I have modded my XBox into a debug kit and I have the XDK software on my computer along with Visual Studio 2003.. So.. What is the XBox dev unit used for? And I don't understand what the Raptor DVD emulator does??? And how do I burn an XBox game/app that I have made onto a DVD that can play on any retail unmodded XBox? I don't understand that whole "signing" thing. Do you have to have an official dev unit to sign or special DVDs?
You have to think in terms of pre-release. Sure you can do all that now, but think back to late 2000. Also, if you were a dev you'd need to test on hardware to be sure. This was all ages before softmod, hell, any mod. Really what you've bought is a bunch of nice collectibles. You probably could have gotten by with a $15 softmodded unit
@ Assembler, but where would the fun be in that lol? I agree. The Raptor card you have, just put it back in it's box and forget about it, you'll never need to use it. Just enjoy the debug kit and the features it has.
When xboxes where still widely sold, the dev. xbox was what you needed to develop games for the xbox, together with visual studio 2003 and the xdk. The development xbox has 128MB of ram instead of the usual 64. As the debug dashboard and bios where bigger than the retail ones, the extra memory compensated for that. Also note that a an application compiled in debug mode is larger than one compiled without debug information embedded. The development xbox had a different MCPX chip. The 1bl part of a debug bios was different so that initially you couldn't use that bios on a normal xbox. Reading from a dvd disk is slower than reading from a harddisk. The raptor dvd card made it possible to simulate that slower behavour to see if it had an influence on gameplay. Sometimes positionning a file on a different place of the dvd could make it's read time faster. So, the raptor was only usefull for larger games that needed to load additional map's and other stuff during gameplay. You can't create a dvd yourself that will run on any xbox. The xbe of an unmodded xbox needs to be signed before it will run. This is done with a private code only known by microsoft. The xbox uses a public code to check the integrity of the signed xbe before it executes it. There are also bit's embedded in the file header that tell the os from which media the file can be executed. So back in time, when a firm had a game ready for the xbox, they had to sent the code to microsoft. M$ did some testing on it to see if it was programmed to the rules, and used their private code to sign the game. At that moment, it was ready for production. Due to the fact your retail xbox is modded, it can run unsigned applications. One of them is the phoenix bios loader that makes it possible to run a BFM bios from disk. This was not the way M$ wanted it to be used. So, the advantage of a real dev kit: -128MB ram, so no problem for bigger games. -emulation of slow dvd read times possible -they have a serial port that allows low level kernel debugging. (I forgot to mention that one)
The big news for us is that the XBOX 2 SDK has been seeded to developers dual Apple Power Mac G5 with a core of Windows NT. The Apple Power Mac G5 is based on two 64-bit IBM Power PC and graphic features ATi Radeon 9800 Pro (R350). However, the R350 is considered a temporary solution and will ultimately be replaced by the ATI R420 coming. Interestingly SDK apparently also has an Apple logo in a sidebar on the application.
