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"A Walk Through The Xbox 360 Evaluation Lab"

This is some good reading.

Every year, the guts of the Xbox were ripped out and replaced with cheaper, more efficient components. But consumers never noticed because the outside of the box stayed the same. Leland slaved away on motherboard redesigns known as “Xblade,” “Barcelona” and “Tuscany,” but no one ever heard about them.
 
Very interesting piece, thanks for the link.

I didn't realize they were on such a stringent launch schedule for the thing all the way back to 2003.
 
Dean Takahashi.

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Argyle said:
NOT CREDIBLE, IT'S JUST SOMEONE'S BLOG

Like AB 101 said, it's the same person who did "Inside the Xbox." As well, it's the arts and entertainment section of the Mercury News.

If those two don't combine and give it some credibility in your eyes, I just don't know what will.
 
Dean's been covering the game industry for years. He used to be with the Wall Street Journal and then Red Herring and has been with the Merc for like 4-5 years now. He also wrote a book on the Xbox, though I forget what it was called. Sharp guy to be sure.

edit: yeah, that book above... that's the one. :)
 
Matlock said:
Like AB 101 said, it's the same person who did "Inside the Xbox." As well, it's the arts and entertainment section of the Mercury News.

If those two don't combine and give it some credibility in your eyes, I just don't know what will.

Its a joke. One of the MercuryNews writers posted on their blog some DS hardware numbers and Nintendo fans refused to believe them because they were from a blog.
 
Thanks for the link, that was really a good read. It would be nice to see something like this in the gaming press more often.
 
sangreal said:
Its a joke. One of the MercuryNews writers posted on their blog some DS hardware numbers and Nintendo fans refused to believe them because they were from a blog.


well Dean is well known for some flubs

like saying metroid prime 2 was a bowling game, remember? :lol
 
This seems to be a little more detailed than that...

Seems like he is recounting his visit to the X360 campus.....too much detail here to totally flub it up....
 
Some interesting quotes...

On the older Xbox, Leland had to help deal with issues like cable problems in Australia, the huge controller that was so big the Japanese didn’t like it, disk-scratching problems that also turned off Japanese customers. (She explained to me why my own Xbox was starting to go on the fritz, failing to recognize some of the newfangled DVDs that have a lot more features on them than the old ones.)

The Xbox 360 project has run a lot more smoothly than the last one. Simulation technology has advanced and helped make sure that the hardware would work right out of the gate. That’s where a lot of the big bugs were found, even before anything was etched in hardware, Leland said. Last time around, Nvidia ran late on the graphics chip, Flextronics had start-up problems in the factory, and Microsoft had to postpone its launches in Japan and Europe.

But this time, the critical hardware is done. IBM "taped out," or finished its chip design, on Dec. 8, 2004. ATI finished its graphics chip in November.

So one of her people spends a lot of time zapping electrical pulses into tortured prototypes. She has had to travel to China, where the factories are, to help set up testing labs, including a room where people just play Xbox 360 games like “Perfect Dark Zero” all day long

Wall guy slave labor?
 
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