microsoft xbox

The Xbox is a sixth generation era video game console produced by Microsoft Corporation. It was Microsoft's first foray into the gaming console market, and competed directly with Sony's PlayStation 2, and to a lesser extent, the Nintendo GameCube. more...

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It was first released on November 15, 2001 in North America; February 22, 2002 in Japan; and on March 14, 2002 in Europe and Australia. It is the predecessor to Microsoft's Xbox 360 console. The Xbox was Microsoft's first product that ventured into the console arena, after having been introduced in Japan Windows CE to the Sega Dreamcast console. Notable launch titles for the console included Halo: Combat Evolved, Amped: Freestyle Snowboarding, Dead or Alive 3, Project Gotham Racing, and Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee.

Games

See also: List of Xbox games compatible with Xbox 360

Hardware

See also: Xbox special limited editions

Xbox was the first console to incorporate a hard disk drive, used primarily for storing game saves compressed in ZIP archives and content downloaded from Xbox Live. This eliminated the need for separate memory cards (although some older consoles, such as the TurboCD, Sega CD and Sega Saturn had featured built-in battery backup memory prior to this). Most of the games also use the hard drive as a disk cache, for faster game loading times. Some games support \"Custom soundtracks,\" another particularly unusual feature allowed by the hard drive. An Xbox owner can rip music from standard audio CDs to the hard drive so players can play their custom soundtrack, in addition to the original soundtrack of Xbox games that support such a feature.

Although the Xbox is based on commodity PC hardware and runs a stripped-down version of the Windows 2000 kernel using APIs based largely on DirectX 8.1, it incorporates changes optimized for gaming uses as well as restrictions designed to prevent uses not approved by Microsoft. A similar approach (PC hardware, stripped-down Windows) was used by the Tandy VIS entertainment system. The Xbox does not use Windows CE due to Microsoft internal politics at the time, as well as limited support in Windows CE for DirectX.

The Xbox itself is much, much larger and heavier than its contemporaries. This is largely due to a bulky tray-loading DVD-ROM drive and the standard-size 3.5 inch hard drive. Because of this, the Xbox has found itself a target of mild derision, as gamers poke fun at it for things like a warning in the Xbox manual that a falling Xbox \"could cause serious injury\" to a small child or pet. However, the Xbox has also pioneered safety features, such as breakaway cables for the controllers to prevent the console from being yanked from the shelf.

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