Twenty-five years ago, Microsoft entered the console market with a hulking black machine, an enormous controller and a game called Halo. What followed changed the industry in ways few could have predicted, and today, the original Xbox is finding an unlikely new home in our pockets.
I think it was also a very similar gpu to one in retail graphics cards and i think it also used win2k or a win NT kernel or something and, as the article says, direct X.
Probably compiling software for windows pc and xbox was very similar - which was probably part of the idea. Making it easier for developers to do both. Also i guess they didn’t need to roll their own silicon so could get to market fast.
Those others are a long time after xbox - they probably had to generalise to catch up. But i think back in the days of ps2, dreamcast and earlier consoles were much less like a general pc using more custom silicon – so porting between them and PC probably a lot more work.
I’d argue that with the xbox, and a lot of what came after, the games consoles are suddenly rejecting a lot of their specialised arcade machine heritage, and a becoming lot more like general pc running an arcade-ish user interface. I think the category of consoles did materially shift especially in terms of hardware, and probably software development too.