Here's Some Cool Shit
First off, speaking of Sid Meier, Sid Meier’s Pirates will be released as a download in the Xbox Originals category next week, along with Black and Ninja Gaiden Black. I’ve been meaning to play that bastard for some time, but have been unable to track down a copy, so I’ll give it a whirl upon release.
In other sort-of Xbox news, Xbox Media Center has been ported to Intel Macs. I say sort of because you don’t actually need an Xbox to run the software. It’s free, open source media center software developed for the original Xbox, but has been ported to Linux and now Mac OS X. Why would you run that and not Front Row or the AppleTV? This interview with lead programmer Elan Feingold gives some reasons:
- Resolutions up to, including and even surpassing 1080P (AppleTV is currently at 720P)
- DTS/AC3 passthrough (which is great for playing DVD/BluRay/HD-DVD sourced audio). This means if you have a surround receiver you can have it decode multichannel audio
- Almost unlimited video and audio format support since we can play anything ffmpeg supports
- A great virtual file system layer with support for protocols like UPnP
- There is a great looking weather item that puts very useful info in front of your eyes.
- Since it is an open platform, the sky really is the limit, things like Youtube browsers, RSS readers, visualizers, MAME/Other emulators are all being integrated seemlessly. Heck, one could even imagine running an Xbox emulator on my quad-core machine…now that would bring us full circle!
So there ya go.