sweden. The motherboard replaced.
Some time ago our Xbox 360 here at home started to glich - the screen froze up after a few minutes with a short squeeky noise from the speakers, one of the red lamps on the front lit and I thought the Xbox was going down. I contacted the support center to have it repaired (I would have to pay for it because we've had it for a couple of years and the warranty didn't cover this error), but they had problems with their incident system for a couple of days and therefore couldn't submit repair request... I asked them to call me back or send me an email when the system worked again, but they couldn't do that (boooh). That made me a bit angry, and I kind of dropped the Xbox from a few inches of height into the floor... and it worked pretty well after that!
...until now that is. This morning we had a real proper RROD (Red Ring of Death) - hardware failure. Argh!
I called the support center again and was prepared to pay for the repairs, but I was told that Microsoft extended the warranty for RROD/hardware failures to 3 years - good! I just got the UPS lables to print out and stick onto the box and will arrange for UPS to pick it up on Monday. They said it might take up to 3 weeks to have the thing repaired and sent back to us, but there's not much I can do about that.
I guess we'll have to power up the old Xbox console now and play Worms for a while :)
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My Xbox 360 is so D**n Noisy
:rant on
I've had the Xbox 360 for almost 2 years now or something like that, and it's a wonderful console to play games on. Last year I configured it as a media extender and hooked it to my Vista Ultimate box sitting in my office with a Tv-tuner so that I can watch live TV and recorded TV shows on the Xbox.
Everything would be all and well if it wasn't for the amazingly loud noise the 360 gives off. I know about the noisy fans and the DVD drive, and people say they DVD-drive is the worst, but I'm not so sure. The noise from the spinning DVD drive doesn't bother me that much, becasue when me and my son play games, we crank up the volume on the surround system anyway :)
The sound from the Xbox when watching a DVD movie isn't too bad either, because the DVD revs down and the fans too it seems like.
No, what bothers me is the annoyingly loud noise from the machine when using it as a media extender. As soon as I press that green button on the remote and the media center program starts, the fans in the Xbox revs up to a maximum and it sure must be louder than 60 decibel. It almost sounds like a hair dryer for crying out loud. Watching TV late at night with the volume turned down is impossible, you won't hear what they say on the show.
I've been peeking at various Xbox modding articles about how to replace the fans, the DVD drive, adding sound dampeners and what not, but I'm not so sure it helps. Some people say it doesn't help a bit. The only thing that seems to work is to rip out the fans completely and replace with water cooling or bigger external fans. Also, some rumours say Microsoft will detect a modded fan and ban you from Xbox Live, but I think that's an urban legend.
There's also talk about the lates versions of the Xbox 360 console being more quiet than the earlier versions, but how quiet is that?
No, the wife acceptance factor and my own patience will probably have me go back to using a standard cable tv receiver with a recordable disc in it. I was happy to get rid of all the extra equipment from the living room and only have a TV, the Xbox and the surround system but as I said - the noise from the console is just too much.
Any good ideas for what I can do before I dust off and reconnect my old equipment?
:rant off
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Track Your Halo 3 Progress on Internet
This has not so much to do with coding as such, but there is a great deal of cool architecture involved in this. I'm sure all of you knows about the Xbox game Halo and especially Halo 3 for Xbox 360 from the guys over att Bungie. The single player campaign game itself is wonderful, but once you've played it through maybe you'd like to test your skills against 100.000+ other Halo players on Xbox Live. But be warned, the guys (mostly kids way younger that yourself) are quite skilled, and you will get your butt kicked around.
Everything is tracked
What's so cool about Halo and Xbox Live is that all your progress, matches, achievments, stats, screenshots, film clips and even the latest look of you player model (armour, colors etc) are sent to the Bungie Halo web site so you can track everything from there. You can go back to every game you played and look at details about score, how many opponents you beat down, with what weapon, what medals you earned and so on. You even get heatmaps of where you are most active and successful on each map!
Playing with my son
I'm spending a lot of time at home together with my 12 year old son, who unfortunately got a serious disease in his bone marrow and has to stay at home or at the hospital all the time until he recovers (which will take many months yet), and we're playing a few games on Xbox Live every day - sometimes many games ;) When we've finished playing, we pull up the laptop to look at our player stats on Bungie.net. Needless to say, my son is way better than I am. I'm more used to playing with a keyboard and mouse than with the Xbox controls ;)
These are the Halo 3 stats for my son, and these are my stats. Don't laugh at my stats and rank please...
Interesting game design
I was once into multiplayer game design and development on an open source project for Unreal Fortress *dreamy look* and I sometimes thought about connecting the games to a website in a way similar to what Bungie has done. Multiplayer stats on websites has been around for a long time for games like Quake, Team Fortress, Unreal (and so on), but I've never seen anything like the service on Bungie.net. The game architecture of Halo 3 itself is something too - I'm very impressed with how you can go and look at a complete game afterwards and see EVERYTHING that happened in the game in detail. Not just from your view, but from everyones view. Something I know isn't, or wasn't possible with the Unreal/Unreal2 engine and I don't thing the Quake engine could do that too.
The only thing I miss is being able to change player armour, emblem, colors and such on Bungie.net instead of from Xbox only.
Ranking system from Microsoft Research
Halo 3 uses a ranking system so that every player can earn experience points and be ranked (if you chose to play ranked games) compared to other Xbox Live players. The ranking system is based on Trueskill from the Microsoft Research division. It's somewhat complex but you don't have to care and it seems to work pretty well. If you want to get XP, make sure you end up on the winning team of a team game or in the upper half of a "Lone Wolf" game without teams. The matchmaking system tries to assamble games which are as even as possible, based on the ranks of the players available on-line. Sometimes it takes a minute or two to get a game started, but most of the time it's very quick and many of the team-based games are very, very even.
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Built Media Center PC, Streaming to Xbox
It's been a while since I blogged anything now. Not that I've not had anything to blog about, but rather the other way around.
During the holidays I built myself a new PC to run Media Center on, stuck a tuner card into it and set up my Xbox 360 as an extender. It works pretty well I must say. I'll write more about the custom PC later and things to think about when installing Media Center, transcoding movies and stuff. I didn't bother trying the Media Center version on Vista because I still have probs with device drivers for my printer, my scanner and a few other things :( Media Center Edition of XP works well for me I must say.
Something you want to look at if you're into streaming divx videos from MCE to your Xbox is the Transcode 360 project avaiable at http://www.runtime360.com/projects/transcode-360/. It's a must.
