this may look like a boring workstation
from the.com era and it is but the eagle-eyed among you might have noticed
that it is also adorned in Xbox logos
that don't quite look like Xbox logos
that's because this Alpha One dev kit
was the first dev kit created after Microsoft unveiled the big metal X at
GDC back in the year 2000 unlike the big X this one uh
certainly didn't cost eighteen thousand dollars to build and require a solid
block of aluminum to be milled for each unit in fact as I'm about to show you it
is built entirely out of relatively low-cost commodity PC parts that anyone
can get and there's more this
is the alpha two the second Xbox dev kit
that's right we have two generations of these things both with working hardware
and the wildest thing about all of this is that unlike the other console Dev
kits that we've looked at these can be recreated by anyone using leaked
software that you can just download imagine being able to build your own
Xbox sort of it's possible most
you know what isn't possible to do by yourself though segue to our sponsor
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today and stay tuned to learn more the Alpha One dev kit isn't very well
documented so I am really excited to crack this thing open and especially to
compare it to Alpha 2 which is pretty much a known quantity at this point but
before we do that the origin story for the Xbox project is really interesting
and it kind of starts with this sticker on the front that says powered by
DirectX the way the story goes is that the original OS was basically Windows
2000 but stripped of everything but the
bare minimum for running DirectX so the name is actually short for DirectX box
now Bill Gates apparently hated the Prototype bastardized Windows that they
showed him so much that he screamed at the original team presenting the first
prototype for over two hours on the night of Valentine's Day like late
enough to where most of them had to cancel dinner with their wives but then
he gave them the go-ahead because he liked how fast it booted and feared that
the PlayStation 2 would take over the living room while also taking the place
of the home computer eventually right out of the gate there are some really
fun Hallmarks of early 2000s computer design I mean you'd hate for your Tower
to tip over right if we were to pry off this fascia here which seems to be just
a piece of sheet aluminum bent and then glued onto the front of a generic case
we could probably figure out the exact model but video gaming historians would
get super mad about that I'm pretty sure yeah I'm getting the nod and really
that's not the important part anyway we want to see the guts which yeah
it's a little what the heck come on your secrets
wow that is um generic
yep that right there is about as exciting as your grandpa's PC I mean at
the time it was pretty exciting the motherboard is an Intel vc820 code name
Vancouver by the way yay go Vancouver as for the CPU I really wanted to pull this
out and give you guys a closer look at it it's got a a Cooler Master cooler on
it young up-and-comer company right there but unfortunately these ancient
plastic push pins are proving to be a bit of a chore to get out and the last
thing I want to do is damage any of them so it might have to stay in there but
that's fine because the reality is it is a run-of-the-mill Intel Pentium 3 733
megahertz CPU but that's a really interesting story the processor was as
the legend goes supposed to be AMD who really did have the superior technology
at the time but sometime between the
aluminum monster and the unveiling of what would become the retail Xbox
Microsoft switched suppliers to Intel AMD though had no idea and they were
actually sitting in the front row at E3 2001 when they found out that they were
usurped by Intel sitting feet away from Dwayne The Rock Johnson
he was presenting the Xbox yeah yeah the Xbox got unveiled by Bill Gates and
Dwayne The Rock Johnson at E3 2001.
he's been that culturally relevant for that long moving on to the memory things
get quite a bit more interesting and thankfully this comes out Rambis is
probably best known today for its role in the industry as a patent troll but
back in the late 90s and early 2000s they alongside Intel were pushing Rd RAM
in this Rim form factor as the next big
thing in system memory it had a huge advantage in terms of bandwidth over the
sdram of the time this module right here remember this is from the year 2000 was
clocked at 400 megahertz and utilized both the rising and falling edge of the
signal to achieve effectively double that 800 megahertz wow unfortunately it
came at a much higher cost due to its larger dies and allegedly very high
licensing fees to Rambis making matters worse while the bandwidth was much
higher the latency was also higher meaning that in the real world
performance on Rambis based systems actually wasn't higher so when DDR SD
dram came along randice got the boot our Alpha One came with a total of 640
megabytes of this Rd RAM the 128 megabytes and a second 512 megabyte
stick and this is the first way in which it differs from our Alpha 2 which
actually only contains the 128 megabyte
module and this what in the heck is that
this is a filler cart because the way that rdram worked you can't just have an
empty slot on your motherboard you must populate both channels either with a
single dual Channel module or two single
Channel modules so you had to use one of these if you wanted to use just the one
but that's weird why would Alpha 2 need a filler stick and have only one-fifth
the amount of memory as Alpha One actually that's not that unusual Dev
kits particularly early ones tend to have more system memory than the final
system and the reason is that the games that they're running on them are not
exactly optimized at that point in the console's life cycle so our alpha 1 had
640 megabytes our Alpha 2 had 128
megabytes final dev kit had 128 megabytes but the system memory was
actually shared with the GPU which is different from Alpha 2 and finally the
retail console had 64 megabytes of shared memory that is less than a tenth
of our Alpha 1 which either means that the software got that much less bloated
over time wow or more realistically
means that when this dev kit was repurposed as a software development
workstation the IT department popped or open for an upgrade and threw in another
stick of memory and that's uh probably not the only thing they upgraded because
how else would our alpha 1 have a GPU
that is three generations newer than our
Alpha 2. see how our motherboard has onboard USB and onboard audio and they
added both a USB card which isn't that abnormal just so you could have more USB
ports words but also an add-on audio card that's because within the Xbox OS
the only functional ports on the motherboard were serial so these are
likely to be close analogs to the audio and USB controllers that ultimately made
their way into the final console but might not have been included on whatever
random Intel motherboard that Microsoft used for these systems then there's this
raid card okay so this bad boy is called a raptor and it was used for DVD
mastering that is kind of all we really
know about it at this point it connected to a 40 Gigabyte hard drive that could
hold all the DVD information and if you weren't mastering a game disc it was not
particularly useful and maybe even made it slightly worse when these were
deployed as workstations it apparently functioned just as a regular raid card
coming back to our alpha one for a second we are missing both the raid card
and that special sound card which could be a big problem for us you see the
stripped down version of Windows 2000 that these run only contain support for
the exact Hardware that it's expecting to run on so if we don't have exactly
the right Alpha One components this thing isn't going to boot and since
alpha 1 is relatively Uncharted Territory we're not even going to know
necessarily what parts have been ripped
out and put back in when this was Frankenstein's together as a workstation
I mean it's a functioning computer as it is it just wouldn't boot up into any of
the dev builds that we tried and we made it as far as December 2000 which should
have worked but didn't we could have started ripping Hardware out of Alpha 2
and putting it in here but we had no way of knowing if that was actually going to
work and really Alpha 2 is the more interesting one from a gaming standpoint
anyway can we fire it up now one other fun thing while we're getting set up for
that is you guys might have noticed that the floppy drives in these are facing
backwards as far as I can tell the only reason for that is that when they put on
that front fascia piece in order to have it look cool and Sleek they covered up
all the rest of the external five and a quarter inch bays and external three and
a half inch Bays that would have been on the stock case you still kind of needed
a floppy drive back then for you know installing your operating system or just
like loading software onto the computer so they would have had to throw these in
and I'm assuming anyone using them would have had to pop the panel and like throw
a diskette in there if they ever needed to use a floppy that's freaking
hilarious also can I just say that I love this PCI card retention mechanism
it's a little janky like this support braces at an angle for some reason but
man those cards are in there that is
awesome something to note is that even if you have all the correct hardware for
your generation of alpha that doesn't mean you can just load up Windows 2000
strip out the extra bits and start playing Xbox games the software that
these run is highly Microsoft proprietary and should never have
actually left Microsoft from legal standpoint it's thanks to software
preservationists that we were able to download it from archive.org and while
we were willing to take that risk we can't in any way guarantee that that
software hasn't been tampered with so you would do so at your own Peril if you
did find yourself wanting to build one of these though one of the hardest pieces of Hardware to get your hands on
is going to be the sound card because they've been out of production for kind
of a long time fortunately a net is in by the name of N64 freak has actually
created a blueprint that you can send to
an overseas PCB manufacturer to have one made for yourself an exact replica of it
for about 50 US dollars so if you're interested in playing around with it
that is an option though as you can see if you just want to play Xbox games
there's no advantage to one of these versus just getting your hands on an old
Xbox we're in the dashboard right now and the build you're looking at is from
about May of 2001 so this is around the
E3 time frame and about six months prior to the actual launch of the Xbox what we
need to check right now before we go any further is to make sure that our oh nope
nope to make sure that our audio recording is working
ooh parental control
yeah that evidently does nothing at this stage
uh okay is this all I can really do with this one or what yeah so if you want to
load a new xdk you actually have to restart the system oh and the way to do
that is power button oh wow up top
other side oh my gosh that feels awful one moment
please bump lens and I guess this is just showing off a light Distortion
rendering effect of some sort 1300 FPS
damn Daniel I I just have to shut the
whole thing down now yep okay well that
was worth it credit to the team it does boot really fast yeah like now think
about how fast Windows 2000 loads yeah this is back in the days of three and a
half minutes this is not a hard drive guys a slow slow mechanical hard drive
they really did optimize the crap out of
this thing okay dolphin classic now with
1100 FPS I think I've seen about enough
of that dolphin swimming around oh
wow turn it turn it back off and turn it
back on again yep
I didn't press the button but it's probably fine I mean other than the
resolution that's not bad so they're showing real-time Shadows working and
then what is this that is our IP address if we were to plug this into a network
it would actually show us what the IP address of the system is and with that
we can hook up a developer's workstation and use the xdk software in order to
load up games onto here so that's actually how Simpson's road rage got put
on there E3 demo 50 complete okay can I
even change which driver I am ah there we go well obviously groundskeeper
Willie even loading off a hard drive this is pretty awful I've never played
the original game though so maybe you guys can shed some insight into whether
this is normal or whether this is just because it's an early build that's a lot
of it's a lot of loading screen all right nice
what's this 12 seconds what's
get game mode I clearly do not understand this game
very well I haven't verified this I only heard about it this morning but
apparently you can plug in a keyboard no
way remember remember with the PS3 how we could plug in a keyboard and access a
console I guess we'll find out soon enough oh this is I don't think this
supports hot plugging Windows 2000 didn't even get support for USB 2 until
Service Pack 4 and we have to run service pack one so it's only got
support for USB one which definitely doesn't have some of the Creature
Comforts of modern USB I think we should try a PS2 keyboard just for lol's humor
me you never know when you're gonna need a PS2 keyboard Tanner that's why I
always keep one in a nearby drawer there we go
we got lights on this bad boy oh what is this that's the uh that's the BIOS they
had a customized bio splash screen yeah that's freaking awesome I didn't even
know you could do that back then I mean you can now every system integrator does
it but back then I don't think that was a thing this does not appear to be doing
anything there might be some hacky way to do this but maybe it's not a default
Behavior there was another build of this game that I could not find where they
didn't have all the voices finalized yet so instead of hearing Homer's voice you
would just hear a Microsoft Sam kind of
voice read off the file name oh that's awesome nice hey I'm getting better at
this let's go oh yeah I'm a road rage Pro now
look Brandon it's an Xbox but it's a
computer it's the DirectX box
uh yeah yeah yeah I'm gonna get ten thousand dollars I've never played this
game before it's fun but we have videos to shoot
come on move it
yes all right let's try another game and
to do that we're gonna show you how we can actually load games onto this thing
because you can't just like pop a game disc into the front oh wait can you do
that Tanner there were some game discs that were made that you could do that
with really um they were all green discs green discs
uh but we don't have any we don't have anything they're quite rare okay they're
usually Dev builds they were also sometimes completed builds that were
just sent off to members of the press though and they actually continued past
the lifespan of the Alpha One and Alpha 2. so those continued on throughout the
life cycle of the Xbox now that we've connected both of these machines to our
Network they can actually see each other and all we have to do is take one of
these games that we have on our local hard drive here like say for example
dark Summit and drag it over to the
shared folder on our Xbox no estimated time it takes as long as it takes which
is a lot more honest than what they give us now like I guess I'm having the early
2000s game developer experience
time to go get some coffee and this
you're cool I didn't actually notice this before but these are not just two
File Explorer Windows this is XB Explorer which presumably stands for
I'm kidding I'm kidding I'm kidding Xbox
the look on his face he was like I
worked for an idiot anyway Xbox Explorer and it allows us to do all kinds of cool
things so we can select our Target machine we can reboot the Xbox remotely
actually that's about it about all we can do but
we didn't try this before filming but our understanding is that the mob 2T
version of dark Summit was supposed to be the playable one clearly not loading
on our Alpha 2 so let's try the debug version and see if we have a bit more
luck with that I really kind of missed the loading bar now yeah
no wait no I'm kidding I'm kidding what
the crap that was so fast wait oh
because it doesn't have to do a full system reset it just resets the software
oh that's awesome version
010101.0 no game object data oh look at
that hairdo though whoa here we go oh oh
okay uh which pad am I supposed to
my controller is not working I don't think my controller is doing anything uh
oh man am I ever gonna get down oh boy
oh I don't think so I think I'm stuck hey there we go oh no
no this is early 2000's game design Brandon
experience is how basic and commodity and almost kind of bootstrap the origin
of the Xbox is they just took off the shelf honestly not even amazing
computers turned them into a development platform and just a couple of years
later the ball was rolling on what would become the Juggernaut that Xbox is today
just 20 short years later the tools were
janky they clearly had no experience no right to be there compared to the
powerhouses at the time Nintendo Sega Sony and yet
they did it just like I did this segue to our sponsor Forum thorum has been in
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if you guys enjoyed this video I'm going to kick you back to the PlayStation 3
dev kit that one is flipping Wild
heavy