i couldnt believe my eyes when i read the story on www.xbox-scene.com. some guy claiming to run windows ce.net on his xbox. i rushed home, downloaded the file, installed it and…. oh my god it worked. i could start windows media player, run ms-word, view powerpoint, etc. sure its not perfect yet and there’s a long road ahead of things to solve. but this is the first time a windows os booted natively on my xbox, (well except the xbox-kernel of course). i hope the developer(s) who made this possible find the time and spirit to develop this further and maybe next year we’re all running windows xp embedded on our xboxes

frodo

is it possible? can we play ntsc movies on pal boxes (and vice versa) smoothly without any jerky hickups?, maybe, it’s too early to say, but with xbmc’s latest option called “adjust framerate” or “dynamic framerate conversions” things surely look promising. previously, watching ntsc encoded movies with 23.976 fps on a pal xbox resulted in jerky playback under xbmc but now with this new option enabled it plays perfectly smooth, and the same goes for playing pal encoded movies (25 fps) on an ntsc xbox. be sure to try it out and let us know how you experience this exciting new option!

see this forum thread here (link) for more info

friendtech, a cpu upgrade manufacturer has now started mass modify xbox consoles with a processor upgrade. however friendtech are not selling these “ft-x2″ (a.k.a. dreamx) xboxes themselves but instead offer them through online retailers, gamestron.com being the first shop to actually sell them (gamestron ft-xbx2 review). the cpu is upgraded to a intel celeron 1.4ghz (1400 mhz with 256kb l2 cache tualatin core) and it includes an external cpu speed switch which enables switching between 1.48ghz and 740mhz cpu speeds. this upgrade double the xbox original cpu speed of 733mhz. for an extra fee you can also get the memory upgraded from 64mb to 128mb and a new hdd up to 200gb in size. more information about the ft-xbx2/dreamx can be found on friendtech xbox homepage where you can view test data, faq, specifications and more.

again, if shops would like to have it reviewed by us please don’t hesitate to send me one

cnet has today posted the first in a three-day report about the multimedia capabilities of todays and future game consoles, including the use of xbmc/xbmp on the xbox. cnet is/was the popular technology news website that contacted us a couple of weeks ago about interviewing a xbmp end-user on camera and that video interview is part of this report, quote: “game industry leads race for digital ‘uberdevice’“. so head over to cnet news.com and check it out the first piece, “strategy: outside the box” and watch the video (with steven, a san francisco student), you also get the full three-day report right now in pdf format if you register with cnet (which is free) otherwise you have to wait two more days to read all three pieces.

cnet news.com article: playing for keeps (a three-day report)
cnet news.com video: xbmp turns xbox to a multimedia center