QUOTE(phot0n @ Jan 5 2010, 05:09 PM)
So, the question that comes to mind is: when/if XBMC360 (or something similar) is ready, will it be better to buy a 360 or a small HTPC? 360 prices will continue to drop... HTPC will continue to get more perf-per-dollar plus all the functional goodies. And there is still a significant amount of work to hack a new 360 (w.r.t xbox1). What do you think?
What the 360 has going for it is form factor, good bundled controllers, dual-usage, low cost and the 'cool' factor if you can get it all working.
Against it is aging and alien hardware, high noise / power draw for what we want it to do (depending on revision) and limited numbers that can be used this way.
(my conjecture from here on, this might be completely wrong)
I'm not a developer nor involved in anything related to XBMC or the scene, but heres what I understand of the XBMC situation at the moment.
There are 3 potential ways to get XBMC on the box:
*Through XeLL and running under linux
*Application running under a hacked dash
*Using Xbox emulator inside hacked XB360 dash
Issues with linux:
XBMC is currently compiled for PPC but that is under OSX. No idea how much work is involved to get this working in linux as some apple specific libraries surely must've been used and that functionality has to be translated to work with GNU equivalents. Another issue is that XBMC running under an OS that can't effectively make use of all 360 hardware functionality (yet) would be quite a bit hamstrung. Performance would also be limited by available RAM (512 mightn't be enough) and the usefulness of libxenon. Since the main function is to play back 1080p video or other things too tasking for xbox1 XBMC, performance would be a priority issue. No use doing it if the xbox 1 can do it better.
That said all the basics are implemented (sound, network, openGL?) so we might see this if driver support gets to a certain point...what point that is I have no idea. What is sorely lacking at the moment is resolution support outside of 640x480? (free60 down at time of post) and support for HDMI. There might be more issues I haven't addressed.
Issues with hacked dash:
XBMC needs to be ported across to the new XDK. Aside from the legal issues of obtaining it (team XBMC would be a pretty big target for MS if they officially release anything, source or otherwise) quite a few modules would need to be ported across or remade from scratch, I have no idea how difficult this may be but they've been reluctant to even try so far. Another massive barrier from what I gather is that network access is encrypted under the hacked dash, until thats broken theres no point in even trying. There might be more issues I haven't addressed.
Issues with emulator:
I'm pretty sure theres a few dozen good reasons why the emulator can't handle every single xbox game released, those reasons would probably translate to XBMC in one way or another.
tl;dr Small, powerful *and* affordable HTPC's would probably (or already are, depends on your budget) be out before XBMC360 sees the light of day, if ever. DFI released a P55 based motherboard in ITX form-factor with a PCI-E 16x slot back in November.
This post has been edited by foreirongold: Jan 5 2010, 11:34 AM
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Topic: 2010 - Year of 360 Homebrew - SNES360 v0.21 (Read 2181 times)