Month: May 2013

Could the Xbox One emulate the 360?

Post author By Matt Wharton
Post date May 30, 2013

There will not be any backward compatibility for the Xbox 360 on the Xbox One. Unusual position for Microsoft as typically they are all about the compatibility with older versions of their products. However in this case it makes sense as the hardware is significantly different between the two systems.

But I do have a thought about this. Given that the Xbox One is running three operating systems could the hypervisor in the new console run an emulated version of the Xbox 360 operating system?

It would not be a simple task to accomplish this but I believe it is within the realm of possibility. Even back in 2011 people were talking about creating an Xbox 360 emulator on a PC, and there is apparently now a working Xbox 360 emulator available for both PC and Mac.

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Xbox One thoughts

Post author By Matt Wharton
Post date May 22, 2013

So Microsoft revealed their forthcoming replacement for the Xbox 360 last night and I sat down and watched it with my wife as we are both gamers and were excited about this event.

I’m still excited about the Xbox One even if the presentation didn’t go down particularly well with a lot of people. Hardcore gamers are annoyed that there was very little about games last night, but that wasn’t what last night was really about. E3 will be the big reveal for the games.

My favourite comment by Amy was when she talked about how cheap she thought the suits were. Can’t Microsoft employees afford better suits!

The Xbox One was being heavily promoted as the entertainment hub of the living room which is fine with me. We’re pretty much using our 360 as the entertainment hub already, we used to watch DVDs on it until we finally got a Bluray player about 6 months ago and still watch BBC iPlayer and 4OD on it. I have no complaints in that regard and I’m sure given that the Xbox One is designed with that in mind from the start it will be better at these kind of things.

I don’t give a fuck about the partnership with the NFL, they never even explained what the fuck that entailed anyway. Halo television show was a cool bit of news but not really relevant.

The most interesting thing for me last night was this line from Marc Whitten.

The soul of the new system is the Xbox One architecture. Three operating systems in one.

Three operating systems in one and the instant switching between gaming and other Xbox features made me think straightaway that they are using virtualisation. I’ve since seen that this has been confirmed.

So it will be running a hypervisor, and then two virtual operating systems a cut down version of Windows 8 and then the Xbox gaming OS. This is a very sensible thing to do in my opinion and the instant switching if it works exactly as it did in the demo will be great.

Amy wasn’t as fascinated as I was with the underlying technologies of the system but she did like the design of the controllers a lot and the responsiveness of Kinect to voice and hand gestures. In addition she was excited by the idea of full screen Skype on it using the Kinect’s 1080p camera.

Overall even despite not seeing much in the way of gaming this household will be purchasing One on release.

Computing Microsoft

Windows Server 2012 in production

Post author By Matt Wharton
Post date May 16, 2013

As part of setting up the new office for my company I needed to set up a server to act as a RODC in what would effectively be a branch office until the rest of the company moved in sometime later.

This gave me the perfect opportunity to use Windows Server 2012 in a production environment and as such gain some real world experience with the new OS in preparation for sitting the 70-417 exam to gain my MCSA: Windows Server 2012 certification.

I had previously downloaded a trial version of Server 2012 but after a failed attempt to install it as a VM on VmWare’s ESXi 4.1 I didn’t do much more with it lacking the resources and time. I have since found a method that would enable it, also for Windows 8 which could be useful for our developers who may need to be coding applications for Windows 8 and need test environments.

Installation on our new Dell R620 could have been easier, but this was not the fault of Windows at all. The server arrived sometime yesterday and without a disc so I’d assumed that the OS had come pre-installed. It had not, which caused a little panic. But once I actually received the Windows Server 2012 disc from our suppliers and then pre-configured the server for the OS (which was somewhat straightforward but didn’t work as it should in my opinion) it was very quick and straightforward to install Server 2012.

My experiences were pretty much as described here
http://workinghardinit.wordpress.com/2012/08/24/how-to-deploy-windows-server-2012-on-dell-uefi-nownotes-from-the-field/