I searched the forums for alpha but came up pretty much empty handed so if there is some other phrase I should search with please educate me. My question is whether any of the alpha kits which my understanding is the G5 mac based kits made it into the wild. If so I had the following basic questions. What was the software like on them? Did it have special hardware in it or was it a standard Apple G5 offering? Did anyone ever try to clone the disk in one and create a second dev station from the original? Did you need to use another machine to develop on and run code on the G5? Any screen shots exist of it in action? Thanks!
Tbh thats the only one ive ever seen, there not as common as xbox1 alpha kits, maybe in the future more will be in the wild, but as of now i dont think threre's to much information available about them.
So I guess it wasn't my imagination and information about them is actually hard to come by. If anyone digs anything up I for one would be interested in hearing about it. Any chance the person who asked for the price check on the alpha kit would be willing to have a moderator post pictures of the alpha station running?
More or less stock G5. Running custom Xbox 360 kernel. Not code compatible with final hardware. Faster than beta 1 when running source targeted for both kits. -hl718
@DaE What's the environment look like? Is it self contained development or just a target machine to run code on? Anything special about the machine or is it really just bog standard?
What You can do with Alpha Dev Kit? This one have Dashboard like dev? Have something like personal key?
Are you saying newer compiled code won't run on it? Or newer hardware can't run projects from it? And that last statement is too vague.. It really all depends on what you're doing..
The architecture change from Alpha (stock G5 CPU) to Beta 1 (first Xbox 360 CPU revision) had enough differences that code compiled for an Alpha kit wouldn't run on a Beta kit and vice versa. In order to get the project started on an Alpha to run on a Beta, you needed to recompile. Because of these same differences, most projects started on an Alpha kit saw a performance drop when jumping to the Beta kit, before any optimization work was done. -hl718
It would be great to understand how they were used as well. I wonder if anyone has ever tried to convert a retail G5 into a alpha dev station?
Good question. Anyone have got recovery disk or something like that for G5? Any diffrience is software or something else like hardware key?
well, with he xbox1 alphas it had a different bios than the regular version of that mobo. so i think you need the modified bios to use a recovery, well.. atleast that's what happened in the past so i wouldn't be surprised if they continued that tradition. oh and DaE im serious, can you get more pictures.. Please?
I would be interested in understanding what special firmware they would use on a G5. It would be very interesting if it was a custom firmware which I doubt vs. a modified open firmware which I could believe being done. @DaE if you still have access to the alpha it can you do a cmd-opt-O-F on boot and see what happens?
