Xbox Troubles Revisited

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Here's your conflicting report of the weekend. A few days back we carried a story about reports coming in of XBox demo machines having issues with crashing and hitching etc... Microsoft replied with something along the lines of "the reports are exaggerated, there are always a few cases with a release of 10,000 units" kind of thing. However this post by a Bungie employee concerning Halo's demo in particular (Thanks Chubee by way of VE)

... apparently some of the software on the demo discs was accidentally built with an old video library. A conflict between the finished hardware and the old library will, under certain conditions, manifest itself as the weirdness reported over the last few days. [snip]

Well that's very good news for XBox that it was indeed as many suspected, just a goofup on sending out non-final builds... an easily resolved issue. But it also as suspected that MS came out saying this is not a problem when in fact it was.

Something else to keep in mind is that the Playstation2 experienced some pretty major problems with hardware on their initial release especially in Japan. This is not some kind of "MS knows nothing type about consoles" type of problem as even (relative to MS) veterans like Sony had bad hardware going out on actual shipping products, not just demo models.

Steve Gibson is the cofounder of Shacknews.com. Originally known as sCary's Quakeholio back in 1996, Steve is now President of Gearbox Publishing after selling Shacknews to GameFly in 2009.

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