How Microsoft attempted to make the Xbox 360 dashboard load faster | Hacker News Reader

How Microsoft attempted to make the Xbox 360 dashboard load faster

eaton-works.com

147 pointswhalesalad53 comments

As indicated in the article, moving dashboard data files from compressed-and-slow NAND to a slightly-less-slow regular HDD would definitely be a performance win, but I think the author underestimates the extent of the improvement.

The dashboard is commonly accessed right after the system has booted, at a time at which lots of startup processes are still competing for files stored on the NAND OS partition. This dramatically increases latency, and thus load times. Fetching dashboard resources from an idle HDD partition could definitely improve responsiveness by more than just a few milliseconds.

I'm not too sure about the exact tooling available for the Xbox, but regular Windows has lots of tracing and analysis options available to improve boot times: see, for example, https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/test/wpt/...

I would not be surprised at all if the Xbox team made this change in response to detailed responsiveness metrics, and that they saw a definite improvement afterwards, which is why they shipped the 'attempt'...

> I'm not too sure about the exact tooling available for the Xbox, but regular Windows has lots of tracing and analysis options available to improve boot times

At least with current gen xbox ships with windows onecore: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/05/oneco...

Presumably one of the goals to unify xbox on windows was to get all the windows tooling.

The dash is one of the last things loaded on the nand. At that point all the critical stuff has been loaded. They also had to compress the dash for storage on the nand, or else the file system would have went beyond capacity.

What generation of Xbox did you test that on? A later one? Maybe the original flash chip was somewhat slower...

I really miss the original 360 “blade” dashboard. It was so fast and everything was predictable. So much so you could navigate without looking at the screen. It also had a great sound effect when you switched between blades.

The blades also resembled the shape of a 360 case. Beautiful design, but I believe it wasn't scalable enough for the new content, therefore got replaced.

Yes, before it got replaced entirely they added a fifth blade for "Marketplace" - hard to believe now but that was a major development in 2006 or 2007 when it happened. But when they opened up the floodgates for video streaming services and such, they just couldn't keep adding blades

> the new content

Ah, yes, the advertisements, masked with the veneer of pointless avatars and a nearly-useless Facebook app. My first time having ads funneled natively through a device I had purchased.

Now advertisements in the dashboard are the status quo for Xbox and Sony, so I guess they were ahead of the curve there.

For sure. The new UI is way too complicated

I scratch this itch with the JX 720 XBMC skin as the default dash for my OG XBOX: https://sites.google.com/site/xbmc4xboxskinmods/jx720

Not sure where to find it now, but back in The Day there was a modified copy of the XBOX360 1888 dash (November 2005 launch ver) floating around as a standalone XEX that would run on a homebrew-enabled 360.

Totally agree, by far the best dashboard of any console I have ever used.

Another great feature was just how blazingly fast it was to hope into and out of that dashboard while playing a game.

Both the PS4 and Xbox One were such a disappointment to me. Even after years of use, figuring out where menu items were and long delays switching between menus. Combined with PC gaming getting both cheaper and gaining great controller support made it so I will never buy a console again. Buying games for a system with a limited lifespan to then be frustrated by the experience is a just not worth it. Meanwhile Steam games I bought almost 20 years ago are still downloadable and playable.

The PS5 and XBSX|S are a lot better in this regard, everything is much faster and they have full compatibility with the last generation. The Xbox's compatibility goes as far back as the original system from 2001.

I miss game consoles not having dashboards. Game just runs.

With game consoles being more “media centers” than just game consoles in 2023 I’m not sure I agree.

At the same time I don’t think there’s anything preventing you from ignoring 90% of a console and just launching disc-based games. You’ll need an internet connection for patches but beyond that it’s pretty easy past initial setup.

Do you actually use the media center pieces?

I only use PlayStation for gaming and occasionally to play a BluRay. It’s really not a great general media box; it would need a better remote control, for starters.

And yet Sony insists on wasting screen space with a a pointless media library icon that can’t be removed.

I use an Xbox One X solely as a "YouTube/Kodi home theatre"... (I also have a lot of game systems and computers). Indeed I have the trusty infrared remote! It's a pretty nice setup! Especially as I can play some games on it from time to time. :)

All HDMI PlayStations can read control signals from the HDMI receiver i.e. can be controlled by the TV remote, though running third party apps (such as Netflix) would be problematic with a TV remote because for some stupid reason Sony does not allow apps to exit(3) so you can start anything with a TV remote but if it's a non-builtin player you need a PS remote or a controller to bring up the system menu and kill the app.

> All HDMI PlayStations

Forgive my pedantry, but the "Fat" (CECHA~Q) PS3s do not support this, only the "Slim" and "Super-Slim" models: http://www.edepot.com/playstation3.html#PS3_Model_Difference...

Do you mean the media remote is poor or do you mean the controller? https://www.playstation.com/en-us/accessories/media-remote/

> At the same time I don’t think there’s anything preventing you from ignoring 90% of a console and just launching disc-based games.

It takes longer to run the game ever since the 360/PS3/Wii gen, and the 360 is notoriously annoying about user sign-in, and there's that center button you accidentally press mid-game to bring up the hub. Wii has probably the worst dashboard cause you need to set up the IR transmitter and Wiimote to get past it even for games that only use GC controllers.

I get the media center thing as a selling point for other people. I just have never used a game console for things besides games.

It’s certainly slower but in absolute terms it still only take tens of seconds on a cold boot.

When sleeping (how most people use the console) it’s practically as fast, especially with Instant Resume on the Series X/S.

I dont miss scratched discs or blowing into cartridges, and whatnot i much prefer just starting the game from the UI, the switch isnt bad in this regard, starts up on your game menu you pick a game and play.

I find it fascinating to learn that they tried. It looks like they really did, but it was a futile effort. What they needed to do was cut out a lot of the unnecessary crap.

The beginning of the end was the release of the "New Xbox Experience" in 2008, which introduced a new rich and very cumbersome UI that was way heavier on resources, more confusing to navigate, and dedicated more real estate to ads and "sponsored content".

If Microsoft cared about speed and usability, they should have reversed course. Kill NXE, restore the original snappy Blades UI, and backport the one useful NXE feature (the ability to install disc games to the HDD). Nobody's going to care about 3D avatars if they make your game machine take three times longer to boot.

Agreed - 14 year old me was very disappointed with NXE.

The new tiles were a good lesson in how any vacuum in a UX will be filled with ads given enough time.

I was shocked when, very late in that console cycle, I, a PS3 owner, got ahold of a cheap, used 360.

Holy shit, the menu was so bad. Ads and other shit everywhere. Cluttered and inconsistent such that it was tricky to find anything—I still have one, and still play games on it sometimes, as recently as last week, but even today don't feel like I have a good mental model for the menu layout and functions, everything just feels randomly strewn about, that even goes for the in-game pop-up system menu.

And yes, it's noticeably laggy.

I've not been happy with the direction of the PS4 and PS5 menus, but despite a ton of shitting-up compared with the sublimely-snappy-and-simple PS3 menu, they're still not that bad—and at least they have the horsepower to run the webshit Playstation Store without constantly running out of memory and refreshing, or crashing, or taking comically long to load a page. You'd think they'd prioritize a great store experience to get you to spend more money, but on the PS3, you'd be wrong. But anyway, point is the 360 menu is so bad that years of making Playstation menus worse hasn't been enough to catch up with its awfulness.

Haven't seen the XBone menu yet. Hope it's better.

One thing to note is that if you're using a 360 now, the most recent update is not actually the NXE. They updated the 360 dash again to make it look like the then-current Xbone dash.

For reference:

- Blades dash has four or five "blades" that you can flip between. Each blade has it's own UI and can open up into submenus.

- NXE dash has a vertical list of horizontal menus, sort of like XMB flipped on its side. Or the Blades dash flipped on its side and with everything on one row each. This design was tweaked several times, most notably when the Kinect launched.

- Grid dash has a grid of icons, vaguely like the Wii Menu, except you can't reorganize anything on it and everything is ads.

I got my 360 the day before the NXE launched, so I didn't notice a performance regression with NXE. But using the grid dash today makes the console feel incredibly sluggish.

Ah, I probably am looking at the grid one these days, then. I've definitely got it connected to the 'net, and updated, since the single most important exclusive game on it is digital-only (the Perfect Dark HD re-release—the version that's just the original game with better textures, 720p resolution, and a modern control scheme)

So the weird, incoherent mess of options on each screen, sized and placed seemingly at random, with ads often far more prominent than any of the stuff you might actually want to do on that screen, is actually an XBone-ism? Boo, I hoped that if I ever got around to having one of those it'd be nicer :-(

I do remember it updating & changing at some point, and that it still sucked before that. I got it after the blade menu, though. I think it had that at first, but lost it as soon as it updated after plugging it in, so I never really used it. NXE's what I probably used the first times I actually played anything on it.

Googles

Oh my god, yes, I do remember NXE. Hahahaha, wow, I'd forgotten that. How awful. I partially retract my complaints about the current menus.

I had the reverse experience. I owned an Xbox 360 and recently picked up a PS3. The PS3 menu is unbelievably snappy by comparison. It’s really hard to go back now, but the Xbox 360 dashboard had always seemed fast enough at the time.

I was honestly expecting an article about how the blades ui was the fastest and best xbox 360 ui because it wasn't loading advertisements.

This remains a hotly contested topic. Not the overall interface, because that seems to be well-liked. Rather, "Was the blades UI fast?" Some say yes. Others complain about the guide taking longer than 10 seconds to appear while in-game. It could be that there's a lot of conflicting opinion between those who view it through nostalgia and those who remember their experiences when it was the de facto UI. Sure NXE had areas where execution speed certainly wasn't fast, but in terms of perception I'd argue there could be something said about the UI elements being more spaced out and feeling "further away" with the paradigm they went with.

Oh, and the blades definitely had ads. Maybe not as many as future interfaces, but I'm not sure why people say it didn't.

Show them to me. I don't recall any.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxtMii5UKVQ

Notably, it doesn't launch you onto a screen with ads at boot. Marketplace is tucked to the furthest left so you'll only go there if you want to.

Before you even get to the Marketplace blade, the Xbox Live blade was an entire upsell blade if you weren't paying for Live. Depending on your opinion of "ads", that counts for some people as a giant ad. (I don't entirely agree with that sentiment myself, but it is something I've been asked to train myself to see.)

(ETA: In a similar vein, the bright logo of Windows Media Center in the Media tab would look like an ad for an upsell to many.)

The person in the video mentions it's not connected to Xbox Live. Here's an example I found that has 2 ads in the "Xbox Live" tab as well:

https://i.imgur.com/B983dJf.jpg

Beyond nostalgia, I do think the Blades were never quite as fast as people remember them being. They were designed extremely well including some brilliant flashy animations that I think were very cleverly designed to give the illusion of speed and fast movement in just the precise way to build a nostalgia for their "speed" after the fact. I think that's precisely why there are so many conflicting opinions between nostalgia goggles and people that remember real experiences on slow WiFi playing multiplayer Xbox Arcade games from full hard drives while streaming some music from a Windows Media Center somewhere else in the house. There were definitely all sorts of cases when you'd hit slowdowns and hiccups in the Blades UI and the animations just let you down at that point.

(ETA: Also, I think some of people's nostalgia is affected by they may not have even had the full hard drives of games and apps and huge active Xbox Live friend lists and such like that until the NXE or later anyway, which is another interesting bias to consider.)

Am I the only one which expected that loading from NAND would have been faster than HDD ?

It seems like the slight speed advantage was in uncompressing the files beforehand on the HDD essentially skipping a step that had to be performed on every boot from NAND.

Seems unlikely, file decompression tends to be quite fast (faster than even relatively fast IO if they're using lz4, but even more expensive compression methods would be faster than an HDD, to say nothing about apparently slow NAND)

One NAND chip is slow. NAND-based SSDs can only deliver high throughput by using many NAND chips in parallel. Additionally, the console's 16MB NAND chip is a far cry from today's 64GB chips used in mainstream SSDs.

A 7200 RPM drive can easily outperform old flash memory. It wasn't always the case that flash was the fastest storage medium. Flash performance used to be measured in KB/s, not GB/s like on modern NVMe drives.

Great to see Eaton is still into Xbox, despite the craziness.

I need to see if my lifetime license to FATxplorer is still valid.

I sincerely hope the rest of the 'inner circle' is doing better and onto greener pastures, even if it means never touching an xbox or EA title again :P

Craziness is one way to define it (:

And it is still valid!

im gonna try to get a 2tb harddrive for my xbox now, saw your tb-expansion post.

its gonna replace the 60gb you sold me 10 years ago :P

Datacenter mode - ~11yrs in the making - nice find

I'm interested in this data center mode, has anyone ever gotten hold of the supplementary dash executable? Or was it gated in some way or not available?

Great article. Perhaps the next step would be to try to get the data center xex to see what that is all about.

I've added it to the to-do list, but I would not be surprised if it's inaccessible. The HTTP request to download it has console ID as a header.

What i find fascinating is it got released as is: slow

Then you have Sony who managed to make a whole media center + web browser into a tiny portable resource constrained device, aka the PSP

Maybe that's why Microsoft could never make a PSP or a Nintendo handheld type console, lack of people who REALLY care about things

You probably didn't have speedier options in 2005 that wouldn't make the system much more expensive. Also with the console being a loss leader and profit expected to come from game licensing, it was judged to be worthwhile at the time.

> Maybe that's why Microsoft could never make a PSP or a Nintendo handheld type console

I'm fuzzy on the history but I do believe online play was embraced by Microsoft far before Sony or the others. Am I right? Anyway, that required home Internet. Sony/Nintendo had their popular portable systems - designed for offline play. In 2005 that type of Internet-reliant online gaming wasn't going to work too well on a portable device with 2005-era wifi and 2G expensive cellular plans in the fashion that Sony or Nintendo would envision.

Also in 2005 Microsoft's mobile plans were all-in on Windows CE. Because their strategy at time was Windows everywhere...why? fundamentally Microsoft was at that time primarily software licensing company that would rather sit and collect license royalties and let other companies develop the low-margin hardware side. Could you imagine a clunky Xbox Portable Zune CE, being really some rebranded Toshiba or Sharp device that was something else in Japan?

> You probably didn't have speedier options in 2005 that wouldn't make the system much more expensive

PSP was released in 2005, it was sold for just $250, 9 months before the XBOX 360

iPod nano, sleek and fast UI, released in 2005 too

Why is that a thing to always find excuses for Microsoft? acknowledge the issues, and work on them, it's getting tiring

> I'm fuzzy on the history but I do believe online play was embraced by Microsoft far before Sony or the others.

XBox had online play by default, Sony and Nintendo required you to buy a peripheral. As a footnote, I think the Dreamcast (1998) was probably the first console that came with a modem by default, and an optional broadband adapter.

> Sony/Nintendo had their popular portable systems - designed for offline play.

PSP had wifi built-in.

The PSP screen was 480x272 pixel, the Xbox 360 was a 720p/1080p machine, assets alone would have been significantly bigger than the PSP's, which is more burden on the NAND and on the CPU for decompression

But also, the Xbox 360 had faster hardware than a PSP. Xbox 360 can handle multi-layered audio+video assets rendered in realtime at 60fps - even the prior generation Xbox console could handle it, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvcxnTM-hfw as one of many examples

The Xbox dashboard is slow because of Microsoft's business goals for it, not because the Xbox 360 hardware or software struggles with HD-sized JPEGs or whatever.

Back in the days one would say they've boought a company that could do that. lulz

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