Xbox 2 is a Windows lovechild
Cross-breeding everywhere
By Wil Harris: Monday 27 September 2004, 11:31
MICROSOFT HAS now confirmed that its Xbox 2 peripherals will be compatible with the PC, and that PC gamers will, come Longhorn, be able to game on Xbox live against Xbox 2 owners.
Currently, the Xbox uses USB controllers with a non-standard jack. Third parties have been making Xbox-to-PC adaptors for a while now.
Eurogamer suggests that the Xbox 2 will be using a standardised joypad design which Dean Lester, top man at Microsoft's Windows Gaming division, has been promoting as a platform standard.
Xbox live gameplay will be enabled by the XNA cross-platform development technology that Microsoft has been busy beaverying away at. It is hoping that by making Xbox 2 and PC development very similar, it can leverage its PC dominance to gain share in the console market.
At the moment, the Xbox 2 is due to premiere some time in 2005 - a full year ahead of Longhorn, and before the Windows Graphics Foundation platform is in full swing on the PC side of things. Traditionally, consoles have lagged behind PC technology. Could the delays to Longhorn from Microsoft mean that the Xbox 2, coupled with XNA and WGF, becomes a technically more advanced platform than the PC for the next year? That would certainly be a coup for the console sector, as well as for ATI, whose graphics power the Xbox 2.
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