An original Xbox can do Doom 3 at 720p natively with extra RAM

I've played the entire MGS2 on the Xbox,
for the most part it was fine, but there were some places were it ran really slow, the game speed was tied to framerate making it really odd to play it in proper slow motion later on, there was a part with a lot of smoke or water or something that was likely fill rate related and it struggled pretty badly
not that I blame the console, it was just no properly optimized for the hardware, but yeah, you could make PS2 games run poorly on the Xbox depending on their demands,
but realistically speaking doing the opposite (XB optimized title port to PS2) would be a far bigger challenge and they wouldn't be able to get away with the basic ps2 to xb ports they did for sure.

hypothetical 512MB for the XB is super unrealistic due to cost,
128MB less so, but I don't think that it would have changed the life the console had.

 

MGS2 was a bad port on the PC aswell, bad performance and other graphical issues. Not even my 9700pro liked the game backthen.

 

I think the whole generation would have changed. I don't think it would have over come the PlayStation lead but it would most likely have sold much better. I think at the end of the day 128 megs of faster ram vs 512 megs of the slower ram would have been a better solution. I also think if they went amd for cpu (as i believe that was an option at one point) would have helped them be more competitive price wise.

Of course this beast of a console could have messed with the timing of the xbox 360 and who knows where we would be

 

Sure, a $2,000 console would definitely have destroyed the $399 PlayStation 2. Outputting 720p when the first 720p HD TVs weren't around for another four years would have been a real coup in the battle of lunacy.

So what drugs are you doing these days?

 

I think it's important to remember that even though more memory, or faster memory, would have always helped, Xbox already shipped with nearly twice the memory that Playstation 2 had, and a HDD that you could cache to if needed. Price was always the real limiting factor. Or maybe more so, cost.

 

I didn't own an xbox at the time. I had a dreamcast and gamecube.

However I think MS could have positioned the xbox as a premium device if they worked with developers to enhance the popular 3rd party games of the time. The xbox matched the price of the playstation 2 as MS burned through money but if I recall that was mostly Intel not wanting to drop prices on the cpu. That is why I said if they went amd for the cpu they could have gotten a better deal and ended up with more ram in the system.

For me at the time I had dreamcast and gamecube and my pc. If xbox was a premium system even if it cost more I might have picked it up for the console games not hitting pc at the time

 

Xbox, in the first year, had a bunch of games with extra content or exclusive features. Not exclusive titles, but features or levels that were exclusive to Xbox. I don't remember every title, but I do remember Spider-man was a big one. The movie tie in game based on the Raimi movie. It had a Kraven the Hunter level that only appeared on Xbox. I think Tony Hawk had some exclusive levels or characters also. And there were definitely more.

And again, I get that adding more memory helps Xbox achieve more, but really, it's cost at the time and considering what it's contemporary competition had, memory was hardly Xbox's weakest point. In fact, it was one of it's strengths.

 

Maybe metal gear solid 2 on the xbox was a bad port, but I think that to reach the performance of the ps2 version they would have to reduce some fill rate bound effects, such as rain, smoke etc. (in Silent Hill 2 for Xbox they reduced the fog, for example). Even in multi-platform it happened that the ps2 had advantages in post processing and effects.

 

Defenitely was an advantage to the PS2. But then again, i wonder how much worth was put in the MGS2 port to begin with. The game ran bad on even a 9800pro at the time.
Were mgs2 made from the ground up for the xbox, it probably could achieve quite close to what the ps2 was doing.

 

Yes, sure. I think they could have taken advantage of the xbox architecture to improve certain aspects of the PS2 version, as happened in Silent Hill 2 which, for example, had the per-pixel lighting flashlight on the Xbox. However, as already mentioned, the ps2 could do things thanks to the high fill rate that the xbox could not handle.

 

Konami ports where famously bad back in the day, for MGS2 xbox they didnt even really bother to get the controls right..... On pc if i remember correctly you needed patches from the community and/or konami to even play it.
Designing a game around the PS2's architecture, playing to its strengths and optimizing the hell out of it, a port done to the X86 xbox by konami wasnt ever going to impress, i think.
That said, i dont think MGS2 xbox was that bad.

 

It's true Konami with MGS2 on Xbox didn't do a great job, but I think the Xbox port of Silent Hill 2 wasn't bad at all. The Xbox version had its advantages. Either way PS2 might have its advantages, but the Xbox was just a beast of a different level. Sure, more could be done on Xbox, but we're talking about ports, it was obvious they couldn't take full advantage of Xbox hardware.

 

The PS2 had this crazy fillrate advantage over anything else at the time, even later high end pc hardware. It also needed it, but still, they could do some crazy things with that machine. Its the particle monster It could do things the xbox or other machines couldnt at the time. Quite limited, but it had its advantages.

 

XBOX was a premium System for its time.
Increasing the performance even more while increasing the price more, well......it doesnt sound like a guaranteed success.

 

I believe the controller's layout and lack of pressure sensitive buttons were a bigger problem than Konami's willingness.
I think DF did a nice technical analysis of the ports

 

OG xbox 2001 has sensitive pressure buttons just like the PS2's dualshock 2. There wasnt anything wrong with the controller layout, actually remapping made it just as playable as with a DS2.
Goes to show the level of optimization done for MGS2 ports at the time.

 

And when did a premium console ever succeed commercially? From the Atari 7600, through PC Engine, NeoGeo and 3D0 - and even the more powerful version of last gens mainstream consoles, PS4 Pro and One X - the mass market can never wanted to spend a lot on a console. Even PS3 sold like crap when it launched with its initial premium console price.

 

exactly