when the original Xbox launched in 2001
it was written off by many too large too
expensive too clunky it's just a PC that
God awful dup controller but these would
not be my thoughts of course I fell in
love with the machine as soon as I saw
it Microsoft somehow knew exactly what I
wanted for my living room and they
delivered but there's a good reason why
the form factor was so big and it's all
because of this the original Xbox would
come with a built-in hard drive 8 GB to
be exact now you might have to remember
at the time time this was unheard of the
Dreamcast PlayStation 2 and GameCube did
have storage options but they were
limited to memory cards for save games
and some small updates now of course
this is not entirely accurate as the
PlayStation 2 fat model does have the
option to expand the hardware with a
hard drive in fact in 2004 Square Enix
released Final Fantasy 11 online for the
PS2 it required a Broadband adapter and
a 40 gig hard drive to play but the Xbox
was the very first console that had a
hard drive built-in right out of the box
and it was a move that confused many
what could you possibly need with so
much space when you launched into the
dashboard it said there was 50,000 plus
blocks of free space as compared to the
minuscule amounts you'd normally see on
memory cards of that era but was all
that space even required and what about
peterm Mo's famous quote in 2008 when he
said the hard drive in every Xbox killed
us well as usual let's dig in a little
and take take a close look at what made
the Xbox hard drive such an important
feature for the console and one that was
ultimately adopted by all other Hardware
makers in future
Generations there were two things in our
plan that we thought absolutely critical
to the success of Xbox and games on Xbox
which had never been done before on a
game console number one a hard drive
that would be important not only to save
information about the player State and
what accomplishments they had
doneal but also so they could store Lar
large amounts of data somewhere and be
able to access and change that over time
the Xbox hard drive is a critical part
of the hardware infrastructure the whole
goal was to bring a new way to serve up
content to Gamers which at the time
remained mostly static meaning if you
did buy a game back then you were stuck
with that build forever the game
couldn't be updated easily but with the
Xbox thanks to the built-in hard drive
and ethernet port games could be updated
along with the concept of DLC or
downloadable content which will be
introduced to expand the life cycle of
any game the original Xbox evolved with
the player in 2001 Xbox still hadn't
finished their Xbox Live infrastructure
but once it was ready to release in 2002
it simply required a dashboard update
that installed itself over the top of
the existing one that came with the
retail Xbox that you purchased this
would open up the Xbox Live tab on the
dashboard to get you all set up now this
is an important thing when you do power
up an original Xbox the system does
quite a few things and one of them is to
check if there's a game inserted into
the DVD drive to boot from and if one
isn't detected the Xbox dashboard files
are stored on the hard drive and are
booted into normally dashboards like
this are stored in Flash and aren't
easily updated at all but the whole goal
of the Xbox hard drive was to keep your
system up to date while simplistic by
today's standards the Xbox dashboard did
do quite a few things it handled DVD
movie playback provided that you had the
dongle inserted you could also play CDs
you could adjust various system
configuration options including video
audio parental controls date and time
you could also take it online if you had
the Xbox Live update as well as save
game management and of course we had
custom
soundtracks there was about 150 original
Xbox titles that supported custom
soundtracks and the way this works is by
inserting a music CD into the Xbox DVD
drive it would be possible to rip the
entire disc to the Xbox hard drive and
replace a Game soundtrack with your own
custom one obviously this is something
that is stuck in the 2000s and simply
wouldn't fly in today's world of dmca
but this was just another value ad for
the consumer and Microsoft did carry
this forward to the Xbox 360 and of
course the Xbox hard drive was used for
save games this is really where the hard
drive was a great investment you had
tons more storage than you knew what to
do with and there was never really a
need to buy any additional memory cards
for the OG Xbox unless you wanted to
transport your profile or save games to
another system at the time there was no
concept of cloud storage so any type of
profile transfer needed a memory card
but otherwise out of the box the Xbox
did everything Microsoft would
infamously remove the hard drive on the
Xbox 360 arcade unit which received much
criticism for but we'll get to that a
little later so far we've discussed the
benefits of the Xbox hard drive from the
perspective of the gamer but the
question remains why was there so much
space at least for the time for just the
dashboard some DLC save games and custom
soundtracks well the Xbox hard drive
wasn't there just for a dashboard DLC
save games and custom soundtracks its
purpose was quite versatile and
developers could really start to take
advantage of the hard drive in some very
interesting
ways for developers having access to a
hard drive was a blessing and one of the
Xbox's most important features each game
could take full advantage of it and
developers could rest easy knowing that
the hard drive was always available to
them and they could rely on its presence
the Xbox hard drive performance metrics
were for the time quite impressive the
average SE time on the hard disk would
be around 10 milliseconds that's
compared to the 130 monds from the DVD
and just to be clear SE times in this
metric is the time to move from a
current read wrp position to a new one
the fast hard drive access meant that
games that streamed in level and texture
data would be possible when we covered
the emotion engine on the PlayStation 2
we praise the Developers for coming up
with new ways to stream in data to think
differently this was done by processing
many tasks in parallel which also
included scheduling DVD reads to bring
in your geometry and texture data on the
fly on the original Xbox its
architecture is more PC like with a
large at least for its time 64 MB of
main memory the large of all six
generation consoles at the time the
problem with the Xbox was that its
memory was unified between the CPU and
the GPU this meant that developers had
to be very careful when allocating
rendering budgets to ensure there was
enough memory available for games and by
setting up temporary cache data on the
hard drive meant that compared to the
PlayStation 2 streaming technology the
Xbox could Sol for it by simply pulling
in its data directly from that temporary
storage Bas speeding up loading and
streaming times significantly games such
as Halo 2 and Fable are excellent
examples of Xbox titles that take full
advantage of the hard drive many believe
that Halo 2 would simply not be possible
on any other system other than the
original Xbox at the time and it's all
thanks to the hard drive without it it's
left up to the DVD drive and that's over
10 times
slower every single original Xbox game
has access to four separate data stores
on the hard drive there's user data
storage that manages save game and
profile data per user title persistent
storage which would persist data such as
high score tables additional DLC data
and any other data that is considered
game-wide next is the utility data
storage which is similar to the title
persistent storage but it's temporary
and this is perfect for not only caching
data but also to be used for temporary
scratch base to take away seek times
away from the DVD and the very best
example of clever use of utility storage
that I can think of it has to be Halo 2
for anyone who played Halo 2 on the OG
Xbox you'll know exactly what I'm
talking about boot up your Xbox skip the
Microsoft logo skip the bunge logo get
to the main title screen and press a to
resume your campaign you're literally
back in the game in less than 30 seconds
from turning on your Xbox and at the
main menu screen you're in the game in
about 15 seconds the hard drive really
does make a huge difference and this is
one of the many reasons why people
believe that games such as Halo 2 fa
Doom 3 and halflife 2 which all have
heavy hard drive access and Reliance on
the hard drive simply would not be
possible on any other system other than
the original Xbox now of course that is
up to your thoughts and interpretation
and as soon as you throw down the
challenge there is obviously a developer
out there that's saying I can do that
and there's probably a way to Sol for
that but I do think that we can all
agree that if it wasn't for the Xbox
hard drive a game such as Halo 2 would
be a lot more fragmented with
significant loading screens during
gameplay rather than the brief pause
when you move to the next part of the
campaign Doom 3 had heavy use of the
hard drive level data was static with
loading screens that broke up the
gameplay but vicarious Visions would
develop a texture streaming algorithm
with prediction to know what textures
needed to be pulled from the hard drive
this was developed during a time where
streaming of texture assets wasn't
really a common thing and maybe the most
well-known example is of morrowwind Todd
Howard famously said that in order to
get around a memory League he would make
the Xbox reboot itself back into the
game now we have already covered this
story in more detail and I'll leave a
link to that video in the description
below But ultimately what he's talking
about is using the hard drive to build a
safe state of the game play and then
rebooting the game back in and loading
directly back into that Save State via a
command line switch this was a Hail Mary
to get around a memory leak that could
not be found and this is one of the
reasons why there are pretty heavy
loading screens on morrowwind on the
original Xbox but on the flip side it's
fair to say that no other sixth
generation console at the time could
support a game like morrowwind the hard
drive was
crucial the homeb community also
innovated when it came to the original
Xbox once the hardware was opened up for
unsigned code access it turned out to be
the perfect device for emulators and
ROMs because every Xbox has a hard drive
this meant that dashboard Replacements
could be built and installed e either by
replacing the Xbox dashboard or it could
be just a secondary dashboard that you
could load into and this is why the Xbox
was so popular for years and considered
one of the very best consoles for
emulators it was powerful enough and it
had the storage and best of all the
community came up with tools to allow
for much larger up to 2 TB drives to be
installed but you didn't even need any
of that you could M any Xbox and have it
running your favorite Nintendo games in
no time no matter what configuration you
had the storage partition would be used
for things like save States skins and
additional ROMs that you needed but it
wouldn't stop here the community
innovated and just like the commercial
developers hbre developers also solved
problems that were seemingly impossible
and I was personally responsible for one
the original Xbox as we said has 64 MB
of unified memory this meant that some
emulators such as final burn alpha x or
surreal 64 could not load larger ROMs
because the system would simply run out
of memory there was no built-in paging
or virtual memory management at all but
to work around this I would build a
virtual memory manager for final burn
alpha x that could load in the largest
Neo Geo ROM and I would then bring this
code to other emulators such as surreal
64 the idea was crude but it worked
effectively leaving a bite swapped copy
of the ROM on the Xbox persistent
storage partition and for any memory
access that threw an exception because
it wasn't loaded into main memory it
would simply pull that page from the
file system and the execution would
continue now this is obviously not
perfect there's going to be some slight
pauses and hitch during the game playay
but use of the Xbox cache API commands
could help with this in some way virtual
memory management did get the job done
and it was used everywhere in the Xbox
home brew scene to work around Xbox
memory limitations and it was all thanks
to the hard drive it simply would not be
possible without
it when the Xbox 360 launched in 2005
Microsoft had made the system expandable
the hard drive was now optional and
could be easily added or removed the
base model Xbox 360 would not come with
a hard drive at all instead adopting a
proprietary memory card that could store
save games the dashboard was all stored
into the system's nand and it was all
encrypted of course a hard drive could
be added at any time and when they
became cheaper more people would adopt
and upgrade to one but the point Point
here is that Microsoft suddenly had
broken their own rules no longer did
everyone have the same Hardware
configuration and as such developers had
to rely more on the DVD drive once again
effectively scaling to the lowest common
denominator have you ever noticed that
some games that you install on your Xbox
360s hard drive actually run slower than
they do from DVD well let me tell you
it's not you it's that the DVD in some
instances was the optimal way to play
games while while many games still use
the hard drive for caching data nothing
on the Xbox 360 could quite match the
super fast loading speeds of Halo 2 for
example and we have to also consider
that the Xbox 360 came with 512 MB of
ram a significant step up from the
original Xbox and this in turn means
that much more data could be loaded into
the main system memory so the Reliance
on the hard drive for temporary cash
storage or scratch Bas wasn't as
important as perhaps it was on the
original Xbox of course we can't dispute
the success of the Xbox 360 and how it
turned out to be but it was apparent
that The Visionaries at Xbox at the time
felt like the hard drive was an
overpriced mistake but I disagree I
personally believe that it's one of the
most important pillars of what made the
Xbox brand so special to many of us
without it things simply wouldn't have
been the same and the quality of the
games in my opinion that we would see
come to the platform would have been
diminished and with that we are going to
leave it here for today's video let me
know your thoughts and experiences with
playing games on the original Xbox in
the comments below as well if you were a
developer that worked on the original
Xbox and you did have experience with
the hard drive or maybe you came up with
some interesting algorithms to streaming
data from the Xbox hard drive I'd
definitely like to hear your stories in
the comments below we're going to leave
it here for today's episode guys thank
you so much for watching if you liked it
please don't forget to leave me a thumbs
up and I'll catch you guys in the next
episode bye for now
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