I worked for Activision. The 10G port is so we can download or stream the latest builds of the game directly onto the local machine. Back in 2010 we had to burn discs every single day and hand them out to QA. Burning discs was often the process that wasted so much time especially towards the end of a project where we had new builds every day. The "burner room guys" always had to come in early to make sure the discs were ready for when QA arrives. It could take hours and hours to hand out copies to a floor of 100+ QA testers. Being able to have a 1G, 2.5G or even 10G ethernet port is a massive timesaver for anyone who needs to get the latest build. Additionally, streaming (as opposed to downloading) to the local machine also helps with security. No more worrying about someone stealing a disk or even an entire devkit. Simply power off the console and the build gets deleted (or at least the leftover temp files become unusable when there is no connection with the server).
@@monke8698 I would assume so since there is such a drastic power difference between the 3. You start to work on 1 and get accustomed to its limitation and then you switch to the other option and bow magically you have a totally different set of numbers to memorize. I would assume it would get mentally exhausting.
Wait,that implies you had problems with employees stealing dev kits? Was that a thing at Activision? I figured you guys had security up to the crown of your skulls,so how did they get out of the building without anyone realizing it?
Oh, yeah, same exact scenario as ours actually. We were able to launch games and we had tried the same things and got the same error codes, but ultimately got stuck when trying to play the games (we didn't put our whole process in the video or show all the troubleshooting steps). We learned after publishing (from insiders) that they get "banned" even before connecting to the internet because the usage is tokenized regularly against a validation server, so once a developer goes out of business or stops applying for tokens, the token stops renewing and it gets deactivated/banned on connection. This is also annoying because even legitimate developers will eventually end up with bricks when Xbox decides no further XSX development needs to happen.
It's funny that the issue yall were having is directly related to the issues xbox live had over the weekend. All games, old or new, physical or digital, have to confirm a digital license in order to be used. Only way to do that is with an internet connection. Internet connection bans the dev kit, and it's now a brick. Unfortunate.
@@Monolize Well, its easily reversible if Microsoft decided to do so. Its not complete bricking, they just blacklist it. Like tbf, some of these consoles are basically loan materials and it belongs to Microsoft. So its technically "stolen". And stolen retail console have been blacklisted too. Like they said, they give 2 for free and few on discounted rental fee, and since this is hella expensive, unless you are super big game studio, you probably don't need more than 2 and can make do with regular ones for testing.
well on modded 360s you can swap KVs and get out of the quote ban so i wonder if its possible on the new gen xboxs as well especially since its a dev kit and that's essentially what an rgh 360 is
For future notice. Xbox's Backwards compatibility isn't true backwards compatibility. The disc is just used as a license that allows the console to download the actual backwards compatible build of the game that runs on the modern Xbox from the Xbox Live network. i.e. None of those old Xbox Games would have worked unless you were connected to the internet. Edit: If it wasn't clear, I'm talking about the Xbox 360 games that were bought. I'm not 100% on Xbox One stuff. I think they'll use Smart Delivery if connected to the internet, but I can't see why Xbox One games wouldn't play natively.
@UC3OUe7A1fhk3x3r3mXKfMOQ No it's not. You are not running actual code of the game from old xbox. You are downloading another version which works on current xbox. That's just different.
"Outside of a game development studio, I believe we will be the first to game on a development kit" For the Halo Championship Series tournament in December, we played on XDKs because they didn't have enough retail units to host the tournament with.
@@warmth_97 If you're talking about the games that were streamed where pro players were crashing, those were actually on AMD PCs since they sponsored the event 😬 They switched to consoles after the first day which helped a bit
I'm sure that Linus already knew that the banning of the xdk was highly likely, so he could not care too much. As long as he made back his money in the overall scheme of things, Linus knew that this would break. Worse case scenario, he either loses a bit of money and never does this again, or he loses a bit money but learns from the experience to know what to correct for next time.
10 gig port is definitely for moving builds over at speed. On titles I 've working on in QA it wasn't uncommon for us to get 2 or maybe even 3 builds a day at 90GB that needed testing.
@@caolkyle Not a game dev, but I guess they need improved hardware cause games in the making are pretty unoptimized and to have less crashes in the dev process they definitely need more RAM/VRAM. Otherwise it would probably get very annoying if work in progress game builds would crash all the time cause of the limited ram. At the end game testers and QA can test the game on the retail versions.
@@caolkyle For more 'demanding' and poorly optimized titles, the full performance capacity is used until the end of the Alpha gate or after transitioning to Beta, afterwards there's a dev setting limiting the the performance capacity to mimic or be as close as possible to a retail unit. It's pretty rare we get to test on retail units though, QA mainly tests on DevKits or TestKits, but there's cases where retail units are used for QA testing in the Final phase.
The speeds are because, as a developer we send builds to the system frequently. Sometimes running real time from computers to dev kits. So the data transfer needs to be quick, because time is money, and sending 200gb+ of data to the console for testing, scrapping that build and sending a new one is aloootttaaa data. Also as a dev, ive never used the buttons on the console, its entirely controlled through the controller, additional keyboard or the work machine. I'm talking the most extensive debug menus you've ever seen, ever, in the controller menus, kinda cool tbh.
@@airy_co afaik it's pretty unlikely without access to the extensive and horrible Microsoft dev tool ecosystem. haven't done xbone/series s/x dev before but if it's anything like the 360 tools, the dev software is generally fairly well integrated with the console plus the whole network access thing would make it pretty hard, seems like it leans pretty heavily on that for things as simple as running software edit: I entirely misread as "a single chance to develop a game with a rogue devkit" but the answer is still pretty unlikely
@@airy_co haha id go with zero chance. I wouldnt have a clue how to boot a game on the console without pushing from the dev platform. Which he doesnt have access to as evident by the end of the video. I was curious if he figured it out tho because ya know, its linus loool.
@@HululusLabs not entirely sure what you mean, a build of the game is what youre sending over. I can load it up with whatever I want, published versions, beta, brroken whatever because not every build is perfect, local builds etc. but it needs to be sent from a work machine. Without access to the work machines which require extensive logins and security hes never going to send anything over wihtout using an authorised login. the dev kit doesnt even connect to the internet its straight into the work pc for us.
I can confirm. PS3 was a really painful experience. There where just no tools for the Cell processor. Sony Japan gave design specs to IBM but completely left IBM out of making compilers and debuggers for the processor, and Sony had no internal capability to create a devkit, and did not figure this out until really late in the process. Oh the stories I could tell... blah.
PS3 made no sense to me. It was my favourite console, it looked awesome but was far too big as well. The graphics looked cardboardy but also amazing for the time. I can't decide if PS3 is the daddy or a mutant freak lol. Or both!
The internals are cool and all, but honestly I dig this aesthetic and design so much more. The feet on the bottom, the dual color and sunken logo, physical buttons and black and grey. It looks like tech, not a black box. All those vents, btw! I would love a little screen like that, even. It could tell you how much is downloading in the background.
This looks more like a bigger xbox one x. They literally took the design from the xbox one x, enlarged to fit all of the internal hardware and add a screen and extra buttons and ports for debugging purposes, it doesn't make sense to like this thing, there's no design in it (and that's the point, since it's intended for developers only)
@@TheCostantinus I will still go with it looks a lot better than the Series X. Get rid of the screen and other dev kit features and shrink it down some and it is exactly what a console should look like. Sometimes the generic old standard design looks better than the fancy new thing. And this isn't an anti-MS comment, the PS5 is awful looking.
i used to work for Square enix, we had these and ps dev kits all over the place for our game testers / devs/ qa all while the new games being tested on them didnt have a name and were still using code names. These things are heavy
The price was nearly entirely for the metal. For the manufacturing, it was a couple grand. That thing was essentially an investment, it is probably worth more now than it was when he bought it, plus all the money they made off the video.
I haven't been in game development for a long time, but I assume that 10GB network port is for uploading new builds and for accessing real-time development and debug tools so you can get insight into running code. Senior developers may make $100-300k a year, and development is often iterative, particularly during debug, so eliminating idle time from the loop is worth a lot of money. The slower port presumably mirrors a real Xbox LAN for the game to use. The spec bump is certainly for unoptimized code, as mentioned, but also loading up extra frameworks and modules to evaluate them in the code base, and running debug and analysis tools. I imagine that the increase from 2x to 2.5x RAM is because the size of tools and unoptimized code have both steadily grown.
The 2x memory is also very useful for finding memory leaks, it allows you more time to identify the cause of the leak before a fault is thrown over no allocatable memory left. As for the 10Gb Eth, it is used not just for transfering builds very quickly but having near instant access to remote debugging tools that need very fast access to ram for breakpoints to not slow down frame time. This is also extended to native tools created by the developer as Microsoft not only expects you to be using Visual Studio to debug the application but your own toolset should you be using a homebrewed solution which is more than highly likely. For example: EA, Ubisoft, Square Enix just to name a few have their own game engines that highly benefit from the fast connection during debugging.
I'm surprised that as an ex-game dev David didn't know that devkits cannot play retail games. That was very common knowledge among developers. It even says in the documentation. This has been the case for all devkits that I have used, back to PS2, Gamecube and original Xbox. Back when PS2 devkits cost AUD$25,000.
yeah and the fact that for anything to work it has to have a validated certificate on the xbox, of which is on a frequent timer for updates and will quickly expire if not synced. That's not always been the case, but assuming everything works until it connects to a server to say otherwise is just silly.
@@anzus6859 you also need to be online to get the license, as you saw as soon as they went online it tried to download the game but then they were banned because their ip was not in the whitelisted subnet or the S/N was already banned prior if you have no license you can play no games, this also happens on normal retail xbox, as this also seems just a scarlett kit just deactivated and resetted to retail
they definetively check if you are a real company with a real game also microsoft asks for a windows build of the game and needs a lot of papers beeing signed on person.
I worked in game dev for a while... It's amazing the basic information that isn't shared in these videos that MVG covers. Any Xbox dev kit since Xb360 has automatically been "banned" on the production XBLive network. They're able to connect to the Devtest XBL network, but they need to be logged into a registered developer account to connect. This also applied to when you can do Dev mode activation on more recent consoles. The minute you boot to Dev mode it puts you in the same walled garden that only allows connections to the DevTest XBL network to prevent piracy/cheating. Also, ever since XB360 even games on the disc need the console to be activated and download the auth codes to read the discs and execute the code. There's plenty of breakdowns on the checks and balances that microsoft uses - go look into the Xbox homebrew scene for more information.
If you have the game downloaded onto the xbox and its mostly taken apart you can pop the disc in let it read the code then pull the magnet off the top of the disc tray thing and remove the disc. Used to play system linked nazi zombies this way lol only had 1 disc.
@@Squilliam-Fancyson i think hes talking about the code on the disc lol. It only spins to read the code then the disc stops when its reading from the hard drive.
@@Squilliam-Fancyson The consoles themselves have unlock codes that have to be downloaded periodically from the Xbox servers otherwise they'll brick the console until it's back online. They started that with the last couple builds of xbox360 to make sure Xbox gold games weren't being downloaded and played after Gold subscription lapsed. 90% of games (including the ones shown) ship with basic sprites and content but lack the actual finalized code for the game. It's something developers started doing with XB1 to "prevent piracy". ModernVintageGamer (mvg) does some great deep dives on the topics if you want to really learn how consoles and game dev works
@@Enstrayed technically don't need it, but if the dev has to wait, it costs the company money. So having fast networking is a must if you move around big files regularly.
I found it amusing that Linus' first thought was that they use it just to test network speeds when he himself has editors edit off network storage with 10 gig networking which is closer to what this debug port would be used for lll
Regarding 10 gig networking: I used to work at a QA where we had over 500 Xbox ones receiving daily builds for games that could go well over 100GB. Being able to get a new build on a console in 10 seconds instead of a couple minutes would have saved a LOT of time.
Could it also be for live debug? I remember live debug remotely when doing dev on a kernel driver for Vista way back when via ethernet in visual studio
I remember reading someplace. Normally when you testing a game software you run into problems and sometimes you need up code 5+ times day, the 10gb network is so when you have upload 5-7gb 4-5 times day it does not take along time using the 10gb network...
For sure, you basically rent them from Microsoft for gamedev, it doesn't matter if they are stolen later. They are basically opening property that is not theirs.
Here's a tip: maybe don't watch and comment on a video made by a channel you clearly have problems with. Your viewer engagement helps Linus out, so I can't imagine he's upset you're butthurt.
"We're probably the first outside of a dev studio to run a game on a scarlet devkit". Sorry Linus. I had a devkit on my desk at work that I took home with me over COVID.
Kinda interesting how sophisticated Microsofts Kill Switches are. MIcrosoft knows how has every devkit, so figuring out when a company goes bankrupt and didn't sent them back is easy. And they put the devkit straight to a banlist. Once such a devkit connects to the internet and reaches a Microsoft Server, it probably instantly gets a kill command to stop working because its banned.
Microsoft whitelists devices to networks that are allowed to connect to them. When a company is setting up a project, they'll communicate the IP address the machine is using to connect to Xbox with Microsoft and they'll allow it to happen. If any device connects to Xbox without that whitelisted IP address, it's instantly banned. So they don't really "know" the status of anything. I could take a fresh XDK from Microsoft home and plug it in and it'll instantly ban because it doesn't recognize my network.
@@Wintyer Fuck Xbox's DRM. I tried to tell people, MVG tried to tell people, but nobody listened. "Oh it's fine, bro. You're just freaking out, bro. Everyone's got an internet connection, bro." Well, enjoy your shitty LockedBox.
It's only been relatively recently that they knew who had what. It wasn't until the XboxOne/PS4 that they began having them phone home at all. Then with XboxOneX/PS4Pro they started requiring devs to submit their public IP addresses from their offices and if the Devkit ever connected from another address it instantly got banned.
You gotta check Xbox 360 Jtag console hack... you will get instantly ban if you do that hack... there was false flagging and ban wave back in the days..
These are regularly bricked because the core usage is for examining source code. If one disappears or is at EOL it's industry standard to brick them to protect IP. That said, early in my career I bricked a PS3 Dev kit, and by bricked I mean caused a unit to completely die, investigating a bug for a game that got completely scrapped
Now the PS3 dev kits that are still around are kept alive by the jailbroken community with DEX versions of CFW like Rebug or Evilnat. I want a PS3 dev kit.
It was really awesome to see Nick in this video, I hadn't heard this side of the game development experience before and I'd like to hear more from him about the way Microsoft, Sony, etc work with devs and their hardware
If he was QA, I wonder how much more he'd know really. Doesn't seem like he worked really long in game dev. People who aren't leads, producers or directors (depending on the the company) don't work directly with manufacturers. He could probably talk about the certification process and maybe he does have contacts who would be more knowledgeable.
From my time working with Xbox consoles, I can tell you that the offline system update (OSU or OSUDT as it used to be called) is not only useful for people to update their consoles while offline, but it was a life saver of a troubleshooting step, especially when Xbox One consoles would be stuck on the green loading screen. Essentially it formats the console and reinstalls the software. Or at least that's what it used to do back in the day. And we'd actually use that for more issues that could not be fixed through regular troubleshooting. It was a sort of a last resort and if that didn't work the console usually needed servicing.
@@KesleyBenedet unfortunately I haven't been working as a game dev, but rather doing tech support for the consoles. The issues I described are issues users were facing and my job was to help them resolve the issues.
I remember when I had bad internet at home so I downloaded PS3 firmware update on a flash drive at school. Didn't know you could do the same for an xbox one, although I imagine it's less intuitive
My drive crush in Xbox one x, I replaced it with some of my SSHD, and I stuck on the OSU part. Drive was partitioned, but nothing works. I am stuck at 1 percent on system installation. I read that I should try several pendrives and tools for unpacking OSU, and after 6 different preparation, I finally have a working Xbox. OSU is a nightmare, and I am not even in the insider program (insiders cannot use OSU before the number of iteration of OSU hits the number of insiders built).
Unfortunately, LTT is not the first to game on a Dev Kit. All of Competitive Halo's tournaments ("HCS") for Halo Infinite run their "Open" brackets through the Xbox Dev Kit consoles because its cheaper to use those than separate gaming PCs for each player for the 50+ random teams trying to make it into the tournament.
Yeah exactly. When I went to HCS recently, there were about 30 XDK dev kits people were using to play through the brackets. I was surprised as well. I got up close with one as well and it is very dope.
I got excited each time it looked like you guys got closer to playing a game. IT couldn't figure out how to fix our printer today at work, and I figured it out myself after an hour. The adrenaline! Lol
It wouldn't work i guess, i'm pretty sure is not that stupid, imagine someone playing your game on the same online services but with a dev kit console, it's litteraly worse than PC cheating, debugging can really make you god, pretty sure dev kits have strict procedures to even plug them to the wall, so many pass and stuff that makes them really usable by devs, kinda makes sense since it's a DEV kit
@@MrQuicheProductions it would work, they were trying to play in offline mode. The game needed to download and update, and since it wasn’t an authorized dev kit it was bricked as soon as they logged in. It would be the case with anyone else that was using an un-authorized dev kit. Aside from the official kit they were using, which has to be given directly from Xbox, any Xbox can be put into dev mode and used as a dev kit but you won’t be pulled off the network.
I think the barcode and the "sort of serial numbers" on the box may have a chance to compromise the one who provide the machine to you. Better also blur that out.
@@asusplayer_ yeah it's probably be banned after 5 minutes this video got released, faster than Xbox to fix their damn servers to run a single player game. Edit: NVM it got banned
17:40 I use this page a lot when swapping out XBOX one's HDD's for SSD's! (or just upgrading or fixing a failed HDD) It's pretty neat and nice of Microsoft to release the software. But Sony also has their offline Updates for PS4 (which you also need to replace the HDD)
@@guspaz It sounds stupid without context like that, but it also means when new consoles come out, he doesn't have to buy multiple of those either. It saves money over time as new consoles come out
@@HearMeLearn Linus already said he has to replace it with a newer one because the current receiver doesn't support the features he wanted (multiple 4k 120hz support). So much for that.
@@william41017 Yeah retail xbox is a black box, but it's also a fucking huge, designed to stand vertically black box. It's got more in common with a vase than a media player.
Game studios use the 10G Debug network to stream pre-built assets from the server/workstation to streamline production. It is mostly a legacy thing now though since the latest consoles can handle read pre-built data a lot faster than streaming from network
@@DimitriMoreira did they ever pay Zubov for his Steel Series games? That was the scummy thing I knew of them, they declined to pay their developers, and in fact just failed to communicate or pay unless put over hot coals and flayed :D
@@DimitriMoreira just because something partially goes to charity, doesnt mean its immune to criticism. they treat lowprofile devs like garbage, its very unbecoming
@@MsHumanOfTheDecade yeah. they're not the company they used to be. been a few years now. was cool they did the ukraine bundle, but that was kind of the last death rattle of the old HB as far as I am concerned.
10 gig networking is clearly just so developers can transfer data to it more quickly. By the time 10 gig internet is widespread, I'm sure standard routers will be operating at 40+
We're on the cusp of, if not 10 gig Internet access, at least multi-gig. Bell Canada is rolling out a symmetrical 3 gigabit tier, and Rogers is trying to one-up them with an 8 gigabit tier. Bell's been sending out xg-pon ONTs with 10 gig ethernet ports for a few months now. Meanwhile, those of us stuck on Videotron have at most their upcoming 1.5 gigabit tier, which is far from symmetrical with 50 megabit of upstream.
@@guspaz I’ve just got 1 gig internet recently (well 1140mbps) but the router provided by my ISP (virgin media) can’t even support more than 940mbps - crazy. Internet will soon be like water pressure, just one speed and it’s a lottery what you get but it will be so fast no one will care.
@@guspaz also you need to be complaining about why mobile data is so expensive in Canada - I’ve been all over the world and Canada was the most expensive I’ve experienced for a data sim by far!
I doubt it. My country has 1gbit widely available, and 2/4gbit in "testing" for consumers, yet only 1gbit routers are provided, and 10gbit networking is very expensive to buy currently. So networking requiring 10gbit is already here, yet there are relatively few consumer routers that will do that speed.
@@Programmdude what country is that? I already see 5G overtaking the fixed line speeds in many parts of the UK, just because we have a “speed guarantee” cash back system so not many people offer it as fixed broadband. Also the latency claims of 5G I think aren’t as good as promised (so no good for gamers).
You have to hand it to LTT, they cover pretty much everything tech now. Gone are the days for just PC hardware and the occasional remote control fire truck. 👏👏👏👏
For the next time: The best way to disassemble glued-on parts, is using blue gasoline (the one used in zippos); A few drops, wait a bit, it will peel off without any effort and without breaking the adhesive film, and when it evaporates, it will stick again.
The thing looks so much more smart than I expected it to be. Why does it have such a fancy unboxing experience?? I thought it would be a some sort of test bench looking thing with a bunch of exposed pcb's and arrives in a beat up carboard box secured with some cracked in half Styrofoam thing and padded with wadded up newspaper.
Nah; they'd want to lock down the hardware design pretty solidly before letting developers work on it; for consumer products like game consoles - especially ones with a brand lineage like Xbox - getting the hardware down is the important part. The software will continue to be developed long into this hardware version's life-cycle and beyond. Microsoft doesn't need to worry about having some "killer apps" ready to go as soon as the platform is released, so they won't take the risk of letting software devs play with potentially broken hardware, or a hardware design that will be obsoleted by the final product. Fun Fact: I used to work for a software company that, along with a finished product, also had to develop drivers for the hardware various laptop manufacturers used in their designs - and the permutations were almost infinite; we had something like 100 different drivers to accomplish essentially the same thing. We often had "development phase hardware" delivered to us. I had indeed received prototype laptops that were exposed PCBs in random cardboard boxes... one even came to us on top of a *cookie sheet*. With a piece of cardboard glued to it so the PCB didn't short out on the metal. Fun times...
@@MrJest2 Laptops and tablets should all get the Vulcan IDIC medal. I have a tablet that I struggled with for a while trying to get Windows 10 to install a driver *and work* with its MTP setting for USB. Nothing would work. Windows would just obstinately refuse to connect driver to hardware. So I got to poking around and manually selected the generic USB MTP driver under Portable Device. It worked! The bleeping STANDARD MTP DRIVER that comes with Windows 10 worked, yet Windows would not automatically detect that and install *that* driver.
@@MrJest2 sounds like a company if it can do it cheaper it will sorry you got stuck in a shitty factory kinda ballshit should have gotten a better job (well more so gone with a better company to get test jigs and shit because dammmmm)
@@greggv8 That's often a good approach if nothing seems to work, these days. Sadly, back when we got prototype laptops "with character" and had to custom craft drivers for each hardware combination, it was just after the release of Win95. There *were* no reliable OS-installed drivers beyond the very rudimentary ones common to any IBM-compatible PC at the time, and everyone who needed to support custom hardware (which was every laptop in existence) had to roll their own.
Even if it wouldn't have gotten them any closer to playing games, in between trying things offline and online, they should have plugged into a non-internet-connected network and performed a tcpdump of the traffic.
XDK Devkits have different encryption and signing keys to the retail units, which is why no commercial games would work. They also have a certificate for all of their capabilities which is tied to the static IP address of the studio it is registered to. The instant that thing was connected to the internet Microsoft would have revoked the certificate making it completely worthless. Without the cert it can not use any of the debug capabilities and since it doesn't have the retail keys it can't play retail games. This would have been useful in the hands of reverse engineers but now it's basically a brick. You would think the game dev guy he has advising him would know better.
It's pretty clear the guy just wanted the money, if he was interested in the potential for the homebrew scene he would't be selling it off to youtubers
I think it's pretty clear that they knew there was a very real possibility the kit would be bricked after they connected it to the internet. They had just already tried everything else and were out of things to try so it was the only thing left they could do. Sure the kit is bricked now, but it was already as good as bricked before, they couldn't do anything with it.
actually no this kit was *new in box* meaning it had never been activated before. without activation, dev kits do not expose any sort of debug capabilities meaning this thing was essentially equivalent to a retail for it's entire lifespan (until sent back to MS ofc)
@@x3wildcard Well they should if they care about right to repair and game preservation. Things like mispaired PS4 blue ray drives can be easily fixed through modding but you'll have to pay Sony to do it out of warranty. There are no (publicly) known Xbox One / Series exploits but having access to XDKs would speed up discovery.
We use these XDKs in QA and when paired with the Xbox GDK, they're awesome and extremely helpful. This is the only version of the hardware which is great since the XB1 had a bunch of different versions (test kits and dev kits for each revision, some looked like retail, some looked sort of like this but different colors/sizes). Without the GDK or Dev app, you're really missing out though. You also can't run retail games on the system and even if you did get your hands on the GDK, dev app and some ISO's, you'd need the sandbox for those games and have dev accounts made for those sandbox's. So this really is just an expensive paperweight in your case. However, I think you can completely turn off developer mode then install the retail Xbox OS and that should work but all of the unique features will be disabled essentially turning it into a standard xbox. Not sure if this is still a thing for these XDKs but I did it once on an XB1 dev kit at work.
Oh hey thanks to Xbox's DRM you can't play most of the games on a Dev Kit, just like the retail systems. However a game like Devil May Cry 5 Special Edition would've been you're best bet since it's a Series X only game and has the complete game on disc. Most Xbox games require an online authentication from Xbox servers. However Series X only game discs don't need this, but some of them also don't have the entire game on the disc like Forza Horizon 5.
I thought it was technically fully bleeped but the words around it and the length of the name mean it could only be EA. plus EA has a division in Vancouver
At university we had something like 15 PlayStation dev kits and 20 Xbox dev kits which we freely had access to in the lab. I never needed to use them (I did Computer Animation) but my course shared lectures with Computer Games Design and they needed to use them for some of their assignments. Microsoft provided us all of their software (Office, Azure, Xbox and Kinect SDKs, Visual Studio, etc) for free as well which was really cool. It was through a Microsoft program called Dreamspark which was rebranded, and I don't know what's included nowadays.
Depending on where you live, it is no longer legally Microsoft's property, given it was acquired in a liquidation sale. But that highly depends on how liquidation of leased products is handled in your country.
You buy a license to use it, not own it. It's still Microsoft's property, you're just in possession of stolen goods if you buy it 2nd hand. It's easier for them to just ban it then bother with getting it back.
IIRC, how it works is that the hardware needs to be returned to Microsoft when development is no longer possible. They didn't have the right to liquidate it.
I don't think it works that way. The company that was liquidated never actually owned the hardware it was rented/leased from Microsoft. Technically speaking the liquidation company never had rights to sell it in the fire place.
For the techies out there, this explains why a retail game wouldn't work on a devkit: ruclips.net/video/U7VwtOrwceo/видео.html Specifically at 18:13, one of the "Core Tenants of Xbox One Security" is "Keep development kit key world separate from retail key world". They don't want people cheating on live servers using devkits.
The kit was in retail mode because to access the development kit key world requires an activation cert which this never got. The reason this couldn't run games is unrelated to dev kit activation, this is just general DRM that even a retail would see.
12:37 Nuh-uh, Linus, that's a buildtag of a Windows 11 core! Or Xbox OS 2202. So by this point you'd know this one's been unfortunately online and been bricked in the same way that GN's was.
@@awildmoose6541 The current one should have had a handle at the top to look like a nuclear reactor core and also to make it easier to carry. Just yet another missed opportunity.
Nah, these can be toggled back and forth. Same with Durango and x360- I have never been in sony camp, nintendo wii ones could also go either way. It's just a pain since you have to log back in and get re-registered to get into retail - and if you're on a devkit that's been flagged by MS, you can brick it.
The debug port is likely for remote software debugging on a PC. You can debug software (i.e. the game) running a remote target over an IP connection. It will allow you to set breakpoints to stop the program, view values in memory, step through lines of code and trace the program logic. It's pretty common in cases where your software is running on hardware separate from the PC which runs your development environment. I don't work for a game developer, but we usually compile the build on our PC workstation, copy it over to the target over ethernet and then run it on the target while live debugging on the PC workstation over the same connection. I imagine it's the same for console game devs, but they probably work with much larger file sizes, hence the need for 10 gbps to speed up transfers of new builds.
@@kuyans3889 i think its more a tournament LAN server thing then a console shortage thing, i know from watching Overwatch league they run on a special LAN server with a higher tick rate then public servers and special patch of the overwatch client. its probably easier developing the server and clients on a dev kit and just using the dev kit in tournament so you dont have to do any "retail model" testing. plus the extra memory and specs would help the game run smoother so you hopefully don't have pro players or the audience complaining or about lag or stutters, which could be very bad for their reputation.
Thats honestly a blessing in disguise, spend that time on trying to get a ps5 or fork out a bit extra for a PC, there really is no point in getting xbox
I wonder how well this would do as a computer, beef up the the SoC some more, extra CPU cores and another 3000-odd GPU cores, have an 80GB SKU, and give it an SD card reader
@@kazioo2 Then just give it the right RAM as well, nothing saying the board couldn't be remade, and it's not like microsoft could just not have gotten rid of the second internal drive slot in the commercial XSX/S, so they ain't shy to fuck us over in the end
13:49 That's not correct at all. PS1 devkits were standard ISA cards (DTL-H2000) that were plugged into our PC's (a Pentium 3 at that time) running Win98. It was essentially an entire Playstation on a card. There wasn't even an SGI machine in the entire studio.
I think in a prior video he said he worked on a Gears of War game, but not in which position. QA testers aren't always named, maybe he worked a contractor company.
You guys could just try turning of DevMode, tho dev stuff wont work as you have to have a developer account, but the normal part(when exitted from DevMode(in the settings, it might reset the console)) should work OK, tho again there might be artifical limit on the resources, which would make it pretty much retail xbox.
Love how Linus embraces learning new things. Sometimes I forget he doesn't necessarily work with console repair much. Makes sense he didn't know about updating offline and the hidden menu's. I used to repair between 5 and 20 of these a week. I almost ALWAYS updated via USB bc it was generally less problematic than via internet.
@@firelord4662 I think u missed my point? I'm learning things all the time like Linus and realized he's no different as the Pinnacle of PC tech on RUclips. Just meant it put it in perspective that what I assume is common technology may not be in different fields.
Great upload, I love it when the LTT crew put up great interesting vids like this, Would be awesome to have a follow up video on this if the system was demanded to be returned, Or if Microsoft could unlock it so its just a regular console with its "Developer" features disabled etc.. Would be awesome if it could be made to work!
It would be pointless to turn it into a regular console since you'd be losing all the interesting features about it and like they addressed in the video, every Series X console can be turned into a dev kit. That's way more interesting (not that Linus can do anything with that since they don't have a dev account).
@@Ayoul I'd say it'd still be interesting because not only would it mean its no longer a dead brick, but also you'd still have that 40gb of ram, would be interesting to see if it would still take advantage of that ram vs a stock series x and compare the results
Being a QA watching this is just funny, I am like "huh, finally I know and have access to stuff Linus doesn't know/ have access to" LOL. Debug LAN is the one we use when using the XSX Manager GDK on a PC to control the console.
Really hoping that someone who happens to get a hold of one of these is able to use it to figure out some kind of jailbreak for the Series systems. DRM only ever hurts legitimate customers. The recent Xbox outage really highlighted just how bad the DRM is.
Jailbreaking a retail console seems hard but for jailbreakers themselves is fine. But with devkits it's another story, you can't figure out shit as you would need to get in touch with inside data or with a legitimate developer who's in will to throw away his credential just so a few people who accidentally got their hands on the XDK will be able to play something. There's just no profitable reason to do this, ok i got to play dirt 5 on 300fps but what's next? Isn't it better to just stick with the retail version? After all it'll be the same thing.
@@PartyhatRS Since you are someone who pirates I imagine you can agree that most games end up getting cracked, and usually rather quickly. So people who pirate those games end up getting them for free anyway. People who actually paid for a copy includes DRM that causes performance issues, can hinder modding, make it harder to back up the game they bought, or at worse make the game unplayable due to needing a constant online connection to a check in server. Look at the recent Xbox outage or PS4 CBOMB issue. A jailbroken PS4 has no issue. However if Sony had not fixed the CBOMB people who actually paid would loose access to just about everything they paid for. You combat piracy by making it easier and more enjoyable to buy the game then it is to pirate it. Make it fairly priced, allow people to mod it or back it up how they wish, and buying it on store fronts like Steam includes extras like achievements, being able to share the game, and so on.
@@PartyhatRS Thanks for that. I am always more then happy to talk things out. Even if I don't agree with someone. I don't agree with pirating something just to get it for free, but some do for one reason or another, and people are entitled to their opinion. However I do think piracy will be a necessary evil until the industry changes a little. For instance demos used to be actually free as a way to get hands on experience to see if you'd like a game. Now usually the only way to demo a game first hand without spending money is to pirate it, and then buy a legit copy if you like it. There are also other games or other content in general you can't easily/legally access if you wanted to. Take delisted games or even VHS tapes for example I also think Sony has actually shown how unnecessary DRM is. Their consoles are full of DRM. Yet they released their PS4 to PC ports DRM free. You can latterly get their ports easily for free with a few clicks. Even so they have seen such great returns on their PC releases more are coming.
i remember when i found one of these just laying outside of a broken down delivery truck when i was on vacation. didnt know they were this rare. it wasnt EXACTLY one of these, but something similar, and definately an XBOX device of some sort. it also said XDK on it and looked sort of like this one, but a little bit smaller.
I worked for a disaster relief company a few years ago we got sent to surrey UK after we got hit by storms I saw a bunch of ps4 and xbox one dev kits in the hello games studio after it was flooded . I remember being sad because I was a fan and seeing how much they lost I understood why the game released in such an unfinished state. This was only a month after the xbox one released so they where basically brand new
@@NightmareRex6 idk what you mean by that, but i have not seen any other comments written like mine or even close. if your trying to imply that i'm a bot, well, sorry to dissapoint you buck'o, but i'm as human as the day i was born.
What's funny, is that if this console is anything like PlayStation dev kits, there's a slight difference in the ID of the console that checks if it's a debug/dev or retail console (for PS3, console ID's would have 1 number different if it was a debug console). Assuming this works the same way these days, this console was probably completely undetected from Microsoft until they decided to connect the ethernet cable. It probably did a handshake with Microsoft servers and saw the difference in the console's identification and immediately banned it. I was surprised it actually accepted the software update, typically the consoles have completely separate builds for each version. Maybe things are changed nowadays. Nonetheless, I love these dev kit videos, it takes me back to the days where I loved to tinker with game consoles and their capabilities. Great video!
5:40 If Microsoft wants to sell newer consoles, their in-store video trailer should show old hardware on the left and newer hardware on the right in the same trailer kind of thing. FPS counters won't help if both are just locked 30 or 60 FPS.
15:33 i like how linus, even after making it big, still dislikes unnecessarily spending money on things. seen him act like this in other videos too, and i just think it’s really neat.
@@prateekpanwar646 until you realize that he still has to mentain a whole company and buy the newest tech to review. I can see why he acts like this lol
I suspect the added memory, on top of what was meant for the games and OS themselves was for the added overhead of attaching the debugger and features you would want to be able to test functionality and diagnose problems. Just running Visual Studio alone on 16GB of memory with a moderately sized non-game project can have you swapping memory almost immediately leading to a terrible dev/debugging experience.
I wonder if they had used a external drive with games from a different Xbox and transferred the games to the Dev kit Xbox whether that would've worked?
The 10G network port is mostly for ingesting builds. If you can shave off 15-25 minutes of QC and dev time for every build they play, you save a _lot_ of money in the long run. EDIT: Nearly everything on the devkit that's "better" than retail version is because you want speed things up for faster iteration (like the 10G I mentioned) and because, like Plouffe said, the game is not always perfectly optimized and that's not always a major concern for the developers or QA. They're not because Microsoft can't sell it at retail nor because they want to make gamers suffer or they just can't do it at scale, like Linus implies.
There was a small moment around 2010 where we all thought the living room would be ruled by a device like this. Cable, streaming and games through a bespoke home theatre pc. The consoles then began to fill that role, which worked out because the public seemed, and still seems, really resistant to using a keyboard in the living room.
One of my fondest memories was that my cousins somehow smuggled a PS2 dev kit to Mexico, I was probably 5 years old but I remember the shape of the console was nothing like the retail version of the console. Sadly they sold the console at a Flea market. Til this day I’ve been searching hard for that dev kit but not a trace of it remains at the local flea markets or technology plazas. Hell even on the internet. Would be cool to someday buy it back.
Hey Linus I've had one for about 3 years now for a company I work for, the dev kit ethernet port on the back is to connect to our company's vpns so when we boot thr console it doesn't get bricked the more you know!
Ps2 dev kits were $10k each and massive, and you would use test kits where you could as they were only 2k each. But, we used to mod chip regular old retail PS2s for $700 and wrote our own debugger that would run on the retail kit. In the end we had most of the functionality of the dev kit on the retail kit. Only leads had dev kits and everyone else (including many of the artists) had chipped retail kits. In a studio of over 100 devs it saved us hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Oh wow, I'd totally forgotten about the "test" PS2 machines. IIRC, the main benefit to a test PS2 was that it ran games burned on regular DVD-Rs instead of requiring manufactured discs with all the DRM and anti-copying measures. That way developers could just burn a disc of the current game-in-development for testing & QA to run. Most of the debugging stuff had to be removed, and the game was "built" like a retail version, so it fit in the memory of a regular PS2, but testing then only needed a $2k test PS2 instead of a full-on $10k development PS2.
The extra memory is mostly for all of the extra debugging software, and a little bit for unoptomized games.
first again
didn't Steve got banned by Microsoft?
@@xmackdaddy69 yes, he did
I figured that was the reason, because I wouldn’t see the reason why an Xbox should have 40 gigs of GDDR6. Absolutely insane.
@@bluephoenix1525 what's the exact reason for banning steve?
I worked for Activision. The 10G port is so we can download or stream the latest builds of the game directly onto the local machine. Back in 2010 we had to burn discs every single day and hand them out to QA. Burning discs was often the process that wasted so much time especially towards the end of a project where we had new builds every day. The "burner room guys" always had to come in early to make sure the discs were ready for when QA arrives. It could take hours and hours to hand out copies to a floor of 100+ QA testers. Being able to have a 1G, 2.5G or even 10G ethernet port is a massive timesaver for anyone who needs to get the latest build. Additionally, streaming (as opposed to downloading) to the local machine also helps with security. No more worrying about someone stealing a disk or even an entire devkit. Simply power off the console and the build gets deleted (or at least the leftover temp files become unusable when there is no connection with the server).
As a developer
Is it that hard to optimise games on series s?
Or techland is just bad?
@@monke8698 tech land is just that bad
@@monke8698 I would assume so since there is such a drastic power difference between the 3. You start to work on 1 and get accustomed to its limitation and then you switch to the other option and bow magically you have a totally different set of numbers to memorize. I would assume it would get mentally exhausting.
100% agree 😀
Wait,that implies you had problems with employees stealing dev kits? Was that a thing at Activision? I figured you guys had security up to the crown of your skulls,so how did they get out of the building without anyone realizing it?
Oh, yeah, same exact scenario as ours actually. We were able to launch games and we had tried the same things and got the same error codes, but ultimately got stuck when trying to play the games (we didn't put our whole process in the video or show all the troubleshooting steps). We learned after publishing (from insiders) that they get "banned" even before connecting to the internet because the usage is tokenized regularly against a validation server, so once a developer goes out of business or stops applying for tokens, the token stops renewing and it gets deactivated/banned on connection. This is also annoying because even legitimate developers will eventually end up with bricks when Xbox decides no further XSX development needs to happen.
thats so sad that their hardware become a brick / e-waste in the near future
It's funny that the issue yall were having is directly related to the issues xbox live had over the weekend. All games, old or new, physical or digital, have to confirm a digital license in order to be used. Only way to do that is with an internet connection. Internet connection bans the dev kit, and it's now a brick. Unfortunate.
@@Monolize Well, its easily reversible if Microsoft decided to do so. Its not complete bricking, they just blacklist it.
Like tbf, some of these consoles are basically loan materials and it belongs to Microsoft. So its technically "stolen". And stolen retail console have been blacklisted too. Like they said, they give 2 for free and few on discounted rental fee, and since this is hella expensive, unless you are super big game studio, you probably don't need more than 2 and can make do with regular ones for testing.
well on modded 360s you can swap KVs and get out of the quote ban so i wonder if its possible on the new gen xboxs as well especially since its a dev kit and that's essentially what an rgh 360 is
is it possible for someone to make a modchip or any modification to a bricked xdk and unbrick it tho?
For future notice. Xbox's Backwards compatibility isn't true backwards compatibility. The disc is just used as a license that allows the console to download the actual backwards compatible build of the game that runs on the modern Xbox from the Xbox Live network. i.e. None of those old Xbox Games would have worked unless you were connected to the internet.
Edit: If it wasn't clear, I'm talking about the Xbox 360 games that were bought. I'm not 100% on Xbox One stuff. I think they'll use Smart Delivery if connected to the internet, but I can't see why Xbox One games wouldn't play natively.
huh I didn't know that
That's so annoying, it'd just use up your space downloading games when they could have just made it actually backwards compatible
@UC3OUe7A1fhk3x3r3mXKfMOQ No it's not. You are not running actual code of the game from old xbox. You are downloading another version which works on current xbox. That's just different.
@@bubbleboy821 lol as if it is as simple as that
ngl, thats smarter then whatever I would of came up with.
"Outside of a game development studio, I believe we will be the first to game on a development kit"
For the Halo Championship Series tournament in December, we played on XDKs because they didn't have enough retail units to host the tournament with.
@@thatanimeweirdo yeah but in this case it was due to a shortage, they did not intend to have the players compete on a completed game with a dev-kit
@@toxicgreen8625 TBF, they probably didn't intend for LTT to get their hands on one either.
@@toxicgreen8625 The Gamescom is a big gaming event, you play on unfinished builds and devkits all the time there.
Is that why there were so many lag outs/players dropping out of games?
@@warmth_97 If you're talking about the games that were streamed where pro players were crashing, those were actually on AMD PCs since they sponsored the event 😬 They switched to consoles after the first day which helped a bit
"As far as we know, ours is still able to run software"
Microsoft: "Not for long."
That hurts
Just don't connect to the internet!
@@MrPruske too late
It's not like it worked before that... It was a paperweight since the beginning, that's a pretty op paperweight!!! Hahahahah
Now this is time to try to ressurect it by trying to install Linux on it. Given the hardware Gentoo is the best bet.
I always like how Linus is like I can't wait to use this and then proceeds to taking it apart and possibly break it before he gets to use it
Ave does it to, must be a Canadian thing.
Welcome to IT
@@Cobyc5150 lol also it’s super entertaining. Almost like Jeremy Clarkson on Top Gear
I'm sure that Linus already knew that the banning of the xdk was highly likely, so he could not care too much. As long as he made back his money in the overall scheme of things, Linus knew that this would break. Worse case scenario, he either loses a bit of money and never does this again, or he loses a bit money but learns from the experience to know what to correct for next time.
@@Cobyc51508:02 Yup
10 gig port is definitely for moving builds over at speed. On titles I 've working on in QA it wasn't uncommon for us to get 2 or maybe even 3 builds a day at 90GB that needed testing.
Out of curiosity do you limit the hardware on the dev kits to see how games would perform on retail units?
@@caolkyle Not a game dev, but I guess they need improved hardware cause games in the making are pretty unoptimized and to have less crashes in the dev process they definitely need more RAM/VRAM.
Otherwise it would probably get very annoying if work in progress game builds would crash all the time cause of the limited ram.
At the end game testers and QA can test the game on the retail versions.
@@tomsvfx not retail, on TestKit)
@@caolkyle For more 'demanding' and poorly optimized titles, the full performance capacity is used until the end of the Alpha gate or after transitioning to Beta, afterwards there's a dev setting limiting the the performance capacity to mimic or be as close as possible to a retail unit. It's pretty rare we get to test on retail units though, QA mainly tests on DevKits or TestKits, but there's cases where retail units are used for QA testing in the Final phase.
The speeds are because, as a developer we send builds to the system frequently. Sometimes running real time from computers to dev kits. So the data transfer needs to be quick, because time is money, and sending 200gb+ of data to the console for testing, scrapping that build and sending a new one is aloootttaaa data.
Also as a dev, ive never used the buttons on the console, its entirely controlled through the controller, additional keyboard or the work machine. I'm talking the most extensive debug menus you've ever seen, ever, in the controller menus, kinda cool tbh.
Interesting. Do you know if there was a single chance to get a game running with a rogue devkit like the one in the video?
@@airy_co afaik it's pretty unlikely without access to the extensive and horrible Microsoft dev tool ecosystem. haven't done xbone/series s/x dev before but if it's anything like the 360 tools, the dev software is generally fairly well integrated with the console
plus the whole network access thing would make it pretty hard, seems like it leans pretty heavily on that for things as simple as running software
edit: I entirely misread as "a single chance to develop a game with a rogue devkit" but the answer is still pretty unlikely
@@airy_co haha id go with zero chance. I wouldnt have a clue how to boot a game on the console without pushing from the dev platform. Which he doesnt have access to as evident by the end of the video. I was curious if he figured it out tho because ya know, its linus loool.
is there no way to send a differential build? Or is that just too prone to error?
@@HululusLabs not entirely sure what you mean, a build of the game is what youre sending over. I can load it up with whatever I want, published versions, beta, brroken whatever because not every build is perfect, local builds etc. but it needs to be sent from a work machine. Without access to the work machines which require extensive logins and security hes never going to send anything over wihtout using an authorised login. the dev kit doesnt even connect to the internet its straight into the work pc for us.
I can confirm. PS3 was a really painful experience. There where just no tools for the Cell processor. Sony Japan gave design specs to IBM but completely left IBM out of making compilers and debuggers for the processor, and Sony had no internal capability to create a devkit, and did not figure this out until really late in the process. Oh the stories I could tell... blah.
Please, share them.
We only hear about how bad it was, but actually hearing from developers and artists that worked on it, would be nice.
PS3 made no sense to me. It was my favourite console, it looked awesome but was far too big as well. The graphics looked cardboardy but also amazing for the time. I can't decide if PS3 is the daddy or a mutant freak lol. Or both!
Please to share.
@@sandertu8366 MVG ( Modern Vintage Gamer ) did make a video where he mentions just how frustrating the cell is.
How powerful is the Cell processor compared to modern CPUs from AMD/Intel?
The internals are cool and all, but honestly I dig this aesthetic and design so much more. The feet on the bottom, the dual color and sunken logo, physical buttons and black and grey. It looks like tech, not a black box. All those vents, btw! I would love a little screen like that, even. It could tell you how much is downloading in the background.
These ones really feel and look solid&reliable. Many has been improved since previous-gen hot and squeaky devkits.
It just looks like an xbox one x
This looks more like a bigger xbox one x. They literally took the design from the xbox one x, enlarged to fit all of the internal hardware and add a screen and extra buttons and ports for debugging purposes, it doesn't make sense to like this thing, there's no design in it (and that's the point, since it's intended for developers only)
@@TheCostantinus I will still go with it looks a lot better than the Series X. Get rid of the screen and other dev kit features and shrink it down some and it is exactly what a console should look like. Sometimes the generic old standard design looks better than the fancy new thing.
And this isn't an anti-MS comment, the PS5 is awful looking.
It looks like a set top box that Panasonic would make 20 years ago and I love it.
i used to work for Square enix, we had these and ps dev kits all over the place for our game testers / devs/ qa all while the new games being tested on them didnt have a name and were still using code names. These things are heavy
It scares me linus tried to take it apart before testing it first.
3 mins into the vid and linus hasn't dropped it yet...so far so good
needs to flex his newfound muscles
I had ocd the entire video
You must be new here
Like, why does he keep wanting to do things backwards?
I mean you paid 69000 for a gold controller!!! This seems pretty OK with Linus standards 😂
this is nothing compared to that for sure this is chump change
The price was nearly entirely for the metal. For the manufacturing, it was a couple grand.
That thing was essentially an investment, it is probably worth more now than it was when he bought it, plus all the money they made off the video.
price of gold went up, so that controller is basically stonks at this point
You can not use that control
@@nanolog522 if I remember right they melted down the gold back
I haven't been in game development for a long time, but I assume that 10GB network port is for uploading new builds and for accessing real-time development and debug tools so you can get insight into running code. Senior developers may make $100-300k a year, and development is often iterative, particularly during debug, so eliminating idle time from the loop is worth a lot of money. The slower port presumably mirrors a real Xbox LAN for the game to use. The spec bump is certainly for unoptimized code, as mentioned, but also loading up extra frameworks and modules to evaluate them in the code base, and running debug and analysis tools. I imagine that the increase from 2x to 2.5x RAM is because the size of tools and unoptimized code have both steadily grown.
Gamers Nexus theorised that, about punting new builds via the 10gb port.
The 2x memory is also very useful for finding memory leaks, it allows you more time to identify the cause of the leak before a fault is thrown over no allocatable memory left. As for the 10Gb Eth, it is used not just for transfering builds very quickly but having near instant access to remote debugging tools that need very fast access to ram for breakpoints to not slow down frame time. This is also extended to native tools created by the developer as Microsoft not only expects you to be using Visual Studio to debug the application but your own toolset should you be using a homebrewed solution which is more than highly likely. For example: EA, Ubisoft, Square Enix just to name a few have their own game engines that highly benefit from the fast connection during debugging.
The bump to 2.5x RAM also has to do with massive log files, as per another comment in the GN video.
That is exactly what the 10gb port is for... I got one of these kits...
@@CallumCarmicheal 10 Gbps does not offer faster access over 1 Gbps, just more bandwidth. (more data, not faster data)
I'm surprised that as an ex-game dev David didn't know that devkits cannot play retail games. That was very common knowledge among developers. It even says in the documentation. This has been the case for all devkits that I have used, back to PS2, Gamecube and original Xbox. Back when PS2 devkits cost AUD$25,000.
yeah and the fact that for anything to work it has to have a validated certificate on the xbox, of which is on a frequent timer for updates and will quickly expire if not synced.
That's not always been the case, but assuming everything works until it connects to a server to say otherwise is just silly.
keep in mind that there are also god boxes that can also run green (production) games other than the red (development) one
this is actually false i played retail games all the time you just need to change the sandbox mode from dev to retail its that easy in the settings.
@@anzus6859 you also need to be online to get the license, as you saw as soon as they went online it tried to download the game but then they were banned because their ip was not in the whitelisted subnet or the S/N was already banned prior
if you have no license you can play no games, this also happens on normal retail xbox, as this also seems just a scarlett kit just deactivated and resetted to retail
Microsoft is about to receive a lot of emails from people who want to "develop" a game and need 2 or 3 dev kits :D
they definetively check if you are a real company with a real game also microsoft asks for a windows build of the game and needs a lot of papers beeing signed on person.
@@edussantoz9034 I think a trailer or a workable demo is enough to be able to be chosen. You also need to be a registered company like you stated.
Problem is you might sign an NDA as well, so its even worse than this.
@@edussantoz9034 It may very well get a lot more people into game development
@NiggaSniffa2005 pretty much the concept is right, it just takes a lot of time to do so
I worked in game dev for a while... It's amazing the basic information that isn't shared in these videos that MVG covers.
Any Xbox dev kit since Xb360 has automatically been "banned" on the production XBLive network. They're able to connect to the Devtest XBL network, but they need to be logged into a registered developer account to connect. This also applied to when you can do Dev mode activation on more recent consoles. The minute you boot to Dev mode it puts you in the same walled garden that only allows connections to the DevTest XBL network to prevent piracy/cheating.
Also, ever since XB360 even games on the disc need the console to be activated and download the auth codes to read the discs and execute the code.
There's plenty of breakdowns on the checks and balances that microsoft uses - go look into the Xbox homebrew scene for more information.
If you have the game downloaded onto the xbox and its mostly taken apart you can pop the disc in let it read the code then pull the magnet off the top of the disc tray thing and remove the disc. Used to play system linked nazi zombies this way lol only had 1 disc.
Yup. They really clamped down on XB1 and XBS after the whole PartnerNet fiasco.
Thats bullshit. Most Xbox 360 disc games do not demand internet connection in order to launch.
@@Squilliam-Fancyson i think hes talking about the code on the disc lol. It only spins to read the code then the disc stops when its reading from the hard drive.
@@Squilliam-Fancyson The consoles themselves have unlock codes that have to be downloaded periodically from the Xbox servers otherwise they'll brick the console until it's back online. They started that with the last couple builds of xbox360 to make sure Xbox gold games weren't being downloaded and played after Gold subscription lapsed.
90% of games (including the ones shown) ship with basic sprites and content but lack the actual finalized code for the game. It's something developers started doing with XB1 to "prevent piracy".
ModernVintageGamer (mvg) does some great deep dives on the topics if you want to really learn how consoles and game dev works
I think the 10G port is for quick updating of in development game assets and remote code debugging.
yup
Its for pushing builds of your game over the network. Obviously since these builds are going to be huge they need the extra bandwidth.
@@Enstrayed technically don't need it, but if the dev has to wait, it costs the company money. So having fast networking is a must if you move around big files regularly.
I found it amusing that Linus' first thought was that they use it just to test network speeds when he himself has editors edit off network storage with 10 gig networking which is closer to what this debug port would be used for lll
Yes, needing to download a new build over 1G a few times a week burns too much time.
Regarding 10 gig networking: I used to work at a QA where we had over 500 Xbox ones receiving daily builds for games that could go well over 100GB. Being able to get a new build on a console in 10 seconds instead of a couple minutes would have saved a LOT of time.
The 10gig port is for transferring builds over the network for remote debugging and testing.
Could it also be for live debug? I remember live debug remotely when doing dev on a kernel driver for Vista way back when via ethernet in visual studio
@@RowdyElectron Live debugging doesn't need that much bandwidth.
@@khyododev766 good point
Woah really? Naaaaaaaaaaaa this totally wasn't sarcasm at allllll 😑
I remember reading someplace. Normally when you testing a game software you run into problems and sometimes you need up code 5+ times day, the 10gb network is so when you have upload 5-7gb 4-5 times day it does not take along time using the 10gb network...
I can totally see Linus getting a cease and desist letter from Microsoft
For sure, you basically rent them from Microsoft for gamedev, it doesn't matter if they are stolen later. They are basically opening property that is not theirs.
But? What?
They wouldn't quite do it that way... Linus is a sacred cow and they know that. They would politely contact him and cut a deal.
Linus: "Ad blocking is the exact same thing as piracy"
Also Linus: Buys stolen property and makes a sponsored video about it
Here's a tip: maybe don't watch and comment on a video made by a channel you clearly have problems with. Your viewer engagement helps Linus out, so I can't imagine he's upset you're butthurt.
He also pirates Windows 10
@@brooks5895 well, that only makes me respect him more. Fuck paying for windows
Also Linus literally right after he called ad blocking piracy: I don't care if you block ads.
@@brooks5895 no he doesn't. Not activating windows isn't piracy.
"We're probably the first outside of a dev studio to run a game on a scarlet devkit". Sorry Linus. I had a devkit on my desk at work that I took home with me over COVID.
And what's your line of work?
Did it actually ran the games tho?
@@bill-cipher000 ye, Gamers nexus made a good comment about this
@@AdrianDX Devkit -> At work
i wonder
@@katto1937 My point is even if they work from home, they’re still part of a dev studio.
Nicholas: "They are really not meant to be taken apart"
Has he not met Linus before??
other than the fact that he's most useless member at LMG
Kinda interesting how sophisticated Microsofts Kill Switches are. MIcrosoft knows how has every devkit, so figuring out when a company goes bankrupt and didn't sent them back is easy. And they put the devkit straight to a banlist. Once such a devkit connects to the internet and reaches a Microsoft Server, it probably instantly gets a kill command to stop working because its banned.
pitty it was not that good at letting people with authentic xbox actualy stay DRM;d long enough to play a gam
Microsoft whitelists devices to networks that are allowed to connect to them. When a company is setting up a project, they'll communicate the IP address the machine is using to connect to Xbox with Microsoft and they'll allow it to happen. If any device connects to Xbox without that whitelisted IP address, it's instantly banned. So they don't really "know" the status of anything. I could take a fresh XDK from Microsoft home and plug it in and it'll instantly ban because it doesn't recognize my network.
@@Wintyer Fuck Xbox's DRM. I tried to tell people, MVG tried to tell people, but nobody listened. "Oh it's fine, bro. You're just freaking out, bro. Everyone's got an internet connection, bro." Well, enjoy your shitty LockedBox.
It's only been relatively recently that they knew who had what. It wasn't until the XboxOne/PS4 that they began having them phone home at all. Then with XboxOneX/PS4Pro they started requiring devs to submit their public IP addresses from their offices and if the Devkit ever connected from another address it instantly got banned.
You gotta check Xbox 360 Jtag console hack... you will get instantly ban if you do that hack... there was false flagging and ban wave back in the days..
Thanks for bleeping out just enough to not get in trouble but still let us know who he worked for and what games he helped develop
Who is it? EA?
I legit thought it was a joke on "EA" being a curse word in the gaming community
EA is big in Vancouver. That would have been my guess anyway.
Who?
did you catch the name of the game(s)?
These are regularly bricked because the core usage is for examining source code. If one disappears or is at EOL it's industry standard to brick them to protect IP.
That said, early in my career I bricked a PS3 Dev kit, and by bricked I mean caused a unit to completely die, investigating a bug for a game that got completely scrapped
Wot was the game gonna be?
Now the PS3 dev kits that are still around are kept alive by the jailbroken community with DEX versions of CFW like Rebug or Evilnat. I want a PS3 dev kit.
It was really awesome to see Nick in this video, I hadn't heard this side of the game development experience before and I'd like to hear more from him about the way Microsoft, Sony, etc work with devs and their hardware
If he was QA, I wonder how much more he'd know really. Doesn't seem like he worked really long in game dev. People who aren't leads, producers or directors (depending on the the company) don't work directly with manufacturers.
He could probably talk about the certification process and maybe he does have contacts who would be more knowledgeable.
From my time working with Xbox consoles, I can tell you that the offline system update (OSU or OSUDT as it used to be called) is not only useful for people to update their consoles while offline, but it was a life saver of a troubleshooting step, especially when Xbox One consoles would be stuck on the green loading screen.
Essentially it formats the console and reinstalls the software. Or at least that's what it used to do back in the day.
And we'd actually use that for more issues that could not be fixed through regular troubleshooting. It was a sort of a last resort and if that didn't work the console usually needed servicing.
How is it like working as a game dev? Can you share a bit of your experience?
@@KesleyBenedet unfortunately I haven't been working as a game dev, but rather doing tech support for the consoles. The issues I described are issues users were facing and my job was to help them resolve the issues.
Oh cool
I remember when I had bad internet at home so I downloaded PS3 firmware update on a flash drive at school. Didn't know you could do the same for an xbox one, although I imagine it's less intuitive
My drive crush in Xbox one x, I replaced it with some of my SSHD, and I stuck on the OSU part. Drive was partitioned, but nothing works. I am stuck at 1 percent on system installation. I read that I should try several pendrives and tools for unpacking OSU, and after 6 different preparation, I finally have a working Xbox. OSU is a nightmare, and I am not even in the insider program (insiders cannot use OSU before the number of iteration of OSU hits the number of insiders built).
Unfortunately, LTT is not the first to game on a Dev Kit. All of Competitive Halo's tournaments ("HCS") for Halo Infinite run their "Open" brackets through the Xbox Dev Kit consoles because its cheaper to use those than separate gaming PCs for each player for the 50+ random teams trying to make it into the tournament.
LTT didn't actually succeed in gaming on it, as it was insta-banned.
Also the PC version crashed live on stage too many times PepeLaugh
Yeah exactly. When I went to HCS recently, there were about 30 XDK dev kits people were using to play through the brackets. I was surprised as well. I got up close with one as well and it is very dope.
I got excited each time it looked like you guys got closer to playing a game. IT couldn't figure out how to fix our printer today at work, and I figured it out myself after an hour. The adrenaline! Lol
Linus was extra funny today! The writer had a good sense of humor! I think we all appreciated it.
Fax
Extra annoying …
You could have used a retail Xbox to install/download and update the game on an external ssd, and then use it on the dev box.
It wouldn't work i guess, i'm pretty sure is not that stupid, imagine someone playing your game on the same online services but with a dev kit console, it's litteraly worse than PC cheating, debugging can really make you god, pretty sure dev kits have strict procedures to even plug them to the wall, so many pass and stuff that makes them really usable by devs, kinda makes sense since it's a DEV kit
@@MrQuicheProductions it would work, they were trying to play in offline mode. The game needed to download and update, and since it wasn’t an authorized dev kit it was bricked as soon as they logged in. It would be the case with anyone else that was using an un-authorized dev kit. Aside from the official kit they were using, which has to be given directly from Xbox, any Xbox can be put into dev mode and used as a dev kit but you won’t be pulled off the network.
I think the barcode and the "sort of serial numbers" on the box may have a chance to compromise the one who provide the machine to you. Better also blur that out.
No I believe that’s linked to the business that the provider got the xbox from
Well it already connected to the Internet so they know it anyway
@@asusplayer_ yeah it's probably be banned after 5 minutes this video got released, faster than Xbox to fix their damn servers to run a single player game.
Edit: NVM it got banned
@@Jaxv3r it got banned in the video
Every number on the console can be probley traced back
17:40 I use this page a lot when swapping out XBOX one's HDD's for SSD's! (or just upgrading or fixing a failed HDD)
It's pretty neat and nice of Microsoft to release the software.
But Sony also has their offline Updates for PS4 (which you also need to replace the HDD)
I would love to know if you actually had to and did send it back to Microsoft
Linus 3 days ago: "Don't make me buy another xbox" Linus now: "i've spent 2000usd on an Xbox" 😅
and then bricked it!
Linus: Dont make me buy an xbox
Also Linus: I bought an Xbox.
Spend $5000 on a fancy AVR to avoid buying one or two $500 consoles
@@guspaz It sounds stupid without context like that, but it also means when new consoles come out, he doesn't have to buy multiple of those either. It saves money over time as new consoles come out
@@HearMeLearn He would still have had to put up with the bad input lag though.
@@HearMeLearn assuming that those consoles do not support new HDMI standards that are not supported by his existing receiver…
@@HearMeLearn Linus already said he has to replace it with a newer one because the current receiver doesn't support the features he wanted (multiple 4k 120hz support). So much for that.
Linus: "We're downloading F1 2019!"
Microsoft Server: "Hehe, I don't think so!"
I really like the looks of that machine... a console with a more mature low key look, plus it would fit quite nicely in an AV setup.
was thinking the exact same thing
You don't think both retail xbox have a low key look!?
@@william41017 Yeah retail xbox is a black box, but it's also a fucking huge, designed to stand vertically black box. It's got more in common with a vase than a media player.
Eh
Game studios use the 10G Debug network to stream pre-built assets from the server/workstation to streamline production. It is mostly a legacy thing now though since the latest consoles can handle read pre-built data a lot faster than streaming from network
Loved this 20 minute getting console banned speedrun hahaha
But seriously, great video!
No
Man the only time I ever watch an ad on a RUclips video is with Linus bro has the funniest transitions
When purchasing the bundle, make sure you adjust the way it's split. There will be little money going to charity initially.
Yeaah humble bundle is kinda scummy, never buying from them
@@awildmoose6541 No, they aren't! I've been buying from them since forever, and I always split the tip and give to charity.
@@DimitriMoreira did they ever pay Zubov for his Steel Series games? That was the scummy thing I knew of them, they declined to pay their developers, and in fact just failed to communicate or pay unless put over hot coals and flayed :D
@@DimitriMoreira just because something partially goes to charity, doesnt mean its immune to criticism. they treat lowprofile devs like garbage, its very unbecoming
@@MsHumanOfTheDecade yeah. they're not the company they used to be. been a few years now. was cool they did the ukraine bundle, but that was kind of the last death rattle of the old HB as far as I am concerned.
10 gig networking is clearly just so developers can transfer data to it more quickly.
By the time 10 gig internet is widespread, I'm sure standard routers will be operating at 40+
We're on the cusp of, if not 10 gig Internet access, at least multi-gig. Bell Canada is rolling out a symmetrical 3 gigabit tier, and Rogers is trying to one-up them with an 8 gigabit tier. Bell's been sending out xg-pon ONTs with 10 gig ethernet ports for a few months now. Meanwhile, those of us stuck on Videotron have at most their upcoming 1.5 gigabit tier, which is far from symmetrical with 50 megabit of upstream.
@@guspaz I’ve just got 1 gig internet recently (well 1140mbps) but the router provided by my ISP (virgin media) can’t even support more than 940mbps - crazy.
Internet will soon be like water pressure, just one speed and it’s a lottery what you get but it will be so fast no one will care.
@@guspaz also you need to be complaining about why mobile data is so expensive in Canada - I’ve been all over the world and Canada was the most expensive I’ve experienced for a data sim by far!
I doubt it. My country has 1gbit widely available, and 2/4gbit in "testing" for consumers, yet only 1gbit routers are provided, and 10gbit networking is very expensive to buy currently.
So networking requiring 10gbit is already here, yet there are relatively few consumer routers that will do that speed.
@@Programmdude what country is that? I already see 5G overtaking the fixed line speeds in many parts of the UK, just because we have a “speed guarantee” cash back system so not many people offer it as fixed broadband. Also the latency claims of 5G I think aren’t as good as promised (so no good for gamers).
You have to hand it to LTT, they cover pretty much everything tech now. Gone are the days for just PC hardware and the occasional remote control fire truck. 👏👏👏👏
For the next time: The best way to disassemble glued-on parts, is using blue gasoline (the one used in zippos);
A few drops, wait a bit, it will peel off without any effort and without breaking the adhesive film, and when it evaporates, it will stick again.
Nail polish remover would doit too
The thing looks so much more smart than I expected it to be. Why does it have such a fancy unboxing experience??
I thought it would be a some sort of test bench looking thing with a bunch of exposed pcb's and arrives in a beat up carboard box secured with some cracked in half Styrofoam thing and padded with wadded up newspaper.
Nah; they'd want to lock down the hardware design pretty solidly before letting developers work on it; for consumer products like game consoles - especially ones with a brand lineage like Xbox - getting the hardware down is the important part. The software will continue to be developed long into this hardware version's life-cycle and beyond. Microsoft doesn't need to worry about having some "killer apps" ready to go as soon as the platform is released, so they won't take the risk of letting software devs play with potentially broken hardware, or a hardware design that will be obsoleted by the final product.
Fun Fact: I used to work for a software company that, along with a finished product, also had to develop drivers for the hardware various laptop manufacturers used in their designs - and the permutations were almost infinite; we had something like 100 different drivers to accomplish essentially the same thing. We often had "development phase hardware" delivered to us. I had indeed received prototype laptops that were exposed PCBs in random cardboard boxes... one even came to us on top of a *cookie sheet*. With a piece of cardboard glued to it so the PCB didn't short out on the metal.
Fun times...
@@MrJest2 Laptops and tablets should all get the Vulcan IDIC medal. I have a tablet that I struggled with for a while trying to get Windows 10 to install a driver *and work* with its MTP setting for USB. Nothing would work. Windows would just obstinately refuse to connect driver to hardware.
So I got to poking around and manually selected the generic USB MTP driver under Portable Device. It worked! The bleeping STANDARD MTP DRIVER that comes with Windows 10 worked, yet Windows would not automatically detect that and install *that* driver.
That's not what devs pcs are so why on God would it be that way with Xbox or Sony?
@@MrJest2 sounds like a company if it can do it cheaper it will sorry you got stuck in a shitty factory kinda ballshit should have gotten a better job (well more so gone with a better company to get test jigs and shit because dammmmm)
@@greggv8 That's often a good approach if nothing seems to work, these days.
Sadly, back when we got prototype laptops "with character" and had to custom craft drivers for each hardware combination, it was just after the release of Win95. There *were* no reliable OS-installed drivers beyond the very rudimentary ones common to any IBM-compatible PC at the time, and everyone who needed to support custom hardware (which was every laptop in existence) had to roll their own.
Even if it wouldn't have gotten them any closer to playing games, in between trying things offline and online, they should have plugged into a non-internet-connected network and performed a tcpdump of the traffic.
that would probably be BAD because Linus is big company and big company cant do THE EXPOSE of other bigger companies
It is 2022, those kinds of communications are using SSL/TLS, you cannot read those packets.
You cant play commercial games on a devkit. They could try to the end of times.
True
@@realcartoongirl ever heard of journalists? That's literally their job description.
XDK Devkits have different encryption and signing keys to the retail units, which is why no commercial games would work. They also have a certificate for all of their capabilities which is tied to the static IP address of the studio it is registered to. The instant that thing was connected to the internet Microsoft would have revoked the certificate making it completely worthless. Without the cert it can not use any of the debug capabilities and since it doesn't have the retail keys it can't play retail games. This would have been useful in the hands of reverse engineers but now it's basically a brick. You would think the game dev guy he has advising him would know better.
It's pretty clear the guy just wanted the money, if he was interested in the potential for the homebrew scene he would't be selling it off to youtubers
I think it's pretty clear that they knew there was a very real possibility the kit would be bricked after they connected it to the internet. They had just already tried everything else and were out of things to try so it was the only thing left they could do. Sure the kit is bricked now, but it was already as good as bricked before, they couldn't do anything with it.
actually no
this kit was *new in box* meaning it had never been activated before.
without activation, dev kits do not expose any sort of debug capabilities meaning this thing was essentially equivalent to a retail for it's entire lifespan (until sent back to MS ofc)
@@x3wildcard Well they should if they care about right to repair and game preservation. Things like mispaired PS4 blue ray drives can be easily fixed through modding but you'll have to pay Sony to do it out of warranty. There are no (publicly) known Xbox One / Series exploits but having access to XDKs would speed up discovery.
We use these XDKs in QA and when paired with the Xbox GDK, they're awesome and extremely helpful. This is the only version of the hardware which is great since the XB1 had a bunch of different versions (test kits and dev kits for each revision, some looked like retail, some looked sort of like this but different colors/sizes). Without the GDK or Dev app, you're really missing out though. You also can't run retail games on the system and even if you did get your hands on the GDK, dev app and some ISO's, you'd need the sandbox for those games and have dev accounts made for those sandbox's. So this really is just an expensive paperweight in your case. However, I think you can completely turn off developer mode then install the retail Xbox OS and that should work but all of the unique features will be disabled essentially turning it into a standard xbox. Not sure if this is still a thing for these XDKs but I did it once on an XB1 dev kit at work.
Oh hey thanks to Xbox's DRM you can't play most of the games on a Dev Kit, just like the retail systems. However a game like Devil May Cry 5 Special Edition would've been you're best bet since it's a Series X only game and has the complete game on disc. Most Xbox games require an online authentication from Xbox servers. However Series X only game discs don't need this, but some of them also don't have the entire game on the disc like Forza Horizon 5.
This was also my first thought, but I wasn't sure if the dev console would behave the same as retail with DRM
exactly even 360 or xbox one game won't work without an ''update'' and internet check ☑
my dev kit can play any game
@@ThaexakaMavro 360 is emulation and needs to download the game from the server.
Even with the complete app on the disc, you can't run retail games on a devkit
I used to work at a peripheral company, we had sony, microsoft, and nintendo dev kits. very cool stuff.
I love how they tried to bleep EA and failed, or did it badly on purpose so they could claim legally "we bleeped it" but diddnt really.
I thought it was technically fully bleeped but the words around it and the length of the name mean it could only be EA. plus EA has a division in Vancouver
@@satyris410 plouffe's linked-in profile has "EA embedded QA " (2015) and QA positions from a few other studios after that.
At university we had something like 15 PlayStation dev kits and 20 Xbox dev kits which we freely had access to in the lab. I never needed to use them (I did Computer Animation) but my course shared lectures with Computer Games Design and they needed to use them for some of their assignments. Microsoft provided us all of their software (Office, Azure, Xbox and Kinect SDKs, Visual Studio, etc) for free as well which was really cool. It was through a Microsoft program called Dreamspark which was rebranded, and I don't know what's included nowadays.
Linus: We got a Xbox Series X Dev kit!
Microsoft: 👀
Depending on where you live, it is no longer legally Microsoft's property, given it was acquired in a liquidation sale.
But that highly depends on how liquidation of leased products is handled in your country.
they're in canada. dunno where they bought it from tho. microsoft still won't care about all that and will feel free to banlist the console.
You buy a license to use it, not own it. It's still Microsoft's property, you're just in possession of stolen goods if you buy it 2nd hand. It's easier for them to just ban it then bother with getting it back.
IIRC, how it works is that the hardware needs to be returned to Microsoft when development is no longer possible. They didn't have the right to liquidate it.
I don't think it works that way. The company that was liquidated never actually owned the hardware it was rented/leased from Microsoft. Technically speaking the liquidation company never had rights to sell it in the fire place.
For the techies out there, this explains why a retail game wouldn't work on a devkit: ruclips.net/video/U7VwtOrwceo/видео.html
Specifically at 18:13, one of the "Core Tenants of Xbox One Security" is "Keep development kit key world separate from retail key world". They don't want people cheating on live servers using devkits.
@misolou fout nice copypasting comments
The kit was in retail mode because to access the development kit key world requires an activation cert which this never got.
The reason this couldn't run games is unrelated to dev kit activation, this is just general DRM that even a retail would see.
I just want to point out that it was because some kids got access to Dev kids and did literally that.
12:37 Nuh-uh, Linus, that's a buildtag of a Windows 11 core! Or Xbox OS 2202. So by this point you'd know this one's been unfortunately online and been bricked in the same way that GN's was.
Screw the normal xbox, the dev kit looks sexy as hell. I'd love to see consoles adopt this look.
I mean the current one is a fridge but this one is almost as ugly, its like a VCR
I mean, they used to. For a long time.
Looks like the dev-kit uses a variant of the Xbox One X design
@@sundhaug92 yes, these were built long before the refrigerator look took hold. Funny that it's the same with previous gens as well.
@@awildmoose6541 The current one should have had a handle at the top to look like a nuclear reactor core and also to make it easier to carry. Just yet another missed opportunity.
Arent most dev kits usually prevented to play retail games by design? I would have been surprised if it would play any retail disk
Nah, these can be toggled back and forth. Same with Durango and x360- I have never been in sony camp, nintendo wii ones could also go either way. It's just a pain since you have to log back in and get re-registered to get into retail - and if you're on a devkit that's been flagged by MS, you can brick it.
ps3 test units can run full retail code with no setting modifications
The debug port is likely for remote software debugging on a PC. You can debug software (i.e. the game) running a remote target over an IP connection. It will allow you to set breakpoints to stop the program, view values in memory, step through lines of code and trace the program logic. It's pretty common in cases where your software is running on hardware separate from the PC which runs your development environment.
I don't work for a game developer, but we usually compile the build on our PC workstation, copy it over to the target over ethernet and then run it on the target while live debugging on the PC workstation over the same connection. I imagine it's the same for console game devs, but they probably work with much larger file sizes, hence the need for 10 gbps to speed up transfers of new builds.
We use these at Halo Infinite LAN events in the Open Bracket. Haven't gotten to tinker with it like linus, very cool video!
@@kuyans3889 i think its more a tournament LAN server thing then a console shortage thing, i know from watching Overwatch league they run on a special LAN server with a higher tick rate then public servers and special patch of the overwatch client. its probably easier developing the server and clients on a dev kit and just using the dev kit in tournament so you dont have to do any "retail model" testing. plus the extra memory and specs would help the game run smoother so you hopefully don't have pro players or the audience complaining or about lag or stutters, which could be very bad for their reputation.
@@kuyans3889 it runs a lot better on the dev kit than the default series x too. Wish we had enough pcs but it is what it is
Linus finds an Xbox Dev kit while I can't find a single Xbox Series X in stock 😭
Thats honestly a blessing in disguise, spend that time on trying to get a ps5 or fork out a bit extra for a PC, there really is no point in getting xbox
I've actually found a few, but I'm trying to find a ps5 for the exclusives since I already have a gaming pc...
@@awildmoose6541 bit extra lmao what you on about not in this market
I wonder how well this would do as a computer, beef up the the SoC some more, extra CPU cores and another 3000-odd GPU cores, have an 80GB SKU, and give it an SD card reader
Remember that VRAM GDDR has terrible latency, so these consoles aren't really meant to be used as universal as PC even on architectural level.
@@kazioo2 Then just give it the right RAM as well, nothing saying the board couldn't be remade, and it's not like microsoft could just not have gotten rid of the second internal drive slot in the commercial XSX/S, so they ain't shy to fuck us over in the end
the hardware would might work, but without proper drivers, they would be pretty much useless.
13:49 That's not correct at all. PS1 devkits were standard ISA cards (DTL-H2000) that were plugged into our PC's (a Pentium 3 at that time) running Win98. It was essentially an entire Playstation on a card. There wasn't even an SGI machine in the entire studio.
Also at 6:50 nick definitely said EA
I think in a prior video he said he worked on a Gears of War game, but not in which position. QA testers aren't always named, maybe he worked a contractor company.
I'm guessing only the D Pad works in recovery mode in case of joystick drift.
1:52 Linus's surprise of 10GbE is priceless
I don't know what they are blurring out at the bottom left from 17:01. Nothing appears there I don't think on a regular update.
i love your vids i like every vid i see.you are my fave,so cool,water cooling wish vid is my fave
@æ Ah, cool
You guys could just try turning of DevMode, tho dev stuff wont work as you have to have a developer account, but the normal part(when exitted from DevMode(in the settings, it might reset the console)) should work OK, tho again there might be artifical limit on the resources, which would make it pretty much retail xbox.
Love how Linus embraces learning new things. Sometimes I forget he doesn't necessarily work with console repair much. Makes sense he didn't know about updating offline and the hidden menu's. I used to repair between 5 and 20 of these a week. I almost ALWAYS updated via USB bc it was generally less problematic than via internet.
Good for you
@@firelord4662 I think u missed my point? I'm learning things all the time like Linus and realized he's no different as the Pinnacle of PC tech on RUclips. Just meant it put it in perspective that what I assume is common technology may not be in different fields.
Great upload, I love it when the LTT crew put up great interesting vids like this, Would be awesome to have a follow up video on this if the system was demanded to be returned, Or if Microsoft could unlock it so its just a regular console with its "Developer" features disabled etc.. Would be awesome if it could be made to work!
It would be pointless to turn it into a regular console since you'd be losing all the interesting features about it and like they addressed in the video, every Series X console can be turned into a dev kit. That's way more interesting (not that Linus can do anything with that since they don't have a dev account).
@@Ayoul I'd say it'd still be interesting because not only would it mean its no longer a dead brick, but also you'd still have that 40gb of ram, would be interesting to see if it would still take advantage of that ram vs a stock series x and compare the results
8:02
South Park, please give Linus a Cameo. That killed me! 🤣
Being a QA watching this is just funny, I am like "huh, finally I know and have access to stuff Linus doesn't know/ have access to" LOL.
Debug LAN is the one we use when using the XSX Manager GDK on a PC to control the console.
Cool
Really hoping that someone who happens to get a hold of one of these is able to use it to figure out some kind of jailbreak for the Series systems. DRM only ever hurts legitimate customers. The recent Xbox outage really highlighted just how bad the DRM is.
I mean you'd have to break The DRM on the Dev kit itself first. Your IP needs to be whitelisted otherwise the devkit gets insta banned
PC Gamers: 👀
Jailbreaking a retail console seems hard but for jailbreakers themselves is fine. But with devkits it's another story, you can't figure out shit as you would need to get in touch with inside data or with a legitimate developer who's in will to throw away his credential just so a few people who accidentally got their hands on the XDK will be able to play something. There's just no profitable reason to do this, ok i got to play dirt 5 on 300fps but what's next? Isn't it better to just stick with the retail version? After all it'll be the same thing.
@@PartyhatRS Since you are someone who pirates I imagine you can agree that most games end up getting cracked, and usually rather quickly.
So people who pirate those games end up getting them for free anyway.
People who actually paid for a copy includes DRM that causes performance issues, can hinder modding, make it harder to back up the game they bought, or at worse make the game unplayable due to needing a constant online connection to a check in server. Look at the recent Xbox outage or PS4 CBOMB issue. A jailbroken PS4 has no issue. However if Sony had not fixed the CBOMB people who actually paid would loose access to just about everything they paid for.
You combat piracy by making it easier and more enjoyable to buy the game then it is to pirate it. Make it fairly priced, allow people to mod it or back it up how they wish, and buying it on store fronts like Steam includes extras like achievements, being able to share the game, and so on.
@@PartyhatRS Thanks for that. I am always more then happy to talk things out. Even if I don't agree with someone.
I don't agree with pirating something just to get it for free, but some do for one reason or another, and people are entitled to their opinion. However I do think piracy will be a necessary evil until the industry changes a little. For instance demos used to be actually free as a way to get hands on experience to see if you'd like a game. Now usually the only way to demo a game first hand without spending money is to pirate it, and then buy a legit copy if you like it.
There are also other games or other content in general you can't easily/legally access if you wanted to. Take delisted games or even VHS tapes for example
I also think Sony has actually shown how unnecessary DRM is. Their consoles are full of DRM. Yet they released their PS4 to PC ports DRM free. You can latterly get their ports easily for free with a few clicks. Even so they have seen such great returns on their PC releases more are coming.
i remember when i found one of these just laying outside of a broken down delivery truck when i was on vacation. didnt know they were this rare.
it wasnt EXACTLY one of these, but something similar, and definately an XBOX device of some sort. it also said XDK on it and looked sort of like this one, but a little bit smaller.
Was probably a old TV Box, they have similar looks, dont anything know about that XDK mark tho
Sounds like a xbox one devkit maybe
I worked for a disaster relief company a few years ago we got sent to surrey UK after we got hit by storms I saw a bunch of ps4 and xbox one dev kits in the hello games studio after it was flooded . I remember being sad because I was a fan and seeing how much they lost I understood why the game released in such an unfinished state. This was only a month after the xbox one released so they where basically brand new
@@NightmareRex6 idk what you mean by that, but i have not seen any other comments written like mine or even close. if your trying to imply that i'm a bot, well, sorry to dissapoint you buck'o, but i'm as human as the day i was born.
What's funny, is that if this console is anything like PlayStation dev kits, there's a slight difference in the ID of the console that checks if it's a debug/dev or retail console (for PS3, console ID's would have 1 number different if it was a debug console). Assuming this works the same way these days, this console was probably completely undetected from Microsoft until they decided to connect the ethernet cable. It probably did a handshake with Microsoft servers and saw the difference in the console's identification and immediately banned it. I was surprised it actually accepted the software update, typically the consoles have completely separate builds for each version. Maybe things are changed nowadays. Nonetheless, I love these dev kit videos, it takes me back to the days where I loved to tinker with game consoles and their capabilities. Great video!
I'm pretty sure you believed you paid 2 grand for this pretty quickly
5:40 If Microsoft wants to sell newer consoles, their in-store video trailer should show old hardware on the left and newer hardware on the right in the same trailer kind of thing. FPS counters won't help if both are just locked 30 or 60 FPS.
I like how they beeped out EA 😂
Yeah they did a good job on that one LMAO
Yes, we all heard Plouffe worked at EA
15:33 i like how linus, even after making it big, still dislikes unnecessarily spending money on things. seen him act like this in other videos too, and i just think it’s really neat.
And the surprising thing is he is millionaire.
@@prateekpanwar646 until you realize that he still has to mentain a whole company and buy the newest tech to review. I can see why he acts like this lol
Actually played on a dev kit recently at the HCS Kansas city event. They run the entire open bracket on XDK consoles.
Does not use the Specs of the system, so is just Xbox regular
I suspect the added memory, on top of what was meant for the games and OS themselves was for the added overhead of attaching the debugger and features you would want to be able to test functionality and diagnose problems. Just running Visual Studio alone on 16GB of memory with a moderately sized non-game project can have you swapping memory almost immediately leading to a terrible dev/debugging experience.
I wonder if they had used a external drive with games from a different Xbox and transferred the games to the Dev kit Xbox whether that would've worked?
@@BroadFame Ahh okay. I thought that might have been the case. Thanks for the info.
Was that a Caddyshack Carl Spackler imitation @7:15 ?! LOVE IT
I find dev kits soooo interesting. The gamecube and Wii had some really neat ones too
The 10G network port is mostly for ingesting builds. If you can shave off 15-25 minutes of QC and dev time for every build they play, you save a _lot_ of money in the long run.
EDIT: Nearly everything on the devkit that's "better" than retail version is because you want speed things up for faster iteration (like the 10G I mentioned) and because, like Plouffe said, the game is not always perfectly optimized and that's not always a major concern for the developers or QA. They're not because Microsoft can't sell it at retail nor because they want to make gamers suffer or they just can't do it at scale, like Linus implies.
Pretty sure the 10 Gigabit port is for quickly updating the beta/alpha game revisions, not for future download speeds or something like that.
6:48 "When I was at E *beep* A.."
amazing job, editor
Honestly the dev kits look sick, I'd love a console or PC case that has that aethetic sometime
There was a small moment around 2010 where we all thought the living room would be ruled by a device like this. Cable, streaming and games through a bespoke home theatre pc.
The consoles then began to fill that role, which worked out because the public seemed, and still seems, really resistant to using a keyboard in the living room.
Also VCRs. It looks like a VCR.
it looks like a VCR
SO, the Xbox one X ?
SilverStone made a lot of cases in the VCR form factor
Smart to make your sponsor a charity on this one
One of my fondest memories was that my cousins somehow smuggled a PS2 dev kit to Mexico, I was probably 5 years old but I remember the shape of the console was nothing like the retail version of the console. Sadly they sold the console at a Flea market. Til this day I’ve been searching hard for that dev kit but not a trace of it remains at the local flea markets or technology plazas. Hell even on the internet. Would be cool to someday buy it back.
You were probably lied to. I bet it was a PS2 variant you don't have lol
Hey Linus I've had one for about 3 years now for a company I work for, the dev kit ethernet port on the back is to connect to our company's vpns so when we boot thr console it doesn't get bricked the more you know!
I had one of these at a testing job recently. Also a ps5 dev kit
1:12 - isn't it obvious, why it exists?
Ps2 dev kits were $10k each and massive, and you would use test kits where you could as they were only 2k each.
But, we used to mod chip regular old retail PS2s for $700 and wrote our own debugger that would run on the retail kit. In the end we had most of the functionality of the dev kit on the retail kit. Only leads had dev kits and everyone else (including many of the artists) had chipped retail kits. In a studio of over 100 devs it saved us hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Totally didn't know these things exists until now
Oh wow, I'd totally forgotten about the "test" PS2 machines. IIRC, the main benefit to a test PS2 was that it ran games burned on regular DVD-Rs instead of requiring manufactured discs with all the DRM and anti-copying measures. That way developers could just burn a disc of the current game-in-development for testing & QA to run. Most of the debugging stuff had to be removed, and the game was "built" like a retail version, so it fit in the memory of a regular PS2, but testing then only needed a $2k test PS2 instead of a full-on $10k development PS2.
What games did you help develop?
@@didho5907 we mostly did licenced titles for Nickelodeon.
5:26 this could be a legal problem being USB-C have a trade mark but it could also be being microsoft is microsoft
i love the devkit design tho, kinda wish the new ones had this design since it clearly shows the series x can be in a more horizontal layout
I love the series X Design...
@@Aomicplane at least better than PS5 Design in my opinion 😅