Xbox360 questions answered by Chris Satchell

* You will definitely need a hard disk to play Xbox 1 games.
* If you yank the hard disk off the top of the Xbox 360 when it's in the middle of doing something, it will not corrupt it beyond repair or damage the File Allocation Table or anything like that - the hard disk uses a "transaction model" so that if you interrupt a transfer the data simply isn't present and the space is presumably reallocated when you next save data to it.
* The "ring of light" around the power button highlights which wireless controller is being used, highlighting player one's activity in the top-left quadrant. When the console is laid on its side, it senses this and starts using the top-left quadrant as you see it with the console laid flat. What's more, the ring of light motif is spread throughout the Xbox 360 interface, so you can see which player pulled up the "Guide" page as you're watching a film or playing a game and, in the words of Satchell, "slap him".

* Cross-platform development between Windows and Xbox is being actively pursued - in the future, Microsoft hopes that people will be able to play games against each other using either platform.
* DVDs can be played even if you don't have the remote control, unlike Xbox 1.
* For now, you can play music and access photographs on the PSP, but you can't do video yet.
That may happen, but Satchell joked that Sony wasn't exactly giving them a helping hand there.
* Interestingly, you can actually have that slideshow draw photographs from another external device, so - as in our demo - you could play music from an iPod while using a slideshow of photos from a PlayStation Portable simultaneously.
* All of these devices will be supported by default, and any firmware updates that are necessary - Microsoft is hoping for very few - can be made available via Live.
* RGB video output will only be possible if you purchase the £17.99 cable separately - regardless of whether you paid £209.99 or £279.99 for your Xbox 360 console.
* You can plug in a keyboard but this is for text input only - including in massively-multiplayer games. You can't use it to play games and that was a design choice.