Gaming tablets–here already?

This link was thrown my way by a friend – I’d spotted it on one of my feeds earlier in the day, but hadn’t checked it.

So this Razer Tablet is designed for gaming, the controls, the physical design, and the spec suggests that.  Is it the sign of things to come? – Well sort of, but in my opinion not for a few more years yet.
[Note: I want to point this out here, but that screen on that Tablet showing that game… I’m dubious as to that tablet running that game!]

If you take gaming to mean console level graphics and games (gaming PC level) then the tablets cannot do that right now, not for the power consumption, and not without burning the users hands.  People say that tablets are the gaming future because of the games available on phones and tablets sell amazingly well, take Angry Birds – which is addictive, I can vouch for that.  Games like that though are simple, aren’t very demanding on the systems that run them, and are optimized for limited device sets, iPhones are spec’d to Apple’s liking, and Android phone all have very similar specifications with regards to processor and gfx.

What does Razer’s tablet concept tell us?
Well quite a bit really.  First, is that Razer believe this is a targetable market, which is fair game.  Secondly, the ultrabook revolution that Intel have been working on can be transferred into tablets; that in itself is a good sign for Intel who have been wanting to get into the tablet space for some time now.  Thirdly, proves to me that tablet gaming at console quality is not going to catch on.

Why would you have a gaming tablet?  I mean take the handheld gaming systems of today, namely the PSP (and it’s subsequent spin offs and sequels) it does it’s job very well, and has sales figures to back it.  I can’t see the need for a gaming tablet for gaming, if you want a tablet buy a normal tablet and a PSP, boosh – happy days.

That covers the here and now, but what about the future?
** Nvidia’s Tegra 3 chips are coming out, and that is a real improvement over previous generations, and Nvidia plans on carrying on with the Tegra line for sometime yet, Tegra 4 and Tegra 5 are in the pipeline and have roadmaps.  Nvidia are a GPU manufacturer, and should churn out something interesting for use in a future gaming tablet.
** Intel are working on their CPU tick-tock strategy, which has gone well so far, but still limits them to classic pc systems.  However, their roadmap has changed for future CPUs, take a look at Sandy-Bridge, quad core cpu with intergrated GPU, all on the same die, but 95W of power.  Ivy-Bridge, same chips, better GFX though, 75W power.  Those are top spec CPUs, go down the range, and that power requirement drops.  Assuming Intel can get a low powered chip with CPU and GPU integrated that can compete with Nvidia’s Tegra chips – which it will do someday; then we could see something good yet.
** You may of noticed that I haven’t mentioned AMD, a CPU and GPU manufacturer, and well placed to take on the tablet sector, in fact their fusion APUs could well do so, if AMD get their act together and make some worthy parts, but at this time, that is unlikely, and they are well out of the race at this time – but things can change, so they should never be truly discounted.
How long until all this happens? – Well about 2 years minimum based on previous cycles of releases, more likely closer to 5 years before it becomes the Gaming Tablet we would envisage, something with respectable battery life and graphical quality.

CPU makers going into the tablet realm though complicates matters.  The Tegra chips, just like Snapdragon or Apple CPUs, are all ARM processors, and are a different architecture to those in PCs (x86).  I’m also fairly certain that Android is written only for ARM, and Windows 8 will be both ARM and x86.  So that gaming tablet would be running Windows 8, which also makes sense as games of the calibre expected are not on Android.

So, the gaming tablet will be an ultra mobile PC, and should be viewed as such, of course it will get slapped with a “Tablet premium price”, and I don’t see a market or need for them.  It does seem that all the manufacturers are on the bandwagon now though, so we’ll see how long that lasts.

SOPA–the nail in the coffin

I usually spot net neutrality issues quickly, but I was a little late to the party with this.  Unfortunately I didn’t realise how far this had gone, or how damaging it would be.

This YouTube video made me realise that so much damage has already been done.  Then when I looked into SOPA and PIPA and realised that we are in for some tough stuff when this gets passed.

I say ‘when’ – because I am doubtful that enough people will oppose this, or even that the people voting on this have any idea of the result of this.

I regularly visit Tomshardware for reviews and such like, but when they post this, then I can’t help but feel that there are some real risks from this being passed, that a lot of websites will suffer.  The corporations and groups such as RIAA/MPAA get to widen their fishing net of misery, whereby they get to take down any site, or any person for even greater outlandish reasons.

Then tonight I found this and I realised that with corporate backing, and money flowing, American politics will work the way the corporations push – and hence why I am doubtful this will be stopped.

Ignorant, corrupt people should not be making any laws, IN ANY COUNTRY; but that is a dream, and I accept that.  BUT Americans making laws in their country, that will affect my country, and I can’t even have a say on it? That’s not fair, right, or legal (pretty sure of that).  There are those of you in the UK, like I am, probably thinking this doesn’t affect you, I believe that we will feel its effects sooner rather than later – besides our very own Digital Economy Act is due for review in the next 5 years, because let’s face it that is a joke as well.

All in all, what will happen to the “free” internet?

The current state of Gaming–Part 3: Where have all the PC games gone?

I saw this a while back and thought what a load of rubbish.

You may of noticed as a gamer over the last 6 years that games have improved graphically, in fact over the last 10 years we finally seem to be reaching a plateau of graphics quality.  If you game on consoles you will of noticed improvements with graphics here too, release titles did not push the hardware in the consoles, while new games are actively reaching the limits, much to annoyance of some console fan-boys.

The PC gamer has in some ways had a very different time over the last 5 years, many have bought expensive powerful systems, and have not needed to upgrade, enjoying better performance and graphics than their console counterparts, without the most noted negative of PC gaming – the continuous upgrades to hardware.

Most games are developed for consoles now, and if we are lucky, ported to PC.  Porting a game from Console to PC can be done in different ways, and whilst many people think it is a “one-size fits all” argument, it is not.  Games cannot be simply altered to run on PCs there is a little more to it than that, but the process is fairly simple.  The ported games look and feel like their console brethren, and you’d be hard pressed to tell them apart, the worst ones still have an expectation of the console controller.  Some ports are actually very well done, and improve on the console versions significantly, but that only applies to a handful of games.

Take 2005 (when the Xbox 360 first came out) it was priced at £200 I believe, and while highly competitive, shiny and new, it was also the start of the mass buying of games consoles, unlike anything before.  However, I know of a great number of people who have bought at least 2 or 3 xbox 360s over the last 6 years, partly due to faults, or because of the need to upgrade.  That comes to about £500, then add in accessories and the extra cost of a game over the PC version (£10 difference), you are looking at a cost of maybe £700 in the last 6 years, or even higher.
I do laugh when people tell me console gaming is cheap… if you actually looked at it, you’d see that you’ve been fooled.

As previously mentioned in an earlier part of this series, the new models of DLC and future games sales mean that the pre-owned game market will dwindle and die as publishers require codes to run the game, one code per user, or something similar – and so the retail games stores we currently have will also disappear.  Without the pre-owned game market console game prices are almost set in stone, and pre-owned games are the only thing in my mind that makes console ownership really worthwhile.

A game is £40 at launch, and if there are poor initial sales that is it, the game is a loss, and the developers tend to ditch it and run.  That game is then neglected, and there have been hundreds of those over the years, but some of those unloved, underappreciated games are still played, because they represented something new, or different – which some gamers actually love to see in the rather stagnant gaming market of today.  In order to maximise those £40 per game sales, the games are made on consoles.  The publishers cite that the consoles are easier to develop for, which is true all the platforms have SDKs which are simple enough, and hardware is set so you have your system limitations, but then your hands as a developer are tied.  Publishers are all about profit, since they are the ones loosing money on game development, they set the rules and requirements to the game studio, and the game studio adjusts it’s original game designs to suit the publisher.  This model only exists because the consoles exist.

Now developers have been openly saying that developing on the PC is hard work, or not worth it, and blame a host of reasons, from “different hardware configurations” to “Piracy”.  PC development is the same as it ever was, every PC is slightly different, I think people now are more stupid though and want to blame other people when the game doesn’t work.  PC gamers are usually the smarter PC users and should be able to keep their systems working properly, and should avoid ‘user created issues’, but it would appear that we too have gotten lazy.

When games are made for consoles and their development (read: Sales) is more vital, then the eventual PC release suffers, it’s not polished or tested correctly.  So when you buy that game, put it in to your PC to install it (often fighting some awful steam/origin client rubbish), and then discover that it won’t load – you blame the developer, and feel cheated.  Yeah, that’s fair enough – but to believe that the fault cannot be with the box in front of you? that’s just plain ignorant.  Being a PC gamer is far from plain sailing, when you game on a PC you accept that, as all PC gamers have for years, that’s why we don’t buy consoles, because sometimes the challenge of getting a game going makes playing it that much better – and nowadays actually exposes ways to make the game itself a much nicer (graphically or performance enhanced).  A PC is a complex thing, so blaming the game or it’s creators is not always correct.  Remember, your PC is running an OS that is handling a lot of background tasks, communicating with hardware via drivers, running protection software – AV and firewalls; all of which can stop something else from working.  There are many more links in the chain responsible for your game running when on a PC, than on a console – complexity caused by simply using a PC as your gaming machine.  Using a PC was your choice, so remember that.

However, back to the first link of the article – that developing for a PC is hard.  It is the same as before, but developers need to remember that our expectations have changed somewhat too, we want things to work when we want them too, we want games that have been tested, and had our needs in mind as well.  Creating two development paths might be tough, expensive, or even too time consuming – but surely you can do things better than you do it now!  The ‘multiple-configurations’ argument is pathetic, make the game as good as you like, make it so that it has ultra level details that only the highest spec systems can handle, and scale down as you see fit to lower and lower levels, it’s your choice as a developer where you set the lines.  If people can’t run a game on ultra then they need to upgrade, they are PC gamers and that is their choice, and they should be accepting this!

Overall, the publishers are forcing a change on game developers, and PC gamers are getting ignored more and more, but throwing us lame excuses doesn’t absolve you of the responsibility and blame, that game you make should work on every platform you release it  on, otherwise it was unfit for release and you have lied to us – AKA fraud (because we paid for it).  Piracy doesn’t harm sales of games, most people pirate a game because they have no faith that they’ll be able to get it running, so they use it as a test!  We don’t want to see PC gaming die, we just want to know that it works before we part with our cash.  Demos are rare these days and most of the time aren’t indicative of the real game, so a pirated copy is the only true pre-purchase test we can carry out.
The PC gamer is also not devoid of responsibility, you own a gaming PC, you built it/purchased it, you should know it’s limitations and respect that.  You also need to remember a PC is multi-functional, complex, and requires maintaining in order to ensure it works as intended.

Only when both sides of this silly blame-war start looking at themselves and giving decent feedback will we get back to good PC gaming times again.  (which might be never )

[On piracy: Chris said to me once – “anything I pirate is because I wouldn’t of purchased it anyway, so they haven’t lost a sale, because their never would of been one!”  Which is a very valid point.
There are legitimate piracy reasons, companies just don’t like it because they will never be able to control it – pfft get over yourselves!]

The current state of Gaming–Part 2: Achievements or No Achievements?

I had this discussion with Chris recently, in fact the day he broke my Xbox (yes it has died a second time), and we have differing views (surprise, surprise).

If you are unsure as to what I am referring when I use the term “Achievements” then you can safely move on, otherwise I am sure you will enjoy the following post.

‘Achievements’ or ‘Trophies’ or whatever future term they are known, are now an integral part of our gaming experience.  Don’t get me wrong, I get the idea of Achievements, and I have to admit they are a nice touch, but I rarely look at them and think “I must do that!”.  I have friends who are ‘Achievement Hunters’ and they spend a lot of time getting all the achievements on a game, thus ‘completing’ it.  In my opinion, any game that requires you to look at and complete the achievements in order to complete the game, is not a good game.

Chris is currently playing through Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and using the achievements to go through the game.  Oblivion is an open world RPG (or sort of) but RPGs are about you progressing your character in response to the game, not following achievements!

I’m playing Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (updated with some nice new looks) because I never got far with it years ago.  I’m playing on my PC, no achievements, just classic RPG fun, and sure it’s long, but I’m enjoying it!

I guess I’m trying to fathom if achievements add to enjoyment of gaming? or do they just provide something to brag about? or more worryingly are they are requirement to justify your “wasted” hours in front of your gaming machines/consoles?  What do you think?

 

The current state of Gaming–Part 1: Generally

Games used to be fun.  I remember playing Super Mario on the SNES for hours, and enjoying it, or playing Tetris on the Gameboy (the original one).  Most of my friends will agree that was what games were like when we were growing up, they were a fun way to pass the time.

Games now have changed, and they come in two flavours; Single-player and Multi-player.  This applies to the games themselves, and I’ll explain that in a moment.  Single-player games have no multiplayer element, they are designed for one person, have long campaigns and usually good storylines.  These are rare nowadays, and storylines seem to of taken a backseat.  Most games used to be single-player, or two-players on one console, but they were essentially just a campaign mode, which usually engrossed the player.

Multi-player games are usually games that have a single-player campaign which rubbish and meaningless, with the whole focus on the multiplayer aspect of the game.  FPS games spring to mind here.
Usually the multiplayer is the vital part, with the single-player component just added on to humour the normal gaming standard; but there are some games that have no split of the components, such as Borderlands, where the game is one RPG storyline, with support for up to 4 players to co-operatively complete that storyline.  There are also games where the single-player is still the focus, but the developers/publishers know how much value (in terms of money-making opportunities) a multiplayer section adds, and so you end up with games like Assassins Creed: Brotherhood, which has the series normal storyline (single-player element) but now has a multiplayer game mode as well.

I have grouped games rather generally above, but those categories still stand.  Multiplayer games rely on that factor to keep players, but multiplayer can get boring, so they add other things to keep you entertained.  Downloadable Content (DLC) is one such way, but the modern DLC model that publishers use is so horrible.  The old DLC model used to be about keeping that game’s community alive, playing, and happy.  Before the birth of the Xbox 360 and PS3, the main platform for DLC was the PC, and PC gamers were blessed with free DLC a lot of the time, or were given modding tools, to allow the communities to make their own mods and maps; massively increasing the longevity of a game.  The new DLC model is all about money, more and more games are being released with DLC brought out for about £8-£10 ($10-$15), and for that 1/5th the purchase price of your new game, you gain some extra maps, or things that most of the time were supposed to be on the game disc but were left off because they could sell it to you later as DLC.  THAT IS WRONG!  But that model is the one they use now because people were forced into it, and the old model is being phased out.  I’m not saying the DLC shouldn’t be charged for, but there are times when the gamers are being taken for mugs, and that’s not on.  Unfortunately things will not change with this new DLC model and will only get worse.  With the birth of the modern consoles, there are backend systems such as Xbox Live and PSN that allow easy content purchasing and distribution, but people stop thinking about what they get, when they get it.  The console generation tends to be the younger age groups, who are very much of the mind-set of “I must have that” and that fuels the new DLC model and is why it became the standard.  It really is sad that this has become the new normal, it’s the worst thing to happen.

There is something else, I started this article by saying games used to be fun.  Not all games now are fun, the amount of anger, stress, rage etc. that some multiplayer games cause is huge.  I mean if you’re ever on Xbox live, just listen to the abuse and things other people say, it’s quite shocking.  I mean I’ve been victim of some abuse on Xbox live, as have some of my friends, and there is no need for it.  People take things too seriously, or in some cases feel that they are “the big man” because they play a certain game.  These are 12 year olds playing a 15+ game usually, and they talk so much rubbish I generally end up laughing at them, in fact most of us older gamers do laugh at them, but I can understand how that for hours every day can really affect some people.  I don’t play online to get abuse from some idiot, I play to unwind, shoot some other players on some FPS and have a laugh with my mates.  It really doesn’t matter what your stats are, it doesn’t make you a “big man” and it doesn’t make your penis bigger, so stop acting like it does!

[Side note:  My friend told me of one individual, who during a game of Call of Duty: Black ops, was insulting other players by using the phrase “Your Mum” in various forms – i.e. “I f***ed your mum”.  The response from one player was genius – “I highly doubt that, you are 12 years old, your penis doesn’t work, you live on the other side of the world, and you are an idiot who probably doesn’t have a clue what having sex is.”
These kids, playing those games online, I just laugh at them, they are nearly always pathetic.]

Windows 8, and can Microsoft break the Apple Monopoly?

I wouldn’t normally group these two big things in one post, but I’m strapped for time, and they are highly linked so I think we can say it’s acceptable here.

Windows 8 was unveiled to developers earlier this week, and the likelihood is that us consumers won’t have a hands on for a few months yet, and I wouldn’t expect and RTM version for 9 months to a year.  That’s not to say it won’t magically appear from nowhere sooner than that, but I like to think that Microsoft will take the time and get it right.

Windows 8 has a dual interface, there is the touch-centric interface which is very similar to that used on windows phone 7, which is definitely designed for tablet devices, but I can’t help noticing that it’s equally adept for larger touchscreen computers.  There is the other interface which as far as I’m aware is still very windows 7 like, perhaps better looking, or maybe it hasn’t changed.  I admit at this current point I haven’t delved through the screenshots.  There should be a huge number of things under-the-hood, including things that Microsoft have been working on for years, but never had in a stable state for inclusion in the Windows OS – features that were intended for Vista and 7, but never made it.  Some of those features were big things, big enough to make the user experience faster, and easier, and that’s what Microsoft seems to want.  So in that respect as a normal desktop user (and not planning to procure a tablet device any time soon) will be looking forward the the next Windows version.

Can Microsoft beat the Apple iPad monopoly?  I think that while Google Android has made good headway, proving that there are alternatives to the iPad – you need to pull consumers away from Apples hypnotic advertising systems that just brainwash the masses, and that Apple uses are slowly seeing the Apple OS for what it is.  I feel that Microsoft is the only company that could actually tip the scales and tear down the rule of the iPad.  Microsoft Windows OS’ have been the mainstay of the PC world, people have been using them for considerable time, and people haven’t bought into the cloud thing, so all your data is still residing on a PC you own.  You want that anywhere right? (or so we are told) and if you have a Windows pc and a Windows tablet, the odds of those working seamlessly are pretty good, and therefore you stick with Microsoft for your computing devices.  I know of people who buy a Macbook, just for their iPhone or iPad; that’s the dumbest thing ever, but it works very well.  I see no reason why Microsoft can leaver the same idea.  I’ll admit Microsoft has some serious hurdles to overcome to be able to do this, and it mostly stems from that the fact that over the years the Microsoft Windows OS has always been a pain to get communicating with other systems, and MS have never got it right.  So if they did it with Windows 8, across Tablets and PCs, and it just worked… that would be something.

Of course Windows 8 is a desktop release, something Microsoft were planning to avoid a while ago, but the PC hasn’t died, and the Cloud hasn’t been adopted by everyone, so a new Windows version for Desktop PCs was much needed.  I hope that Microsoft make Windows 8 everything it can be, It’s going to be a huge multi-versioned, multi-platform, multi-architecture release, with confusion abound I’m sure; but I think if they learnt all their lessons, it might surprise us all.

Passwords–How you can deal with the huge number you must remember.

In the digital age, everything requires a password, and we keep getting told “don’t use the same password, blah blah blah.”  It’s a strange one, we have difficulty remembering things, passwords are no exception.  The bit about not using the same password is very true, you don’t realise it but not every website treats usernames and passwords the same way.  Some sites have them stored in encrypted systems, and no-one can see that password information, others have partially encrypted systems, and some just store as plain text.  I’m not sure you’d feel comfortable knowing anyone could see your password if they really wanted to.

I’ve been reasonable with my passwords in the past, usually fairly solid variations on similar previous passwords, and yeah I used the same one a few times.  However, recently I discovered that I had way too many logins to keep tabs on, and I found a program called KeePass, which I started using.  KeePass is a password manager, which stores all your log-ins in a file, which is locked with a “master password”.  KeePass worked well for me, but I found something which I think is better.

KeePass has a few big issues, and one of them is that browsers just don’t play ball with it very well.

So I switched to Last Pass (heard about it on Security Now podcast and checked it out).  Instantly I realised I had done the right thing.

Last Pass stores your logins on your system, but authenticates you with the Last Pass server, for synchronising your passwords between systems.  If you want reasons to use a password manager, here are a few:
1) You remember one password – no more bits of paper all over the place, no more “S**T what password was that”.
2) You can have randomly generated passwords – ok you can’t remember these ones, but they sure mean nothing, they are harder to crack, and really that’s the important thing.
3) You can take all that information with you between systems, or in the case with LastPass, it syncs for you.

When I have to create a login for a website that I’m not really happy with (i.e. I don’t trust it), I set up a user account and have a randomly generated password.  That means even if that site treats my log-in like crap, it means nothing to any of my other log-ins, it gives no hint as to my other passwords.  That’s a big security bonus.

The problem with password managers is that once you start using one, you can’t stop, it makes things easier, and browsing the internet is just like it used to be without spending hours looking around your desk for the post-it note with half your internet logins scribbled on it.  However you really do become dependant and you forget any of the passwords you’d usually of used.

Of course what we should all be doing is running our own user environments off a USB stick, with our own browser of choice and something like LastPass built onto that browser; we have our passwords, we have our own customised experience and we have that to-go, on any system we have to use; and more importantly, we can secure all of that data on that USB.  That’s something I will cover next time.

Xbox 360 Freezes and RROD

This blog was always supposed to record my views and experiences, and this is no exception.  Now it may seem like years since the big xbox 360 RROD fiasco, but I can assure you there are many people with the older style xbox 360s that are still getting this issue.  I had decided a while back that if my xbox had this issue, I would fix it myself, no way am I paying M$ the money to just give me an xbox they have sitting on a shelf.

Unlike most people who talk about the RROD, mine was not constant.  My xbox decided it would freeze at random points after a restart, either loading dashboard, or loading a game, or even just sitting on the dashboard.  During this time I got a number of errors, including a E74 RRoD, a fair few dashboard errors, and no information when the console froze.  However I did get the graphical glitches and issues associated with the ANA chip on the board.

I dismantled my xbox according to a number of guides (NOTE: this voids any warranty or chance of getting M$ to fix it, since you’ll likely damage the seal sticker) and I’m not responsible for your results if you choose to do this.  I’m only discussing my experience.

There are some commonly talked about fixes, namely the X-Clamp fix.  Which works for some, but for most it only delays the inevitable return of the RRoD.  Other people use coins, clamps, heat guns, the towel trick, or in some crazy instances, an oven!  I’m going to be straight with you.  The X-Clamp fix makes sense, but is also technically pointless.  Now my xbox is a previous refurb from M$ with the heat piped heatsink over the GPU, which is obviously an improvement over the original.  It’s about 3 years old, since I bought it, off a friend who had just got it back from M$.  Nearly 5 years after then manufacture date on the reverse of the console, so who knows how old the motherboard is in there.

DO NOT USE THE TOWEL TRICK, AN OVEN, OR OTHER STRANGE FIXES.  There are known repercussions from doing those, including complete death of your xbox.

After replacing the thermal compound on the CPU and GPU and still having issues, I discovered the whole (relatively unknown to me) issue of the ANA chip and the interconnects between GPU and ANA.  Close inspection of the board confirmed a number of views from others about the solder being rubbish, or deteriorating.  Hence the heat gun fix, which a number of people seem to have success with.  However rather than using a heat gun over vast areas of the board, I decided (with the help of my father, who has a steadier hand than me), to work on the solder individually.  A large number of solder connections were pitted, suggesting poor connection, but the dodgy connections were all over the board, and while just working around the ANA chip might solve the problem you have today, another one may appear tomorrow.

After going over most of the solder on the underside of the board, mostly reheating the solder that was there, and allowing it to set; I booted my xbox back up, and the problem of freezing of E74, or RRoD was gone.

3 hours of gameplay and no issues.  Then a few days later a good 6 hours with no issues.  I’m relatively sure that I can say that the issue is fixed.

So what I’m trying to say is think about what the issue is before doing a fix.  My fix cost me absolutely nothing, so maybe yours will too.

NOTE: I didn’t carry out the X-Clamp fix, or anything else, other than replacing the old thermal compound and soldering any poor connection points on the underside of the mainboard.

How can you fix all those tagging issues in your media library?

If you are anything like me, you’ll have masses of digital music.  Now chances are some of isn’t exactly tagged right.  Now we here at CTN today recommend media monkey, it organises and tags and is damn useful in general.  There are some flaws with it though, for example I let it organise my media library and gave it permission to rename and move things as needed.  Which worked great, apart from the masses of untagged, unnamed, and Japanese music in my library which really confuses me.  So I was left with a library that I can use in media monkey with no issues, but the folder structure is messed up big time.  My solution was to start fixing those tagging problems, now media monkey makes it simple, but it is horrible with multi disc albums, or foreign tracks.  So eventually I gave up when it started annoying me with my multi cd compilation albums.

I recently discovered a number of tagging programs, and settled on a great little program called ‘MusicBrainz Picard’ which is a little old now, and possibly no longer being developed, BUT it has helped me greatly sort out some of my collection (it’s an on-going struggle).  Picard will lookup the songs on the MusicBrainz database, which is community created and usually damn accurate, and try and find matches based on the tag information in the files already.  One great bonus is that if your files have no tags, and the filenames are no help, then you can lookup the PUID, a fingerprint of that song, which although has it’s flaws, can really help when you have no clue.  In my use of the PUID feature, I’ve been very impressed in how well it works.

So if you’ve got music library issues, maybe this will help you out too.

DIY Xbox 360 hard drive upgrades

Now I know there are hundreds of guides out there showing how to do this, and I will be linking to a couple of them in order to write this.  The guides I have linked to are the two I found to be most useful.  However, I recommend you read what I have written here as it lists a few problems I ran into that aren’t mentioned on the other guides.

This task isn’t actually very difficult, it’s just long, so don’t trust the time scales quoted by a number of people, as it’ll probably take you at least 3 hours (or it did for me).

I’m going to start this by linking to two very good guides, which you want to have open and ready to use (and store the links somewhere), bearing in mind you will be rebooting your pc at many stages of this guide.  It’s very handy if you have a second machine, but it doesn’t matter too much.

Guide 1: http://www.diy-guides.com/upgrade-your-xbox-360-to-250gb-inexpensively/
NOTE: this is slightly out-dated with it’s software list.  hddhackr is at build 1.25 as I write this, and that’s the one I used.  USE THE LATEST VERSION here.

Guide 2: http://digiex.net/guides-reviews/console-guides/xbox-360-guides/3152-xbox-360-how-hack-250gb-sata-drive-work-xbox-360-xbox-360-slim.html
NOTE: similar to guide 1, but has some good points.  (I discovered guide 2 halfway through my transfers, but the point about xplorer360 versions is VITAL!)

Now, some issues you might face:

First and foremost, don’t panic when doing all this, most of the time it’s a simple fix and even though you might of done something stupid you can usually solve it too.

Problem 1: Installing the 250gb (or whatever drive you bought) into your computer and using HDDHACKR.
I assume that by doing this you sort of know how hardware works in computers, how to install hard drives, etc.  I only have two laptops with me at the moment, but I was lucky that my dell allows easy hard drive changing.  HDDHACKR is a confusing program, but what you really have to do is unplug ALL drives in your system if you can, then attach your drive that you want to flash.  You will have to go into your BIOS, and set the SATA mode (or equivalent section) to ATA (or legacy, or compatible, or something like that).  I also had to disable my DVD drive in the bios as I can’t unplug it.  Pay close attention to what  you modify in the bios, as you will need to change it all back to what it was for your normal usage of your system.

Onto HDDHACKR; using your USB stick you will load MS-DOS, and run ‘hddhackr’ from the prompt.  It will usually find your drive, double check all the information on that screen, and if you unplugged/disabled everything else, the only drive should be the drive you are going to flash.  if no drive is shown double check the BIOS again, sometimes settings aren’t saved (that’s what happened in my case).  Otherwise you might need to try using a different system, as some chipsets are known to be a pain with HDDHACKR.
Some people are also not accustomed to DOS, or filenames it seems.  The hddss.bin file could be named anything, in my case (using guide 1) it is shown in DOS as ‘HDDSS2~1.bin, which is what you type when it asks you for HDDSS.bin.  Easiest way to know what you need to type is at the MS-DOS prompt before loading hddhackr, type ‘dir’ (without quotes) and write down the name of the bin file – it really is simple.

The guides are fairly good about the problem, but just in case I’ve gone over it above.

Problem 2: Copying data to and from the hard drives (both original xbox 360 hard drive and your flashed drive).
This is a very difficult and confusing stage, so be very careful, especially if you haven’t done any backups of your xbox 360 data onto memory stick. (I didn’t bother, too much hassle in my opinion.)  One very important thing to do is follow the guides in the order they are written, as if you don’t you will end up having to go back some steps, and waste hours of work – I am speaking from experience here.

If you are using Vista or Windows 7, turn off UAC.  Running as admin just does not work in this case.  Now you can attach the drive to your system however you like, I’m using a USB adapter, but you can have the drive attached internally without any issues.

You’ll want to backup your original hard drive first, the guides split this into two stages, partition 2, and partition 3.  Now I assume you have a 20/60/120 gb hard drive as an original, so you’ll be using the standard version of Xplorer360 (0.9 beta 6).

Create a folder on your system drive to store all the backup data.  The guides are fairly good with this, so I won’t go into detail, but I recommend you backup partition 2, and also copy the contents of the partition 2 manually (just in case you have issues).  As for partition 3, copy that over to your backup location.  This process takes longer than you expect, possibly well over an hour.

Copying data back onto your flashed drive is a bit of a headache.  And will take even longer than the dumping of data.  I recommend using guide 2 for this bit as guide 1 is vague in this area.

Guide 2 says to use the standard xplorer 360 to restore partition 2, which is fine, however when I did this I lost my partition 3, but just format the drive in the xbox 360 and it will come back. (see key point below).
Then with partition 2 restored, and partition 3 missing and returned after a format, you can transfer partition 3 back.  Here is where the time is lost.  You will need to use the right version of xplorer360 here (standard for up to 120gb drives, and the 250gb hacked version for 250gb drives, do not be fooled otherwise.)  You will probably want to copy everything back from your partition 3 backup you created earlier.  Do this in smaller chunks, otherwise you will be sitting there confused for a long period of time wondering what it is doing, especially when it looks like it’s stuck on a loop.  Since I copied this data over 3 or 4 times because of various mess ups on my part, for my final copy over I broke it into chunks.  Now I had 3 folders (cache, content, minidex) and name.txt.  Start with name.txt and copy that over, then minidex (you can do the whole folder), then cache (whole folder).  Now content is a pain.  If you copy the whole folder (several gigs of data) you have a harder time tracking it.  So I created a new folder called Content on the xplorer360 partition 3.  Then into there I copied the folders one by one, starting with my profiles, and lastly the big DLC folder (0000000000, or whatever).

KEY POINT 1: be very careful with drag and drop, xplorer360, and if you mess up be very wary of any dialogue boxes that appear, ensuring you read them fully.  You’d be pretty mad if you erased your original drive because you clicked “yes” instead of “no”.

KEY POINT 2: messing up the partitions on your original drive is very very very BAD so don’t do it.
If you mess up the flashed drive don’t worry.  If partition 0 or 2 is missing or damaged, then you will have to use hddhackr to recreate them (see below).  If partition 3 is the only missing/damaged partition then you can just format the drive in the xbox 360.

To recreate partitions with HDDHACKR:
1) prep system and drive for hddhackr as normal
2) load USB stick and run hddhackr
3) note down the line for the drive. e.g. 0x6EB0 SATA Pri Master …
4) the 0x6EB0 (those are zeros) is the port.
5) now exit hddhackr by typing x at the question prompt
6) type the following (without quotes): “hddhackr C [port] [master/slave]
“hddhackr /?” will give you syntax usage but I will explain here anyway.
Replace [port] with the port you wrote down so in my case 6EB0.
Replace [master/slave] with A0 for master, or A1 for slave (check the syntax usage to be certain for this)
7) that should just repartition the drive.

After repartitioning you will be starting from scratch with that drive.  Hence if you were like me halfway through a copy over and it goes funny, you’ll be pretty annoyed.

Overall, expect the process to take you at least 5 hours. But at least for most of it you can do other things.  The biggest problems I had were finding guides that actually worked.  The second guide also provides information about using the drives in the xbox 360 slim, meaning that the 250gb drive you flash can go with you to a new xbox if you need to.

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So after 9 hours (4-5 is what it would of taken in one good run), I have a 250 gb hard drive in my xbox 360, and it seems to be fine and dandy.  Will obviously add to this if anything crops up, but I really hope it stops others falling into the pitfalls I had.