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Dandu

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jan 23, 2009
120
15
Hi,

I have a collector Power Mac G5 : a dev kit for the Xbox 360. It's a Power Mac G5 Dual 2 GHz with a network card, used as alpha kit for the Xbox 360.

xbox.jpg


And i have a question : i search the software, because my model come with a fresh Mac OS X install (and not the original hard disk). Anyone can help me ?
 
Wow, crazy item. I thought Xbox was based on PC x86 architecture? Is it Power PC?

The PS3 and Wii are also PPC derivative as far as I am aware.

Jobs made a remark when he was once on stage with Bill Gates that, due to the Xbox 360 development, that Microsoft was the single biggest customer of Power Mac G5's that year.
 
Wow, crazy item. I thought Xbox was based on PC x86 architecture? Is it Power PC?

The Xbox is x86 (a ~Pentium III 733 MHz), the Xbox 360 is PowerPC (a custom tri core PowerPC) and the Xbox One is x86 (8 cores AMD Jaguar).

The first dev' kit for the Xbox 360 is a Power Mac G5 (my model), and Microsoft use it at E3 2005 for the demo (hidden)
 
Jobs made a remark when he was once on stage with Bill Gates that, due to the Xbox 360 development, that Microsoft was the single biggest customer of Power Mac G5's that year.

hahaha :D
 
I'm not sure what you mean. Are you looking for software for the machine because it has a fresh install of OS X?
 
I have only Mac OS X, i search the SDK from the Xbox 360
 
Dandu, you would likely only be able to get that from Microsoft. I really doubt any of them have the SDK still on them, simply because they would have been used by major game developers to develop games - and they would have wiped the hard drives (or completely removed them and sold the systems without a hard drive) to avoid leaving their game code on them.
 
Not gonna happen.

The tower isn't the whole part of the setup. That's why it was called an "Alpha Xenon Kit". The G5 was acting as a drop-in replacement for the early Xbox 360 development targets. It booted into a customized operating system that would then wait for commands from an external computer running the development tools and remote debugger. Without the other half of the setup, the software on the G5 was quite literally useless. The system I saw running didn't even have the Xbox Dashboard installed- they were *that* early. It had a launcher menu that let you load executables directly, and that was it.

From what I've been told, getting the software for these machines (even if you have authorization from Microsoft) is becoming extremely difficult. I don't think they're giving it out anymore unless you already had access to it, which means you would have had to have been developing for the 360 as early as 2004. Likewise, even if you did get access to the SDK, and the Xenon OS that ran on the G5, you'd hardly be able to do anything with it- code written for that setup isn't going to run directly on the 360 and visa versa (not that there's a plethora of 360 SDK examples floating around to begin with).

So, unfortunately, you've basically got a bog standard G5 there with a few fancy Microsoft stickers on it. Unless you have some REALLY good friends located fairly high up in a major game development studio, you're never going to get the software for it. It's never been dumped and released publicly, anyone with the resources to do so has generally been more interested in working with the later 360 development units (the ones with the sidecar that has the low level debugging FPGA and extra RAM installed in it). These systems have pretty much been forsaken and forgotten about.

-SC
 
Not gonna happen.

The tower isn't the whole part of the setup. That's why it was called an "Alpha Xenon Kit". The G5 was acting as a drop-in replacement for the early Xbox 360 development targets. It booted into a customized operating system that would then wait for commands from an external computer running the development tools and remote debugger. Without the other half of the setup, the software on the G5 was quite literally useless. The system I saw running didn't even have the Xbox Dashboard installed- they were *that* early. It had a launcher menu that let you load executables directly, and that was it.

From what I've been told, getting the software for these machines (even if you have authorization from Microsoft) is becoming extremely difficult. I don't think they're giving it out anymore unless you already had access to it, which means you would have had to have been developing for the 360 as early as 2004. Likewise, even if you did get access to the SDK, and the Xenon OS that ran on the G5, you'd hardly be able to do anything with it- code written for that setup isn't going to run directly on the 360 and visa versa (not that there's a plethora of 360 SDK examples floating around to begin with).

So, unfortunately, you've basically got a bog standard G5 there with a few fancy Microsoft stickers on it. Unless you have some REALLY good friends located fairly high up in a major game development studio, you're never going to get the software for it. It's never been dumped and released publicly, anyone with the resources to do so has generally been more interested in working with the later 360 development units (the ones with the sidecar that has the low level debugging FPGA and extra RAM installed in it). These systems have pretty much been forsaken and forgotten about.

-SC


Could you elaborate on how this system is forsaken and forgotten about when there are plenty of people looking to repair their g5 units that were once used as kits? Also never going to get the software is a bold statement. considering I have a remote recovery. and to say what I am more generally interested in comes as a suprose to me because the later dev units are all over the place....xna kits with sidecars are easily obtainable if you look in the right places. so instead of shutting someone down, why not say something positive.
 
Could you elaborate on how this system is forsaken and forgotten about when there are plenty of people looking to repair their g5 units that were once used as kits? Also never going to get the software is a bold statement. considering I have a remote recovery. and to say what I am more generally interested in comes as a suprose to me because the later dev units are all over the place....xna kits with sidecars are easily obtainable if you look in the right places. so instead of shutting someone down, why not say something positive.

Just because there are plenty of people looking to repair their G5 dev kits doesn't mean Microsoft actually cares, because they don't. Hence... "These systems have pretty much been forsaken and forgotten about". If you're actually in a position to contact Microsoft for legitimate support, they'll offer you a replacement sidecar unit and just swap out the whole system rather than trying to repair or resurrect it. The only people trying to keep these boxes online are collectors.

I'm pretty sure you need the non-remote recovery disks to bring it all online though. As I recall, there was a lot of additional stuff required just to get the G5 to the point where it would attempt to load the XeDK shell, which is what the "remote recovery" is capable of upgrading/replacing (and not the underlying code that actually boots the shell).

-SC
 
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