Will Xbox 360 games run nativly on Mac OS X w/ a G5?

May 21, 2005 3:34 PM

Will Xbox 360 games run on Mac OS X w/ a G5? (via Slashdot) Looks like Xbox 360 games run natively on the G5. Macs, for a long time, have not been considered a platform that companies have been anxious to develop their games for. Looks like this is gonna change.
posted by Livewire Confusion (46 comments total)

This just in -- incomplete hardware uses existing hardware to showcase games under development!

The answer to the sort of question is, of course, no.
posted by nthdegx at 3:43 PM on May 21, 2005

I have to agree with nthdegx, but I am amused that MS is using Apple's hardware.
posted by danb at 3:53 PM on May 21, 2005

No, never in a million years.
posted by SweetJesus at 3:55 PM on May 21, 2005

Also some doubters here.
posted by hackly_fracture at 3:58 PM on May 21, 2005

they said this about the XBox too.. it's P3-based with an nForce chipset. didn't it end up taking ages to get halo on pc?
posted by mrg at 4:08 PM on May 21, 2005

Umm... Wouldn't y'all rather have someone hack and port OS X to this little wonder first? Or would you rather play console games on your $2000 computer rather than the reverse?
posted by Space Coyote at 4:10 PM on May 21, 2005

I'd rather see OS X ported to a PS3. Holy crap would I love that. Burning Blue-Ray discs and taking advantage of that cray, crazy 2 TFlop Cell/NVidia power. All for (likely) under $500.
posted by the_savage_mind at 4:14 PM on May 21, 2005

this just in: mac enthusiasts lose their minds and start making wild assumptions based on a blurry photo... again.
posted by shmegegge at 4:19 PM on May 21, 2005

this just in: mac enthusiasts lose their minds and start making wild assumptions based on a blurry photo... again.

Heh heh. Touché.
posted by letitrain at 4:30 PM on May 21, 2005

i'm sure microsoft will go to great lengths to ensure these games won't run on macs... but it might still be hackable.
posted by Silky Slim at 4:47 PM on May 21, 2005

Because the G5 systems can only use a GeForce 6800 Ultra or an ATI Radeon X800 XT, developers had to significantly reduce the image quality of their demos - which explains their lack luster appearance. Anti-aliasing wasn't enabled on any of the demos, while the final Xbox 360 console will have 4X AA enabled on all titles

that pretty much says it all.
posted by bitdamaged at 4:53 PM on May 21, 2005

i'm sure microsoft will go to great lengths to ensure these games won't run on macs... but it might still be hackable.

Well first they'd have to run on OS X no?
posted by juiceCake at 4:54 PM on May 21, 2005

I'm not getting something. Certainly M$ would prefer to have the games that it develops run exclusively on the Xbox, for obvious reasons.

But why wouldn't third party developers like Square Enix or Sega want to publish their games on as many platforms as possible? Putting aside the question of exclusivity licensing, if games created for the xbox 360 can be easily ported to the Mac platform why wouldn't they be.

Further, I don't see how Microsoft could stop them (using tactics like refusing to license a company that does develop games for the Mac) without potentially hurting itself.
posted by oddman at 5:17 PM on May 21, 2005

Plus the xbox will have a triple-core SMT (6-way multiprocessing) at 3.2GHz, AND an integrated memory model (the memory controller is on the GPU, and the GPU can access the CPU's L2 memory cache directly). Basically the xbox2 is what a Mac would look like if Apple were serious about making killer hardware, instead of crippling their low end so as to not compete with their pro tower offerings.

Now, Apple could indeed be shipping 6-way machines next year, but for games compatibility to happen Microsoft would have to open up DirectX/XNA for the PowerMac platform. Little gain here and giving MacOS a help wrt WindowsXP/Longhorn is strategically counterproductive.

What does give me a woody however is Apple & Sony collaborating on a $1000 PPC box. OMFG. The PS3 is already 95% PC, just double the XDRAM to 512MB, pop in a proper SATA HD and we're talking Amiga 500. Schwinggg!
posted by Heywood Mogroot at 5:17 PM on May 21, 2005

if games created for the xbox 360 can be easily ported to the Mac platform why wouldn't they be.

Apple is too protective of their pro tower market. The mini is shipping with high-end graphics oomph from ca. 2002. The iMacs are similarly crippled. Apple really sucks here, for it to attract square it would have to ship power on the low end, something it hasn't done since forever.

Square wouldn't bother porting anything to the towers, these only sell 150k units a quarter. Not much of a market there.
posted by Heywood Mogroot at 5:19 PM on May 21, 2005

So, essentially, the Xbox 360 is vaporware... I mean, if a Radeon X800XT doesn't have anywhere near the horsepower of the upcoming console (as MS is saying), that means that the technology behind it really doesn't exist yet.

Anyway, it's been known for months that Xbox 360 game development was being done pretty much entirely on Macs, so this isn't really a shock.
posted by clevershark at 5:23 PM on May 21, 2005

Or would you rather play console games on your $2000 computer rather than the reverse?

The reverse... I should... want to... play computer on my $400 console?

I don't get geekery.

The mac enthusiasts are just so excited about the (sadly fictitious) possibility of having a $2,000 computer that isn't a total dog from the gaming perspective, Coyote.
posted by nanojath at 5:34 PM on May 21, 2005

So, essentially, the Xbox 360 is vaporware...

Uh, no. Vaporware implies it doesn't exist, and will never come out. The Nintendo 64 ran on big SGI machines when it debuted at E3. It's standard practice to do this.

I bet you 10 bucks we see the XBox 360 in November.
posted by SweetJesus at 5:51 PM on May 21, 2005

The similar processor won't help the porting prospects, since MS's biggest weapon in the game development world, DirectX, is very much still a Windows toolkit. The children who want to play games will have their consoles, what Apple can hope for is to take advantage of some of the hardware innovations finding their way back into graphics boards and processors that they can use.
posted by Space Coyote at 5:53 PM on May 21, 2005

Ignoring the fact that Microsoft'll never allow their libraries to be distributed with OSX games, do Mac users really want to get sucked into the annoying PC gamer upgrade cycle? I mean, it's a lot more expensive than just buying a console.
posted by cmonkey at 6:11 PM on May 21, 2005

The X-Box's CPU is a Pentium III - does that mean X-Box games will run natively on PCs?

I thought so.
posted by Veritron at 7:20 PM on May 21, 2005

And hell, the SNES used a 65C816 processor just like the Apple IIGS. Now, where's my copy of Super Mario World GS?
posted by Space Coyote at 8:17 PM on May 21, 2005

The better question is, after Sony's press conference last Monday, who in their right mind would buy an XBOX 360 with the much cooler PS3 coming out five months later?
posted by jonson at 8:35 PM on May 21, 2005

Dude, look how wide that box is. Those Macs could be used for anything. There's plenty more room in there for XBox 360 units, tv hardware, who knows? Maybe they're using the Macs to record what's up on the screen, and the XBoxes are plugged into the TVs via the video in/video out on the Powermac?
posted by monofonik at 8:37 PM on May 21, 2005

I didn't buy a Mac so I could sit around playing games all day. That's like buying the Mona Lisa so I can masturbate to it.
posted by fungible at 8:39 PM on May 21, 2005

The XBOX's dev kit runs on a Windows machine. The Super Nintendo's dev kit ran on a Apple IIgs. The XBOX 360's dev kit runs on a Apple G5. Yeah, with the right hardware and software, you could get the console's games to run on the computers the dev kits ran on, but the game companies have never let that happen. (As an aside, the PS2 and PSP's dev kit is a giant thing called TOOL that runs Linux.)

monofonik, while I can't find the URL again, I saw a site a couple days ago that had pictures of the inside of the box with the door open. The XBOX360 shell had nothing plugged into it at all.
posted by zsazsa at 9:05 PM on May 21, 2005

I have friends who work at EA. The X-Box development platform are Powermac G5's with a special video card. One of my friends said that the reason a lot of games haven't been ported to the mac has something to do with byte order between a risc processor and a cisc processor. With all 3 gaming consoles having essentially, a mulitple g5 processor, the chance of companies porting those games to the mac are a lot higher now.
posted by nakedelf at 9:08 PM on May 21, 2005

The X-Box's CPU is a Pentium III - does that mean X-Box games will run natively on PCs?

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Just because she also eats pizza doesn't mean she likes you.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 9:24 PM on May 21, 2005

The reverse... I should... want to... play computer on my $400 console?

I don't get geekery.

The point of running a real OS on a console machine is because it opens up the possibilities of having a nice, cheap, small and interesting desktop/media PC. This is why nerds spent so much time (and even money) hacking linux into the Xbox, and why they even bothered to figure out how to break the boot authorization hardware.

When the original Xbox was coming out, geeks were salivating and humping each other over the very idea of "'free' hardware for an all-in-one ubermedia PC", because cycle-for-cycle and feature-for-feature game consoles tend to be vastly cheaper than build-your-own PCs or stock offerings in the same time period as the initial offering.

This is because most consoles are loss leaders. System developers (from Atari and Nintendo on to Sony and Microsoft) fully expect(ed) to recoup the loss through licensing to game developers and other channels.

See also: Hardware like the iOpener, where geeks were buying them to basically make thin clients and network machines for cheap, where iOpener expected to make up their loss in data service subscriptions. There's more. I've also heard of people buying specific MP3 players just because the hard disk or memory card inside of it was more valuable at the retail level than the retail price of the device.
posted by loquacious at 9:51 PM on May 21, 2005

loquacious, you must be talking about the iPod mini's which, (when they came out) were $250 and had a 4 GB CompactFlash card worth significantly more.

Also, if this XBOX/G5 business turns out to be true it'll give me another good reason to upgrade to a G5.
posted by anarcation at 10:16 PM on May 21, 2005

Because the G5 systems can only use a GeForce 6800 Ultra or an ATI Radeon X800 XT

That's news to me and my multiple monitor setup. The editors over at Slashdot must not get paid for fact-checking.
posted by AlexReynolds at 10:21 PM on May 21, 2005

iPod mini's which, (when they came out) were $250 and had a 4 GB CompactFlash card

No, you're thinking of the Rio Carbon.

But loq is right about the reasons for hacking consoles. If the XBOX 360 is as much computer as they say, it would be a serious coup to get it to run as an OS. You could play real HD resolution videos with nary a hiccup, for example.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 10:51 PM on May 21, 2005

loquacious, you must be talking about the iPod mini's which, (when they came out) were $250 and had a 4 GB CompactFlash card worth significantly more.

I believe it was a 4GB microdrive - they were selling for $400 at the time.

And, as a computer engineer and software developer, no, the G5 will not easily run games made for the x360. PS3 games might have the easier time being ported, however macs are so small in terms of market. Even with the mac mini penetration, you dont have the horsepower at that level. If the mac minis (and the rest of the line) get upgraded dramatically next sprig and sell like hotcakes then maybe. And by dramatically upgraded, I mean G5 1.8GHz+ all around, ATI R520-derivative or nVidia G70-derivative.
posted by SirOmega at 10:55 PM on May 21, 2005

Well, now that our "I'm-nerdier-than-you" sticks are out...

Although the first link seems to be contradicting what we all remembered, the second one says there are some compatible cameras.

/derail
posted by anarcation at 11:14 PM on May 21, 2005

official specs of xbox 360:
Custom IBM PowerPC-based CPU
Three symmetrical cores running at 3.2 GHz...

An IBM power-PC chip... hmmm, for alpha kits that had been out to developers for almost a year before the final design for the 360 was finished, where can we get a 3.2 ghz Power PC? Any takers? Anyone?

As for whether XBOX games will run on Macs... HAH! Yeah, no, not going to happen. It's a custom OS in that Dev Kit, that's why the thing costs $10K per unit for developers... In closing... NO.
posted by dj_fraudulent at 12:46 AM on May 22, 2005

Far more likely than X-Box 360 games running on Macs is the implications this could have for a future Windows to run on PPC chips.

Considering that IBM is going to be powering all three next-gen game systems, that it is responsible for fabricating the 64-bit AMD chips (at least to a large part), I believe Intel has got to be seriously quaking in its boots when it looks five years down the road.

I don't think there's any chance of seeing any OS X running on an X-Box 360. I think there's a decent shot at seeing Longhorn for PPC.

I also really, really, REALLY hope to see Apple OS running on a cell-based system. There have been serious rumors swelling to the effect that Apple has been working with Sony in relation to the PS3. Now maybe that's just in regards to h.264 high def video integration. But I could also see iTunes store action going on... at the very least the decoding and playing of Fair Tunes tracks streamed over the network, if not outright running of iTunes. More than that, I think it would make great sense if Apple was to have some level of input on designing the gui interface for the system as a whole, at least the media-related parts.

I don't think it's stretching too much to think (hope?) that the PS3 will play nicer with my OS X media (including iLife suite files) than any non-Apple systems to date. I look forward to streaming my future wi-fi enabled iPod to the always-on, wifi/bluetooth2/gigabit ethernet enabled PS3 (and btw, Sony has made noise that not only will the PSP operate via wifi as a controller/remote, but that you will be able to access effortlessly your PS3 media-server from anywhere with wifi access to to switch out content on your handheld).

Considering the emphasis put on the Cell as a naturally grid-computing-friendly processor solution, and considering that it's also designed with the purpose of scaling down to handhelds eventually, a future PSP that used a smaller Cell system for power could have incredible synergy with the PS3.

I'm not trying to knock the new X-Box here, but in regards to the PS3 I have to say I haven't been honestly excited by the prospect of a game system like this since I was a kid. A lot of this is speculation, but it also seems quite doable and in sync with a lot of the noise Sony (and Apple, where that's relevant) has been making the last couple years.
posted by the_savage_mind at 3:18 AM on May 22, 2005

With all 3 gaming consoles having essentially, a mulitple g5 processor

"PowerPC" != G5, necessarily. While the XBOX360's CPU(s) run at 3.2Ghz, they're *not* the same processor as the G5 (otherwise you would have already seen 3+Ghz PowerMacs).
posted by mrbill at 3:24 AM on May 22, 2005

They are based on the G5, mrbill. Also, keep in mind the 360 won't be shipping until the end of the year. By the same token, I assume IBM has functioning 'normal' G5s at that speed already fabricated. They're just not ready to roll out yet. A fairer comparison will be to see what speed the G5 chips for PowerMacs are like at the time of the 360's release.
posted by the_savage_mind at 3:50 AM on May 22, 2005

I don't understand how an ATI 800XT is a handicap on these machines. really.
I also congratulate M$ on keeping an emulator for the XBOX from sweeping the PC world, since those components are pretty industry-standard. I expected them to appear a few months after the XBOX came out, leaked by someone on the team.
I've steered clear of all the newfangled consoles (SNES all the way, baby), since the PC has enough games for me to waste my life away on.
posted by Busithoth at 6:20 AM on May 22, 2005

SweetJesus writes "I bet you 10 bucks we see the XBox 360 in November."

That's as may be, but I seriously question MS's ability to deliver on the very enthusiastic specs they've announced before 2006. From what you can see in the photo, that's not A G5 you see running things, that's TWO G5's, each of which was potentially a dual-processor machine.
posted by clevershark at 11:09 AM on May 22, 2005

"Far more likely than X-Box 360 games running on Macs is the implications this could have for a future Windows to run on PPC chips."

Not only did the development PowerMacs run a version of Windows NT, there had been PPC versions of Windows NT that were only discontinued in 1997, which were used in IBM PPC servers. It's not unreasonable that Microsoft continued to update the code to work on PPC hardware, just like Apple's Darwin runs on x86 hardware.
posted by karlshea at 11:27 AM on May 22, 2005

karishea, definitely. There's no way those demos could run on the PowerMacs without ported code. I should have been more specific and said 'consumer versions of Windows'. That would be interesting, if only to see what it would do the x86-derived chip companies.
posted by the_savage_mind at 11:32 AM on May 22, 2005

I'm not quite sure if it would benefit Microsoft to have a PPC consumer version of Windows. I think they'd end up in the same situation as Apple did when they switched from the 68K to the PPC, and end up with "fat binaries" that would run on both systems. I also don't know how much developer support they would have, in the sense of compiling and testing on two completely different processors, with vastly different feature sets.
posted by karlshea at 11:37 AM on May 22, 2005

Clearly the games were demoed running on the dev system. The dev system for 3DO was a Mac with a special card, but 3DO games did not run on a vanilla Mac. The same applies here, perhaps doubly so as it's possible that the Macs involved in the demo were not even running the Mac OS (MS may have revived the long-forgotten PowerPC version of Windows NT for this purpose).
posted by w0mbat at 12:47 PM on May 22, 2005

I wasn't thinking about a run-everywhere version, but a fully customized version. I suppose keeping versions for two separate architectures could be troublesome, but I'm not sure how much more so it would be than creating versions for handhelds and the new X-Box. I suppose the latter don't have the complication of massive hardware support, however.

Excellent point about software support. I wonder if that's not something that could be accounted for in the context of their acquisition of Virtual PC. On the other hand, I suppose that would never be a very efficient solution. As well, I have heard that VPC is most likely to be implemented in their server virtualization push.

Oh well, I'd much rather dream of Apple CellMacs, or PowerCells or whatever you'd call them;) Granted, I've read some reasoned discussions about why that is unlikely (or at the very least difficult), but I really wonder if Apple, an integral player in the development of the Power chips and a partner now with both Sony and Toshiba in terms of pushing HDTV, would just let that go.

Unless their only plan for the Cell is to power consumer electronics equipment like iPods, VideoPods, etc. Still, a Cell-powered home media center with a Mini form factor and a focused version of OS X seems far too natural to be just a pipe dream, and the difference between that 'consumer electronic' device and a full Apple computer seems negligible. Much as with the case of the PS3 itself.
posted by the_savage_mind at 1:21 PM on May 22, 2005

It's been made clear in multiple places that the Xbox 360 games that were shown both on the MTV special, and at E3, were running on Alpha dev kits.

Let's say that again - ALPHA versions of the Xbox 360 development kit. Said to only have about 30% of the power of the final console. They don't have finished hardware to use at this point, and even the development kits have a ways to go.

And that's only 30% of the capabilities of the final console, so however things are running now, they'll have over 3 times as much power available at release.
posted by evilangela at 11:04 AM on May 23, 2005