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One of the weaknesses of the Dreamcast to date has been its rather limited 16MB of RAM. Current rumors suggest that Microsoft intends to use upwards of 64MB for the unit. But again these are merely rumors and we'd urge you take them with a pinch of salt and a tequila slammer. Next-Gen has frequently reported that a 4Gig HD, DVD drive and VGA/TV-Out connectors will be the order of the day.
Our sources also indicated that peripheral devices will sport the USB interface in order to keep with the 'plug and playability' that other consoles have always had.
In terms of 'connecting' and 'online' facilities nothing less than a 56K modem has been mentioned in other press reports.
Our feelers are still out and about and should we trawl in any more information we'll let you know. Regardless, we will try our best to distinguish between reality and pulp fiction. We are left with one major worry. The beauty of a console lies within its simplicity, reliability and compatibility. In other words it works. How many times have any of you crashed a Dreamcast, N64 or PSX? How many times have you got that dreaded blue screen or a lock-up with your 3D card's frame buffer? Using an Intel/AMD x86 processor, with a 3D card, Direct X7/8 and with Windows 2000 (albeit in beta form) isn't exactly trouble free. Neither has it been in any Microsoft OS to date. Perhaps the OS for X-Box will be a throwback to Windows CE a la Dreamcast… Either way, Microsoft certainly has a few choices and a lot of 'proving' to do before they inspire enough confidence within consumers to be able to pull off a next generation console.
Charity starts at home at Microsoft (although Bill did donate a wad of money recently to charity- good egg) and we cannot confirm 100% that this project is even fully funded as yet. But certainly the interest is there within some of offices at Microsoft, the heads of many journalists and consumers alike. Figures such as '$6 billion investment for X-box' have been turning the rumor mill for at least a month.
Just because we like to throw in the odd buzzword now and again (and because this part of the Private Eye is a 'regular' feature, this month we want to clear up the issue of "What is a MegaTexel?". As some of you will know, there's been a lot of confusion over just what a MegaTexel really is. And the real answer, well it depends on which 3D card company you ask. This month we asked the folks at NVIDIA who had this to say,
"NV's definition of a texel is a filtered, textured pixel. A texel technically is a sample, from a texture map. To create a bilinearlly filtered, textured, pixel, the texture mapping hardware would actually have to grab 4 samples from the texture map. Those 4 samples are commonly called texels. However, the PC Graphics industry, starting with 3dfx, adopted the term texel to be a filtered, textured pixel, not the samples from a texture map."
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