With the NXE you can rip games to the HDD, yeah you need the disc still but this is what i did.

 

 

 

My sister tripped over my xbox when I was playing Gta4 and it scratched the disc and when I tried playing it, it went to the loading screen then froze. I got a friends copy of gta4, you could rent the game if you don't have a friend with the game. put they're game into your xbox (you can't just swap hard drives) and rip it. give the game back then put your broken scratched disc into the xbox and you can play again without having to replace the game! :thumbsup:

 

 

 

Hope it helped

This is pretty interesting. Why buy games when you could just rent and rip them?

From what I understand from his post, you'd still need the game's disc.

Yeah but this is if you have bought the game but its broken and dosent work anymore, get someone elses game, rip ir then use your broken game to verify that you own it and start it.

Makes sense, as long as the disk is readable enough to know what it is.

Makes sense, as long as the disk is readable enough to know what it is.

 

Yeah, I don't have a proper place to put my 360 since I'm poor and ive broken saints row 1, halo 3 (which i replaced and now i wish i waited for this update) and gta4, im glad this update came out,

Makes sense, may be useful to some people. :)

That's pretty awesome...I have a game that I can do that with. I'm kind of intrigued that they've made that feature available though...because that's definitely going to make it alot easier for people to hack that new feature, and to be able to fully rip games and then play them w/o a disc.

Improves load times in most cases...some have been found to make it worst but few exceptions have been found and funnily enough the only one i heard of was halo 3

Well, I guess it's time for me to go rent a bunch of games.

Well, I guess it's time for me to go rent a bunch of games.

 

you'd need the discs after

So this is similar to the PC gaming concept? Basically installing the gaming while using the disk broken disk as verification? I'm not sure on how big the games are but I assume if you have a small Xbox hard drive it will be full pretty quickly with all the ripped games.

Well, I guess it's time for me to go rent a bunch of games.

 

you'd need the discs after

 

 

 

Oh. I see.

Yes! I can Play Bioshock again!

So this is similar to the PC gaming concept? Basically installing the gaming while using the disk broken disk as verification? I'm not sure on how big the games are but I assume if you have a small Xbox hard drive it will be full pretty quickly with all the ripped games.

 

 

 

it will, each game is like 4-7gb. i know that fallout 3 is 5.9gb. so basically, this will only work if you don't have much on a 20gb harddrive, or you have the 120gb harddrive which microsoft rapes you on the price for. personally, on my 20gb harddrive, i have a bunch of arcade games, and like 1.6k songs, and i have like 1.4gb of space left or something, so i'm not gonna be able to rip games any time soon, just because i need the bigger harddrive which is like $150.

All I need is to find someone with the Orange Box disc and I can play 2Fort and Hydro again.

 

 

 

I dropped my disc and it got scratched, now whenever it loads 2Fort it freezes and Hydro will have whacked up graphics such as no floor etc. the rest of the maps, are fine however.

I never thought of that possibility, now I can play Gears again, even though Gears 2 is out :

 

 

 

Oh, if you want an explanation of why Halo 3 has increased load times, the game is optimized so that maps are saved on the game partition when you are playing. If you are reading off the disc, your load times are based on the slowest write/read speed of either the hard drive or disc reader. When you are reading off the hard drive, the load time is the read and write time of the hard drive combined.

 

 

 

The more detailed answer from Bungie

 

[hide=]The New Xbox Experience (NXE) launches today and with it comes a new feature that allows games to be installed to your hard drive. Unfortunately Halo 3 will load slower in this scenario and could negatively impact your online experience. Read on for details.

 

 

 

Halo 3 & NXE

 

 

 

The New Xbox Experience was released today and one of the new features allows you to install your games to the HDD. While you still have to keep the original disc in the tray, installing to the HDD can make some games perform a little better while also putting a little less wear-and-tear on your DVD drive. However, this isnt to say that ALL games will see optimizations from being installed. In fact, in the case of Halo 3, the game will actually see increased loading times. Several websites have reported the results of tests to gauge how some games perform after being installed to the HDD for Halo 3 and their tests indicate that in some cases, the load times are significantly longer. Our own internal investigations have yielded similar results.

 

 

 

To help explain why this is the case I tapped our uber engineer and Chief Caching Officer, Mat Noguchi, to answer a few questions.

 

 

 

 

 

What is the overall performance difference a player can expect to see when running Halo 3 straight from the disc versus installing it to their HDD? Some websites have reported that the game runs worse after the install.

 

 

 

The Xbox 360 HDD has a section for games to use called the utility partition. Games can use this section for whatever they want to; Halo 3 uses the utility partition to cache maps as they will load faster off the HDD than off the DVD. As a side note, the utility partition can be deleted when other games are played. This is why maps can take longer to load when you play another game in between various Halo 3 sessions. (As was the case with Halo 1 and Halo 2.)

 

 

 

So when Halo 3 runs, if a HDD is present, we copy maps from the DVD to the utility partition (on the HDD). Think of it as an on demand install of Halo 3 to some scratch space on the HDD. Halo 3 doesnt actually know where its running from, so it always assumes its running from a DVD. This is an unfortunate consequence of new features (namely, install to HDD) being added to the Xbox 360 after Halo 3 shipped. And as a result, it means that even if Halo 3 is already installed to the HDD, it will still copy maps to the utility partition.

 

 

 

So then the real question is why is copying from HDD to HDD slower than copying from DVD to HDD? In the first case, you are reading from one I/O device (HDD) and writing to the same I/O device (HDD). In the second case, you are reading from one I/O device (DVD) and writing to a different I/O device (HDD). In the first case, because we are reading and writing to the same device, the total copy time is the amount of time it takes to read the map plus the time it takes to write the map. Ultimately this is because for the HDD, you read and write through the same mechanism, i.e., the hard drive read/write head, and those reads and writes cannot occur simultaneously through a single mechanism. (If they could, it would be awesome, and I wouldnt have to document any of this. Unfortunately, its not easy to do for other reasons.) For the second case, because we are reading and writing from different devices, the total copy time is the larger of the total time to read the map and the total time to write the map. This is because we can read from one device (DVD) at the same time we are writing to another device (HDD). There is some overhead because you cant start writing data until you read it, but it is dwarfed by the time to copy a map. (About 128k vs. 500 MB or a ratio of 4000:1.)

 

 

 

There are other factors that contribute to load times, such as preloading data from the map you are about to start so that you dont have to sit through a non-interactive loading screen; the only difference in load times occurs when we copy a map that has not been cached to the utility partition or has been evicted from the utility partition because some other maps were run. Once a map has been cached, the time to load it will be identical to running Halo 3 off the DVD with a HDD.

 

 

 

 

 

Why is this the case? Many other games have reportedly seen improved load times and performance after being installed to the HDD.

 

 

 

 

 

The technical reasons were outlined above, but for a higher level answer, we shipped Halo 3 before Microsoft finalized this particular feature. As a result, we were not able to take advantage of it (or any other potential optimizations we discovered after shipping Halo 3). Perhaps we also coded too close to the metal.

 

 

 

 

 

Is it possible for Bungie to update Halo 3 to better utilize the HDD install features of NXE?

 

 

 

 

 

While anything is possible, it would be a significant undertaking to try and retroactively patch/update Halo 3 to be optimized to take advantage of the HDD install features of NXE. The risks of doing that and the resources required has to be carefully considered against what could really be a rather insignificant change to the player experience. For now our team is focused on making great games for the future like Halo 3 : Recon and other unannounced projects but we will continue to monitor this situation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So in conclusion, please be aware that installing Halo 3 to your HDD will actually result in longer load times and thus a less optimal experience than if you run the game from the disc drive. This happens due to the way Halo 3 already uses a HDD to cache data and once you do an install, you are copying between two different areas of the same drive as you are loading a map.

 

 

 

If you just plan to play campaign or offline content, you may feel that the tradeoff is worth it in order to have a slightly quieter Xbox 360 and reduced impact to your disc drive. However, if you play Halo 3 online, please be aware that increased map loading times can have a negative impact to everyones experience. In some cases, it could take considerably longer to load multiplayer maps, meaning that everyone you are matched with is also stuck waiting for your maps to load. If people start to lose patience, you then have scenarios of players leaving parties and aborting matching because they dont want to wait. This adds to the problem, creating a cycle where more and more people have a harder time getting into the games they want to play. To avoid this negative situation, we are advising that Halo 3 players do not install the game to their HDD.[/hide]

So this is similar to the PC gaming concept? Basically installing the gaming while using the disk broken disk as verification? I'm not sure on how big the games are but I assume if you have a small Xbox hard drive it will be full pretty quickly with all the ripped games.

 

 

 

it will, each game is like 4-7gb. i know that fallout 3 is 5.9gb. so basically, this will only work if you don't have much on a 20gb harddrive, or you have the 120gb harddrive which microsoft rapes you on the price for. personally, on my 20gb harddrive, i have a bunch of arcade games, and like 1.6k songs, and i have like 1.4gb of space left or something, so i'm not gonna be able to rip games any time soon, just because i need the bigger harddrive which is like $150.

 

 

 

 

 

Delete the songs, if you have them on your computer you can just stream them. That won't take any space on your hard drive, i do that.

Also, you can't replace Halo 3 this way. Well, you could, but Bungie says there are problems with it.

I'm happy that this has let some people not have to replace a game they don't need too. I wonder if microsoft thought about this before and if everyone does it, wont that hurt game sales and they might take the feature away?

I'm happy that this has let some people not have to replace a game they don't need too. I wonder if microsoft thought about this before and if everyone does it, wont that hurt game sales and they might take the feature away?

 

 

 

Not very much since you still need the actual disk to play the game

Yeah but the whole point is not having to replace a game that you already bought you have a broken game? get someone else game, rip it and play it with your broken disc

Yeah but the whole point is not having to replace a game that you already bought you have a broken game? get someone else game, rip it and play it with your broken disc

 

 

 

you just saved quite a bit of money, and you're complaining? :roll: Kids these days...

Yeah but the whole point is not having to replace a game that you already bought you have a broken game? get someone else game, rip it and play it with your broken disc

 

 

 

you just saved quite a bit of money, and you're complaining? :roll: Kids these days...

 

 

 

He's not complaining.

 

 

 

 

 

Seriously?