6 ms·

How Microsoft attempted to make the Xbox 360 dashboard load faster

147 points by whalesalad 4y ago

mdmglr 4y ago
Great article. Perhaps the next step would be to try to get the data center xex to see what that is all about.
- EatonZ 4y ago
  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.
mariusmg 4y ago
Am I the only one which expected that loading from NAND would have been faster than HDD ?
- RyanShook 4y ago
  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.
  - masklinn 4y ago
    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)
- wtallis 4y ago
  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.
- TonyTrapp 4y ago
  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.
PreInternet01 4y ago
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/optimizing-performance-and-responsiveness 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'...
- bentcorner 4y ago
  > 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/onecore-to-rule-them-all-how-windows-everywhere-finally-happened/ 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.
- EatonZ 4y ago
  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.
  - iforgotpassword 4y ago
    What generation of Xbox did you test that on? A later one? Maybe the original flash chip was somewhat slower...
babypuncher 4y ago
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.
- jmoak3 4y ago
  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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  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.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
asdff 4y ago
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.
- kivlad 4y ago
  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.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
    Show them to me. I don't recall any. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxtMii5UKVQ 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.
    - WorldMaker 4y ago
      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.)
    - kivlad 4y ago
      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 https://i.imgur.com/B983dJf.jpg
Jerrrry 4y ago
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
- EatonZ 4y ago
  Craziness is one way to define it (: And it is still valid!
  - Jerrrry 4y ago
    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
  - stephbu 4y ago
    Datacenter mode - ~11yrs in the making - nice find
dschuetz 4y ago
Back in the days one would say they've boought a company that could do that. lulz
mariambarouma 4y ago
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?
Kukumber 4y ago
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
- Kipters 4y ago
  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
  - maxsilver 4y ago
    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 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.
- tenebrisalietum 4y ago
  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?
etempleton 4y ago
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.
- sedatk 4y ago
  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.
  - sylens 4y ago
    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
  - z3c0 4y ago
    > 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.
- topbanana 4y ago
  For sure. The new UI is way too complicated
- Lammy 4y ago
  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 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.
- 4y ago

147 points by whalesalad 4y ago

mdmglr 4y ago

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

EatonZ 4y ago
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.

mariusmg 4y ago

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

RyanShook 4y ago
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.
- masklinn 4y ago
  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)
wtallis 4y ago
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.
TonyTrapp 4y ago
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.

PreInternet01 4y ago

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/optimizing-performance-and-responsiveness 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'...

bentcorner 4y ago
> 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/onecore-to-rule-them-all-how-windows-everywhere-finally-happened/ 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.
EatonZ 4y ago
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.
- iforgotpassword 4y ago
  What generation of Xbox did you test that on? A later one? Maybe the original flash chip was somewhat slower...

babypuncher 4y ago

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.

jmoak3 4y ago
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.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
yamtaddle 4y ago
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.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

asdff 4y ago

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.

kivlad 4y ago
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.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  Show them to me. I don't recall any. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxtMii5UKVQ 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.
  - WorldMaker 4y ago
    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.)
  - kivlad 4y ago
    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 https://i.imgur.com/B983dJf.jpg

Jerrrry 4y ago

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

EatonZ 4y ago
Craziness is one way to define it (: And it is still valid!
- Jerrrry 4y ago
  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
- stephbu 4y ago
  Datacenter mode - ~11yrs in the making - nice find

dschuetz 4y ago

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

mariambarouma 4y ago

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?

Kukumber 4y ago

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

Kipters 4y ago
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
- maxsilver 4y ago
  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 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.
tenebrisalietum 4y ago
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?

etempleton 4y ago

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.

sedatk 4y ago
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.
- sylens 4y ago
  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
- z3c0 4y ago
  > 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.
topbanana 4y ago
For sure. The new UI is way too complicated
Lammy 4y ago
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 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.
4y ago