[HN Gopher] How Microsoft attempted to make the Xbox 360 dashboa...
___________________________________________________________________
How Microsoft attempted to make the Xbox 360 dashboard load faster
Author : whalesalad
Score : 94 points
Date : 2023-01-10 16:56 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (eaton-works.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (eaton-works.com)
| dschuetz wrote:
| Back in the days one would say they've boought a company that
| could do that. lulz
| mariambarouma wrote:
| I'm interested in this data center mode, has anyone ever gotten
| hold of the supplementary dash executable? Or was it gated in
| some way or not available?
| mdmglr wrote:
| Great article. Perhaps the next step would be to try to get the
| data center xex to see what that is all about.
| EatonZ wrote:
| I've added it to the to-do list, but I would not be surprised
| if it's inaccessible. The HTTP request to download it has
| console ID as a header.
| babypuncher wrote:
| I find it fascinating to learn that they tried. It looks like
| they really did, but it was a futile effort. What they needed to
| do was cut out a lot of the unnecessary crap.
|
| The beginning of the end was the release of the "New Xbox
| Experience" in 2008, which introduced a new rich and very
| cumbersome UI that was way heavier on resources, more confusing
| to navigate, and dedicated more real estate to ads and "sponsored
| content".
|
| If Microsoft cared about speed and usability, they should have
| reversed course. Kill NXE, restore the original snappy Blades UI,
| and backport the one useful NXE feature (the ability to install
| disc games to the HDD). Nobody's going to care about 3D avatars
| if they make your game machine take three times longer to boot.
| [deleted]
| jmoak3 wrote:
| Agreed - 14 year old me was very disappointed with NXE.
|
| The new tiles were a good lesson in how any vacuum in a UX will
| be filled with ads given enough time.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| I was shocked when, very late in that console cycle, I, a PS3
| owner, got ahold of a cheap, used 360.
|
| Holy shit, the menu was so bad. Ads and other shit everywhere.
| Cluttered and inconsistent such that it was tricky to find
| anything--I still have one, and still play games on it
| sometimes, as recently as last week, but even today don't feel
| like I have a good mental model for the menu layout and
| functions, everything just feels randomly strewn about, that
| even goes for the in-game pop-up system menu.
|
| And yes, it's noticeably laggy.
|
| I've not been happy with the direction of the PS4 and PS5
| menus, but despite a ton of shitting-up compared with the
| sublimely-snappy-and-simple PS3 menu, they're still not _that_
| bad--and at least they have the horsepower to run the webshit
| Playstation Store without constantly running out of memory and
| refreshing, or crashing, or taking comically long to load a
| page. You 'd think they'd prioritize a great store experience
| to get you to spend more money, but on the PS3, you'd be wrong.
| But anyway, point is the 360 menu is so bad that years of
| making Playstation menus worse hasn't been enough to catch up
| with its awfulness.
|
| Haven't seen the XBone menu yet. Hope it's better.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| One thing to note is that if you're using a 360 now, the most
| recent update is not actually the NXE. They updated the 360
| dash _again_ to make it look like the then-current Xbone
| dash.
|
| For reference:
|
| - Blades dash has four or five "blades" that you can flip
| between. Each blade has it's own UI and can open up into
| submenus.
|
| - NXE dash has a vertical list of horizontal menus, sort of
| like XMB flipped on its side. Or the Blades dash flipped on
| its side and with everything on one row each. This design was
| tweaked several times, most notably when the Kinect launched.
|
| - Grid dash has a grid of icons, vaguely like the Wii Menu,
| except you can't reorganize anything on it and everything is
| ads.
|
| I got my 360 the day before the NXE launched, so I didn't
| notice a performance regression with NXE. But using the grid
| dash today makes the console feel _incredibly_ sluggish.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Ah, I probably am looking at the grid one these days, then.
| I've definitely got it connected to the 'net, and updated,
| since the single most important exclusive game on it is
| digital-only (the Perfect Dark HD re-release--the version
| that's just the original game with better textures, 720p
| resolution, and a modern control scheme)
|
| So the weird, incoherent mess of options on each screen,
| sized and placed seemingly at random, with ads often far
| more prominent than any of the stuff you might actually
| want to do on that screen, is actually an XBone-ism? Boo, I
| hoped that if I ever got around to having one of those it'd
| be nicer :-(
|
| I do remember it updating & changing at some point, and
| that it still sucked before that. I got it after the blade
| menu, though. I think it had that at first, but lost it as
| soon as it updated after plugging it in, so I never really
| used it. NXE's what I probably used the first times I
| actually played anything on it.
|
| _Googles_
|
| Oh my god, yes, I do remember NXE. Hahahaha, wow, I'd
| forgotten that. How awful. I partially retract my
| complaints about the current menus.
| etempleton wrote:
| I really miss the original 360 "blade" dashboard. It was so fast
| and everything was predictable. So much so you could navigate
| without looking at the screen. It also had a great sound effect
| when you switched between blades.
| Lammy wrote:
| I scratch this itch with the JX 720 XBMC skin as the default
| dash for my OG XBOX:
| https://sites.google.com/site/xbmc4xboxskinmods/jx720
|
| Not sure where to find it now, but back in The Day there was a
| modified copy of the XBOX360 1888 dash (November 2005 launch
| ver) floating around as a standalone XEX that would run on a
| homebrew-enabled 360.
| sedatk wrote:
| The blades also resembled the shape of a 360 case. Beautiful
| design, but I believe it wasn't scalable enough for the new
| content, therefore got replaced.
| z3c0 wrote:
| > the new content
|
| Ah, yes, the advertisements, masked with the veneer of
| pointless avatars and a nearly-useless Facebook app. My first
| time having ads funneled natively through a device I had
| purchased.
|
| Now advertisements in the dashboard are the status quo for
| Xbox and Sony, so I guess they were ahead of the curve there.
| sylens wrote:
| Yes, before it got replaced entirely they added a fifth blade
| for "Marketplace" - hard to believe now but that was a major
| development in 2006 or 2007 when it happened. But when they
| opened up the floodgates for video streaming services and
| such, they just couldn't keep adding blades
| topbanana wrote:
| For sure. The new UI is way too complicated
| Jerrrry wrote:
| Great to see Eaton is still into Xbox, despite the craziness.
|
| I need to see if my lifetime license to FATxplorer is still
| valid.
|
| I sincerely hope the rest of the 'inner circle' is doing better
| and onto greener pastures, even if it means never touching an
| xbox or EA title again :P
| EatonZ wrote:
| Craziness is one way to define it (:
|
| And it is still valid!
| Kukumber wrote:
| What i find fascinating is it got released as is: slow
|
| Then you have Sony who managed to make a whole media center + web
| browser into a tiny portable resource constrained device, aka the
| PSP
|
| Maybe that's why Microsoft could never make a PSP or a Nintendo
| handheld type console, lack of people who REALLY care about
| things
| Kipters wrote:
| The PSP screen was 480x272 pixel, the Xbox 360 was a 720p/1080p
| machine, assets alone would have been significantly bigger than
| the PSP's, which is more burden on the NAND and on the CPU for
| decompression
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| You probably didn't have speedier options in 2005 that wouldn't
| make the system much more expensive. Also with the console
| being a loss leader and profit expected to come from game
| licensing, it was judged to be worthwhile at the time.
|
| > Maybe that's why Microsoft could never make a PSP or a
| Nintendo handheld type console
|
| I'm fuzzy on the history but I do believe online play was
| embraced by Microsoft far before Sony or the others. Am I
| right? Anyway, that required home Internet. Sony/Nintendo had
| their popular portable systems - designed for offline play. In
| 2005 that type of Internet-reliant online gaming wasn't going
| to work too well on a portable device with 2005-era wifi and 2G
| expensive cellular plans in the fashion that Sony or Nintendo
| would envision.
|
| Also in 2005 Microsoft's mobile plans were all-in on Windows
| CE. Because their strategy at time was Windows
| everywhere...why? fundamentally Microsoft was at that time
| primarily software licensing company that would rather sit and
| collect license royalties and let other companies develop the
| low-margin hardware side. Could you imagine a clunky Xbox
| Portable Zune CE, being really some rebranded Toshiba or Sharp
| device that was something else in Japan?
| Kukumber wrote:
| > You probably didn't have speedier options in 2005 that
| wouldn't make the system much more expensive
|
| PSP was released in 2005, it was sold for just $250, 9 months
| before the XBOX 360
|
| iPod nano, sleek and fast UI, released in 2005 too
|
| Why is that a thing to always find excuses for Microsoft?
| acknowledge the issues, and work on them, it's getting tiring
| cnasc wrote:
| > I'm fuzzy on the history but I do believe online play was
| embraced by Microsoft far before Sony or the others.
|
| XBox had online play by default, Sony and Nintendo required
| you to buy a peripheral. As a footnote, I think the Dreamcast
| (1998) was probably the first console that came with a modem
| by default, and an optional broadband adapter.
|
| > Sony/Nintendo had their popular portable systems - designed
| for offline play.
|
| PSP had wifi built-in.
| mariusmg wrote:
| Am I the only one which expected that loading from NAND would
| have been faster than HDD ?
| TonyTrapp wrote:
| A 7200 RPM drive can easily outperform old flash memory. It
| wasn't always the case that flash was the fastest storage
| medium. Flash performance used to be measured in KB/s, not GB/s
| like on modern NVMe drives.
| wtallis wrote:
| One NAND chip is slow. NAND-based SSDs can only deliver high
| throughput by using many NAND chips in parallel. Additionally,
| the console's 16MB NAND chip is a far cry from today's 64GB
| chips used in mainstream SSDs.
| RyanShook wrote:
| It seems like the slight speed advantage was in uncompressing
| the files beforehand on the HDD essentially skipping a step
| that had to be performed on every boot from NAND.
| masklinn wrote:
| Seems unlikely, file decompression tends to be quite fast
| (faster than even relatively fast IO if they're using lz4,
| but even more expensive compression methods would be faster
| than an HDD, to say nothing about apparently slow NAND)
| asdff wrote:
| I was honestly expecting an article about how the blades ui was
| the fastest and best xbox 360 ui because it wasn't loading
| advertisements.
| kivlad wrote:
| This remains a hotly contested topic. Not the overall
| interface, because that seems to be well-liked. Rather, "Was
| the blades UI fast?" Some say yes. Others complain about the
| guide taking longer than 10 seconds to appear while in-game. It
| could be that there's a lot of conflicting opinion between
| those who view it through nostalgia and those who remember
| their experiences when it was the de facto UI. Sure NXE had
| areas where execution speed certainly wasn't fast, but in terms
| of perception I'd argue there could be something said about the
| UI elements being more spaced out and feeling "further away"
| with the paradigm they went with.
|
| Oh, and the blades definitely had ads. Maybe not as many as
| future interfaces, but I'm not sure why people say it didn't.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Show them to me. I don't recall any.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxtMii5UKVQ
|
| Notably, it doesn't launch you onto a screen with ads at
| boot. Marketplace is tucked to the furthest left so you'll
| only go there if you want to.
| PreInternet01 wrote:
| As indicated in the article, moving dashboard data files from
| compressed-and-slow NAND to a slightly-less-slow regular HDD
| would definitely be a performance win, but I think the author
| underestimates the extent of the improvement.
|
| The dashboard is commonly accessed right after the system has
| booted, at a time at which lots of startup processes are still
| competing for files stored on the NAND OS partition. This
| dramatically increases latency, and thus load times. Fetching
| dashboard resources from an idle HDD partition could definitely
| improve responsiveness by more than just a few milliseconds.
|
| I'm not too sure about the exact tooling available for the Xbox,
| but regular Windows has lots of tracing and analysis options
| available to improve boot times: see, for example,
| https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/test/wpt/...
|
| I would not be surprised _at all_ if the Xbox team made this
| change in response to detailed responsiveness metrics, and that
| they saw a definite improvement afterwards, which is why they
| shipped the 'attempt'...
| EatonZ wrote:
| The dash is one of the last things loaded on the nand. At that
| point all the critical stuff has been loaded. They also had to
| compress the dash for storage on the nand, or else the file
| system would have went beyond capacity.
| bentcorner wrote:
| > _I 'm not too sure about the exact tooling available for the
| Xbox, but regular Windows has lots of tracing and analysis
| options available to improve boot times_
|
| At least with current gen xbox ships with windows onecore:
| https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/05/oneco...
|
| Presumably one of the goals to unify xbox on windows was to get
| all the windows tooling.
| [deleted]
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-01-10 23:00 UTC)