The New New New Xbox Experience Halo4 Dash

[Spatial]

I think we should all just agree that both companies love to bend the consumer over and give them a good seeing to and then we can all get back to moaning about EDGE scores / frame rates / how much better things were in the 80's etc.

[Matt]

Nah. They're both only after our money, which is why I get confused when fanboys pledge undying loyalty to a corporation. You can argue semantics of which is the worst company of course.

I'm still a little bitter having been through six 360s though. Oh, and I didn't appreciate the recent patent award for the Page Up / Page Down keys either, but best I don't get started on patents!

[Leon Retro]

and then we can all get back to moaning about EDGE scores / frame rates / how much better things were in the 80's etc.

Now... that's the basis for a great chat show.

[sj33]

Slighty OT, but this HDD install stuff has made me look at price prices of 360 HDD's. My local indie had a 120GB drive for £69.99. It's marked 'Preowned', but behind the counter he's playing an Elite 360 (on a 14" CRT!), with a grey HDD xD. Clearly he just switched the drives and put the one that came with it for sale. So it's basically brand new. I phone him up and ask how much I'd get part-ex for my 20GB HDD, he said £20 - more than I expected. I took up about 4 PAL PS2 games too and got the drive for a lovely £22!

so, £120 RRP drive for £22, I am smiling Black HDD looks rather silly on my machine though. I'm slightly more interested in this HDD stuff now, and might stop em from getting further DRE's.

[Alex_976]

They were on offer in Comet recently also. Check the bargins forum.

[spinpug666]

Abit of a trivial question about the new big update, but will they be adding any new features to playback of music stored on the HDD?

The reason I ask is that if you choose 'Play All' then 'Random' it plays the music/songs in alphabetical order. It's a right pain, especially if you have over 1000 tracks on the HDD. You always end up listening to tracks named A etc, and always in the same order. There's nothing RANDOM about it!

[MattyD]

I'd like a proper option to fast-forward and rewind as well. How hard can that be FFS? I sometimes listen to podcasts off a thumbdrive when I'm playing offline and it's a right pain in the ass if I have to stop for some reason and come back to it later.

[Paulos G]

Sessler's Soapbox: Lies, Damn Lies, and Internet Rumors

[Matt]

I was thinking today how the HDD installs will work - I don't mean transferring the game to the HDD, I mean the technical side of it, changing the calls to the DVD to the HDD. Something that hasn't been talked about, but must be at least a little issue, is HDD thrashing.

Firstly, does anyone know if the Dash does any kind of defragging? Because unless MS have got a better data system on the 360 than in Windows (which I doubt, I'd guess the 360 is a variation of FAT32 but I don't know for sure), you will have a lot of fragmentation once you've added and removed a few retail games and arcade titles.

Secondly, a lot of 360 games use the HDD as cache. That may cause some thrashing for game like GTA4, which usually streams from the DVD. It'll now be streaming from one section of the HDD, while continuously jumping to the cache segment.

So while it will definitely improve load times, I'm wondering if we won't see a few unforeseen issues.

[anephric]

The 360's HDD housekeeping is already crap, if you've ever looked at the directory structure with XSata (basically, stuff doesn't get deleted properly), so yes, unless the dash update has some better housekeeping built-in - and I don't know why I expect this from the people who gave use Disk Rape II: the Superfetch Crackdown (Vista) - it's going to get a bit messy. I'd still rather the HDD do more work than the prone-to-death DVDROM, though, because at least the HDD is user-replaceable. And as I'm really only planning to use the HDD install for a couple of games at most (Mass Effect and such) I'm not really too concerned by it.

[Matt]

Thanks for letting us know it's already bad in there. As you say, it will be an improvement over the DVD - for me, cutting down the DVD noise is the biggest benefit.

[ne0star]

Yeah, to be honest I would be happy if it was the same old dash and this was the only improvement.

With Braid and Castle Crashers over the last month I have been spoiled with an almost silent 360!

[MonkeyWrench]

The 360's HDD housekeeping is already crap, if you've ever looked at the directory structure with XSata (basically, stuff doesn't get deleted properly)

Stuff doesn't need to be deleted. Do you think when you delete a file in Windows it really removes all the zeros and ones? No, it just leaves the file where it is and updates the index to let it know those clusters can be overwritten.

[toythatkills]

I had about 50 arcade games on my 360, the list was taking AGES to load up every time I wanted to play something, so I deleted about half of them. It now takes even longer than it used to take in total, just for half the games. It's stupid.

I really hope they manage to get this list to load instantly, or in reverse. I'm sick of waiting for two minutes just to be able to select the game I downloaded most recently (which logic dictates is more likely to be chosen).

[Widegoat]

I had about 50 arcade games on my 360, the list was taking AGES to load up every time I wanted to play something, so I deleted about half of them. It now takes even longer than it used to take in total, just for half the games. It's stupid.

I really hope they manage to get this list to load instantly, or in reverse. I'm sick of waiting for two minutes just to be able to select the game I downloaded most recently (which logic dictates is more likely to be chosen).

I have this very problem and I too hope the dash update does something about it. It's crazy, I have to wait about five seconds for the list of seven game demo's on my drive to populate fully, scale that up to fifty or so Live Arcade games, and finding the game you want can be a serious wait.