By: Jay

The History of Xbox

The Xbox is a sixth-generation video game console

manufactured by Microsoft. It was released on November 15, 2001 in North America, February 22,

2002 in Japan, and March 14, 2002 in Australia and Europe and

is the predecessor to the Xbox 360. It was Microsoft's first foray into the gaming console market,

and competed with Sony's PlayStation 2, Sega's Dreamcast, and Nintendo's GameCube. The

integrated Xbox Live service allowed players to compete

online.

Some of Microsoft's plans proved effective. In preparation for its

launch, Microsoft acquired Bungie and used Halo: Combat Evolved as

its launch title. At the time, Goldeneye 007 for Nintendo 64 had

been one of the few hit FPS games to appear on a console, some of

other ones being Perfect Dark and Medal of Honor. Halo: Combat

Evolved proved a good application to drive the Xbox's sales. In 2002,

Microsoft overtook Nintendo to capture the second place slot in consoles sold in North America.

The name for the Xbox was originally the DirectX box as it

came from a group of Microsoft DirectX developers,

but later changed to Xbox after focus testing. The marketing

team apparently "created this whole, long list of better names for the machine",

former Microsoft VP of game publishing Ed Fries said in a

interview with Gamasutra

The Xbox was discontinued in late 2006, although the final Xbox game, Madden NFL 09

was released in August 2008. Support for out-of-warranty

Xbox consoles was discontinued on March 2,

2009; any in-warranty repair now needed will not be

undertaken and faulty consoles will be replaced with an Xbox

360 instead. Xbox Live support was discontinued on April 15,

2010

Nvidia ceased production of the Xbox's GPU in August 2005, which marked the end of Xbox production. The Xbox 360 had

superior storage, audio and video capabilities compared to

the original Xbox.

When equipped with a removable hard drive add-on, the Xbox 360

supports a limited number of the Xbox's game library through

emulation. Emulation adds support for anti-aliasing as well as up

scaling of the still standard definition image. These emulators

are periodically updated to add compatibility for older games and

are available free through Xbox Live or as a file download to be burned

to a DVD-R from the Xbox web site. These updates are also available

monthly as part of the demo disc that comes with each issue of

Official Xbox Magazine.

As the architectures are different between Xbox and

Xbox 360, software emulation is the only way to have

compatibility without including hardware from the original

Xbox. According to Microsoft the Xbox 360's life span will

last until 2015, more than doubling the life span of the

original Xbox.

On November 15, 2002, Microsoft launched its Xbox Live online gaming service,

allowing subscribers to play online Xbox games with other subscribers around the world

and download new content directly to the system's hard

drive. The online service works only with a broadband Internet

connection. Approximately 250,000 subscribers signed up

within two months of Xbox Live's launch

In July 2004, Microsoft announced that Xbox Live had

reached one million subscribers; in July 2005,

membership reached two million, and by July 2007 there

were more than 3 million subscribers. By May 2009, the

number had ballooned to 20 million current subscribers

On February 5, 2010, Marc Whitten posted on

gamerscoreblog that Xbox Live support for the original Xbox

games would be discontinued as of April 15, 2010. Services

were discontinued on schedule, but a group of 20

gamers continued to play for almost a month afterwards by

simply leaving their consoles on connected to Halo 2

APACHE N4SIR was the final user to play on the original

Xbox's Live Service and was finally disconnected on May

11, 2010 at 01:58 EDT

My Opinion on Xbox: I like xbox more than the ps3 but I know

the ps3 is better. Xbox you have to pay for xbox live and it

doesn’t have blu-ray player. I like the controllers more and I

just think it looks cooler.

My Friends Opinion on Xbox: My friends think xbox is bad because they don’t like the

controllers and they wouldn’t want to pay for xbox live.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox