... if this late switch was part of the cause of the infamous ring of death.

Wasn't the RROD more an XBox 360 thing than for the original XBox? Did the original XBox even have a "ring" display?

The XBox 360 had the RROD. The original Xbox didn't have that - except for a case of where a fire could be caused if the power lead was continually plugged/unplugged from the back of the unit. A replacement figure of 8 lead fixed that.

Apparently.

As other people have said, the RROD was specific to the Xbox 360 - and that machine also used an IBM triple-core PowerPC CPU to boot, rather than anything from either Intel or AMD.

I'm honestly not sure what difference it would have made if the original Xbox had retained the AMD chip.

At a glance, it looks like the plan was to use AMD's budget CPU - aka an 800mhz Duron.

https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/original-xbox-designed-with-amd.2438461/

So it would have been faster (both in terms of architecture and clock speed) than the 700mhz Celeron which was eventually used, but it would have also ran hotter.

So swapping the Duron out for a Celeron may have actually improved the reliability of the OG Xbox; with the Duron, we could have ended up with the RROD appearing a generation earlier!

I guess the big question is: would that extra processing power have been put to good use? The OG Xbox was already more powerful than the Gamecube or PS2, and we were still mostly using analog TVs with SCART or component out; a few people may have plugged their console into a VGA monitor, but things like HDMI weren't released until 2002.

So arguably, it wouldn't have made much of a difference from a gaming perspective, especially for third party cross-platform titles which would have primarily targetted the PS2. Though I do wonder what it might have meant for first-party titles like Halo, since that was definitely Microsoft's killer-app.

That said, the OG Xbox did become something of a media-appliance in it's later years, once people figured out how to mod it and get things like XBMC (still going strong as Kodi, 20 years later) and arcade emulators running on it. And there were quite a few people who tinkered with upgrading it to a 1 Ghz P3 or similar. since this made it capable of playing HD media...

So it would have been great from a hobbyist perspective, though whether Microsoft would have viewed this as a good thing or not is debatable!

When I started playing with systems I didn't give a damn about the CPU type, 8080, 8086, Z80, Z-8000, 68020 etc etc. Getting everything working just switching to a new CPU by plugging a new board into the S100 box was entertaining.

I love 0:46:

"As I said, the design here was driven by spending time with gamers, and actually putting the control in their hands. We tried out over 100 different form factors - y'know to find what was the most comfortable, and what would give them the best gameplay."

It boggles the mind how godawful the 100+ other controller prototypes must have been for the final monstrosity they selected to have been the best of the bunch.

I just realized he didn't say they tried them out *before* selecting the monstrous disaster that shipped. My 'weasel words' filter must have been glitching.

What he was probably saying out the other side of his mouth was that they found out too late, so they hurriedly put a bunch of razorwire-wrapped joysticks in their hands so that they could spin it as having been tested and approved by gamers.

Or maybe they gave them to a munch of infants and selected the ones that they chewed on the longest.

Those are far more plausible scenarios than believing that a game would have selected that over 100 other designs.

Munch of infants?

Is that the new collective noun for a group of children? I like it almost as much as the other recent addition, a "Wunch of Bankers"

This made me lol. I should have proofread that better.

> It boggles the mind how godawful the 100+ other controller prototypes must have been for the final monstrosity they selected to have been the best of the bunch.

It looks like Microsoft fell victim to two things when designing the original Fatty controller.

The first was that the designers were perhaps a bit too giddy about the creation of a new console, and borrowed lots of features from other controllers, including the "dual cartridge slot" mechanism from the Dreamcast.

Which to my mind was a daft idea - where Sega used their controller slots for rumble-packs and the overly ambitious mini-gameboy memory cards, the Xbox controller already had vibration capabilities, so the only thing they ever got used for was for memory cards. Which themselves weren't particularly popular, since you could save games to the internal HDD.

The second problem was that for whatever reason, Microsoft wasn't able to get their supplier to provide them with high-tech circuit boards. Which put further constraints on how small they could make the controllers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_controller

So, yeah. Given the design and technology constraints, it probably was the best option ;)

Personally, I never had an issue with the size of the original controllers - though I do remember the various digs Penny Arcade made, including the comic where one of the characters is all but invisible as he sits under a coffee-table sized controller...

There's a reason most console controllers now look something like the original Playstation controller (itself an updated SNES controller):

"In development, we simulated every possible joypad situation. We imagined what it would be like to have to continually put the pad down while mapping a game, or playing while lying on the floor, and many other cases. After that we had to decide on the weight of the buttons and the pad itself. We adjusted the weights one gram at a time and eventually we found the correct balance. We probably spent as much time on the joypad's development as we did on the body of the machine.[4]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_controller

From a pure Machiavellian negotiating perspective swapping horses at the very last moment in a two horse race is a great tactic for pushing the suppliers profit margin down close to zero.

Machiavellian and Microsoft? Yup. Too many people today (not here) have forgotten BillG's old ways because he retired from Microsoft, gives to charity, and participates in Reddit's secret santa, but his actions definitely earned him his original reputation as an exceptionally ruthless cutthroat in a field full of ruthless cutthroats.

The image rehabilitation he's had over the last 20 years is unfortunate.