ModernVintageGamer
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What was the Hard Drive in the Original Xbox actually used for?
🕑 Added 2024-06-24 11:46:00 +0000 UTCThe Original Xbox launched in 2001 and it brought a few innovations never seen before to the video game console industry. The first would be a built-in hard drive that was not an optional add-on, rather it was a core component of the Xbox hardware. But did the hard drive provide any benefit other than large storage capacity for save games and custom soundtracks? In today's episode we take a closer look at the Xbox hard drive feature and how developers took advantage of it in different ways. Was it really necessary in the end? Let me know your thoughts!
Comments
Angelo Andreussi
Hi MVG, nice work as always. You know what could be nice to go into detail about Halo 2 development? The usage of stencil shadows engine that was planned initially (and showed in the infamous e3 presentation of the game) but never actually used for performance reasons. The game suffered a lot from is because they had to change lighting-shadows solution in the end causing the game to look sometimes worse than Halo 1. This could be interesting to speak about, especially for the parallel experience of doom 3 on xbox that used effectively stencil shadows instead. Maybe another trick by John Carmak that could be investigated in this video.
