Xbox has released a video showing off the developer version of Project Scorpio, outlining some of the differences between it and the retail version of Microsoft’s new video game box. According to Kevin Gammill from the Xbox engineering team, devs are making games specifically to play on that front panel, just for fun. Apparently it runs Snake and everything.
In the video you can see the front panel has different uses and five buttons that are mapped specifically to it. Devs can use the GPU to render for the front panel, and in the video you can see dolphin, the tradition Xbox graphic test, running on the front screen.
Gammill says these buttons and the front screen are programmable however the devs want, so if they’re not using a screen for every dev kit they can still use the buttons to change the gameplay. Larry Hryb, better known as Major Nelson, says he’s ‘Even seen some developers using mini versions of their game so they can see what the console’s doing.’
The dev kit is more powerful than a retail kit so they can ‘Come in higher and tune lower as they get closer to shipping their game.’ The dev kit has 24 GB of RAM, twice that of the retail Scorpio.
Hryb notes that the back of the dev kit looks a lot like the retail version of Scorpio, but with an extra port for a network cable.
