While surfing the web waiting for my flight back from Orlando I noticed a blog in Game | Life over at wired stating new production motherboards of the xbox 360 have HDMI ports. Microsoft did not even announce this when they talked about the price drop *shakes fist bastards”. So what a nice bonus for all you soon to be x360 owners to have a feature that was only on the Elites till now. While they have no plans to do this with the core system the article speculates its to sell off the old model mobos. While some Sony fanboys claim its just a copy on PS systems its another step for nice looking gaming for us all. Standards have to be met right?

Virtual Heroes Inc. announced that they will now be utilizing the Unreal3 engine. VHI (a advanced learning technology company) makes simulation games for the real world. Working with Federal systems, Healthcare and commercial training markets to make applications and serious games for learning. They say the use of this engine will help them create the most real looking people to date. You guys mite remember VH’s previous works with the old unreal engine in “Americas Army” our own USArmy’s tact ops style FPS game. Its great to see how diverse gaming tech is getting and how it has been evolving into more platforms.

Dean Takahashi at The Mercury News states that Microsoft is making a smaller, cheaper chips for their popular xbox360. This should help with the heat issues they hope. Being able to redesign the mobo and other shell features to create air flow would be a nice step no?

“Codenamed “Falcon,” the chips are manufactured with a 65-nanometer process, as opposed to the current 90-nanometer process. A smaller and less expensive chip gives Microsoft some options as to how they want to rework the 360, whether it’s a simple price cut or a redesign of the entire unit.”

Don’t count on a cheaper system any time to soon, but with Sony’s price cut it would be wise on their end. Source

The hardware is bad? A Yahoo tech article states Xbox 360 users are in a uproar, and numbers getting higher since the release of the console. Not being a 360 owner, and not aware of all the issues people have been living with just to get a little Gears of War or Halo fix on, makes me wonder- is this something that the PC world is going to cast upon the console market? I sure hope not! It’s bad enough there are patches for games available over Xbox live but for the hardware to be that bad is just wrong. Consumers should not have to take it, let alone buy it. Is the hardware that cheap? Just the curse of PC parts getting to hot? Hell I blew out a Athlon 64 3000 and a GeForce6500 this summer, are those parts not from 2005?. But are there any good case mods to even prevent it for a 360? Thats the main problem when you look at the console market in todays standards.

Microsoft has called the seizures “general hardware failures,” while some users have referred to a “red ring of death,” for the three lights that illuminate on the console when a serious problem has occurred. Many have raised the possibility that something — either the power cord, or a component inside the box — is overheating and breaking in the units.

A thread on the GameSpot.com forums from 2005 recommended suspending power cords with string in midair to keep them cool. In June 2006, a post on the blog Xbox-scene.com pointed enthusiasts to a way to cool the console by piping tap water through hoses that snaked through the machine’s innards. Another Xbox-scene.com entry from June of this year purports to show photos of a Microsoft-repaired console with added hardware to trap heat.

They won’t even dish out the numbers of returns, its gotten that bad in the past few months! The article also states that all this could cost Microsoft around 1 billion or more big ones. Do you think the Elite version the console coming out in Japan soon will be more solid? Source