Archive for the ‘Hardware’ Category
September 1st, 2010 | 
Author: From eurogamer.net:
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Microsoft has told Eurogamer Spain that Kinect voice recognition will be disabled for mainland Europe until spring 2011.
The company confirmed rumours that the voice-recognition software will only accept American English, British English, Japanese and Mexican Spanish at launch this November. Even Canadians will have to wait until spring 2011 to be able to control the system via voice.
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Full Story: eurogamer.net
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The new controller with a ‘transforming’ D-Pad has now been confirmed by Microsoft:
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We’ve just made the Xbox 360 Wireless controller even better with a brand new version that includes a transforming D-pad. The engineers have come up with an ingenious solution with a d-pad that can go from a plus to a disc with the twist of the wrist.
In addition to the new d-pad, the matte silver controller also features concave analog sticks and gray A,B,X,Y buttons for added style.
The controller will only be available with the new Play & Charge Kit that will launch on November 9th for US $64.99.
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More Pictures: flickr.com
News-Source: majornelson.com
From joystiq.com:
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We’ve got it on good authority that sometime this Holiday season, Microsoft will launch a new Xbox 360 controller with a rather unique d-pad. According to our trusted source, when one rotates the d-pad ninety degrees on this new controller, it’ll raise up about a quarter of an inch — a modification apparently revealed to be targeted at fighting game fans.
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Full Story: joystiq.com
We received pictures from an “X-Scene friend” of the 4GB internal memory in the new Xbox 360 ‘S’ 4GB model. Unlike the old ‘Arcade’ units the memory is no longer located directly on the motherboard, but instead Microsoft uses a small addon-on PCB with a 4GB flash memory unit [3.2GB usable]. This probably makes production easier as all motherboards are now exactly the same … for the 4GB model they add the internal memory pcb-addon, for the 250GB unit they add the internal HDD.
I also added a picture of the Xbox360 ‘S’ 250GB and Xbox360 ‘S’ 4GB next to each other so you can see the glossy vs matte finish of both units. This hasn’t been covered much, but the 4GB model has a matte finish (vs glossy) and black borders (vs silver for the 250GB model). Which look do you prefer?
As always, hit the pictures of high-res 
From joystiq.com:
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That email purportedly sent out by Microsoft a couple weeks back inviting its recipients into a Kinect beta program? Yeah — it was legit. Joystiq has received corroborating evidence confirming the program, including pictures of the promised Kinect-enabled Dashboard update running on a participant’s retail console. In them, you can clearly see the flatter presentation, new mini-guide and revamped Avatar editor — complete with a re-proportioned Avatar.
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Full Story (with lots of pics): joystiq.com
Here’s a video posted on Youtube by SiddGoneWild that shows the old HDDs from the Original Xbox 360 will work just fine on the new Xbox 360 S. You’ll have to strip the HDD from the original HDD-case and slid it into the 360 S HDD-port. Not ideal, as the Xbox 360 S proprietary port is much larger than the 2.5″ SATA HDD, but it will fit in (SATA data/power ports match the standard) without needing any 3rd party hardware addons or so. I’d just suggest to add some rubber tabs on the sides or so to prevent the HDD from moving too much.
I assume laptop/PC HDDs modded with HDDHackr(info) will work just fine in the Xbox 360 S as well (and save you a small fortune). If anyone tried this already, let us know in the forum thread below 
From seattletimes.nwsource.com:
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In April, Microsoft sued the U.K.-based game technology company, which makes controllers that work with Microsoft’s Xbox video game system. Datel makes game system accessories that sell in Walmart, Best Buy and Target stores, and Microsoft said Datel’s “TurboFire” and “Wildfire” controllers infringed on several of Microsoft’s patents for controller design.
Microsoft filed a motion to dismiss with prejudice on Wednesday in the U.S. District Court in Western Washington, according to court documents.
Datel has a comment now.
“It’s a confidential settlement that resulted in the dismissal of the ITC [International Trade Commission] case and the case in the U.K.,” said Marty Glick, attorney for the firm Howard Rice. “The antitrust case which was the first we filed of all of these is still very much full steam ahead.”
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Full Story: seattletimes.nwsource.com
From venturebeat.com:
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The company’s engineers created a chip that combined the machine’s microprocessor and its graphics chip on a single piece of silicon. In the past, different versions of the console have all used two separate chips for those tasks.
The code name for the project was Vejle, named after a city in Denmark. (It’s not Valhalla, as some thought).
The new chip takes the exact same 3.2-gigahertz, three-core microprocessor and 500-megahertz graphics chip design and puts them on the same chip. In order to create this, Microsoft and IBM engineers had to work together to build the necessary connectivity within the chip to route electrical signals in and out of the chip. You can’t just glue the two designs together. Rather, IBM had to get rid of its main communications channel between the chips, dubbed the front-side bus, and build a substitute for it.
The main chip is packaged with a separate 10-megabyte embedded memory chip. So the two chips are packaged in a single module. The combined chip uses 60 percent less power than the original 2005 pair of chips, and it uses 50 percent less space. Robert Drehmel, senior technical engineer at IBM, said that one of the big challenges was to marry two chips that were built by different companies, designed by different engineering teams, and created with different chip design tools. IBM had to learn more about the unfamiliar ATI design, design specific tools to adapt it, and then recreate an overall design that did the same thing as the prior designs.
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Full Story: venturebeat.com
From nexus404.com:
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The new 250GB hard drive for the new “Slim” Xbox 360 S units begun appearing this week in some online retailers. As the tech blog circuit started getting excited over “OMG leak”, Microsoft spoiled their fun by confirming it via Larry ‘Major Nelson’ Hyrb video. The new 250GB hard drive is the biggest Microsoft has offered yet, and will set back Xbox gamers $130.
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Full Story: nexus404.com
From joystiq.com:
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We tried out the [Kinect] menu system and movie controls to test its recognition of seated users:
* Sitting in a chair: Definitely works.
* Sitting on the floor: Works.
* Reclining while facing the Kinect: Works.
* Reclining with the Kinect at our side: We couldn’t get this to work, but we’ve been told that it will by launch.
* Using another human as a coffee table (should have taken photos!): Kinect recognized the person behind the human coffee table trying to control the movie.
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Full Story: joystiq.com