Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Hacking the Xbox 360 Hypervisor Part 2: The Bad Update Exploit

icode4.coffee

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 109 posts

Re: Hacking the Xbox 360 Hypervisor Part 2: The Bad Update Exploit

#91

Post by hot_gril »

jamesfinlayson wrote: post #78
hot_gril wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder about that too. New console supports only a subset of 360 games somehow, and with different enhancements. The 360 could also play original Xbox games without much exception, but it was noticeably slower than the original. Halo 2 on 360 has a shorter render distance.

> The 360 could also play original Xbox games without much exception I remember there being a list of what it could play but I was never too sure how comprehensive it was. I know it couldn't emulate Midtown Madness 3.

Oh. So it can't emulate the game I probably played the most.

Re: Hacking the Xbox 360 Hypervisor Part 2: The Bad Update Exploit

#92

Post by hot_gril »

perching_aix wrote: post #81
hot_gril wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i5-9400f, and I was wrong about GPU, it's 1660ti

It's really surprising then that you had such a bad experience with PS3 emulation specifically at least, the i5 9400F was a go-to recommendation there for a very long time, basically ever since that processor's release (6 years ago). It was in last August they bumped their system requirements to the i5 10400F. Nearly all of the games marked "Playable" in their compatibility list should be plug-and-play territory, wit…

I didn't try reaching out, I just wanted to play Shrek Forever After (for a very random reason) and gave up after 5 minutes of choppiness. Like I said, there's probably a fix, and I appreciate that there's community support, but I simply didn't have time. Especially because on the PS3 side, this was after waiting a while for RPCS3 to do its pre-run caching.

Re: Hacking the Xbox 360 Hypervisor Part 2: The Bad Update Exploit

#93

Post by trashface »

maximilianburke wrote: post #87
trashface wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PS3 was wacky, but the 360 wasn't that different from a PC at the time. There were some differences in rendering API, it had a few features not available on PC hardware. And the CPU cores were actually slower than an equivalent intel, but you had 6 of them, rare for the time. If your game was relatively portable and already used a API relatively close to D3D, it wasn't too hard to bring it up on the 360. I worked on…

The 360 had three hyperthreaded cores, not six.

It had 6 hardware threads, but yes pedantically there were three cores.

Re: Hacking the Xbox 360 Hypervisor Part 2: The Bad Update Exploit

#94

Post by trashface »

jamesfinlayson wrote: post #77
trashface wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PS3 was wacky, but the 360 wasn't that different from a PC at the time. There were some differences in rendering API, it had a few features not available on PC hardware. And the CPU cores were actually slower than an equivalent intel, but you had 6 of them, rare for the time. If your game was relatively portable and already used a API relatively close to D3D, it wasn't too hard to bring it up on the 360. I worked on…

Which game?

It was an early xbox live arcade game. Not AAA.

Re: Hacking the Xbox 360 Hypervisor Part 2: The Bad Update Exploit

#95

Post by pjmlp »

tedunangst wrote: post #61
jcranmer wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Xbox 360/PS3 era of video game consoles is probably the hardest era to emulate. Subsequent generations of consoles are essentially the same hardware as regular computers, just with a custom OS (and known hardware profile, certainly a benefit over regular consumer PCs). But that era of video game consoles is the last gasp of the custom hardware design of earlier consoles, which is substantially harder to emulate b…

xbox 360 is pretty close to modern graphics hardware; in fact it debuted modern shader arch a bit before it became the PC standard.

That would have been DirectX 8, which predates XBox 360 by five years.

Re: Hacking the Xbox 360 Hypervisor Part 2: The Bad Update Exploit

#96

Post by trashface »

rickdeckard wrote: post #80
trashface wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PS3 was wacky, but the 360 wasn't that different from a PC at the time. There were some differences in rendering API, it had a few features not available on PC hardware. And the CPU cores were actually slower than an equivalent intel, but you had 6 of them, rare for the time. If your game was relatively portable and already used a API relatively close to D3D, it wasn't too hard to bring it up on the 360. I worked on…

Regardless of the D3D-like API-layer (which helped Microsoft compensate for the peculiarities of PowerPC), they're both PowerPC architectures. You apparently don't know the Story how Sony spent big R&D-money with IBM to transition from MIPS to the custom PowerPC Cell Architecture, while IBM was already selling parts of this development to Microsoft for Xbox 360, and Microsoft ultimately beating Sony in market-launch…

The PS3 system design was radically different. We considering porting the same PC game we (relatively) easily ported to 360 to that platform, but rejected it because it would be months of work, at least. Didn't matter that it was a similar CPU (technically) to the 360.

Re: Hacking the Xbox 360 Hypervisor Part 2: The Bad Update Exploit

#97

Post by pjmlp »

rickdeckard wrote: post #80
trashface wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PS3 was wacky, but the 360 wasn't that different from a PC at the time. There were some differences in rendering API, it had a few features not available on PC hardware. And the CPU cores were actually slower than an equivalent intel, but you had 6 of them, rare for the time. If your game was relatively portable and already used a API relatively close to D3D, it wasn't too hard to bring it up on the 360. I worked on…

Regardless of the D3D-like API-layer (which helped Microsoft compensate for the peculiarities of PowerPC), they're both PowerPC architectures. You apparently don't know the Story how Sony spent big R&D-money with IBM to transition from MIPS to the custom PowerPC Cell Architecture, while IBM was already selling parts of this development to Microsoft for Xbox 360, and Microsoft ultimately beating Sony in market-launch…

Microsoft was helped by PS 3 being a pain to program, given the Cell architecture, a mistake that Sony didn't repeat, and hence why the 360 was the only XBox that had an upper hand against Sony.

Re: Hacking the Xbox 360 Hypervisor Part 2: The Bad Update Exploit

#98

Post by perching_aix »

hot_gril wrote: post #92
perching_aix wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really surprising then that you had such a bad experience with PS3 emulation specifically at least, the i5 9400F was a go-to recommendation there for a very long time, basically ever since that processor's release (6 years ago). It was in last August they bumped their system requirements to the i5 10400F. Nearly all of the games marked "Playable" in their compatibility list should be plug-and-play territory, wit…

I didn't try reaching out, I just wanted to play Shrek Forever After (for a very random reason) and gave up after 5 minutes of choppiness. Like I said, there's probably a fix, and I appreciate that there's community support, but I simply didn't have time. Especially because on the PS3 side, this was after waiting a while for RPCS3 to do its pre-run caching.

Given that game has been marked "Playable" years before your CPU has seen its initial release, and that there are no notes on its Wiki page, I'd expect it to run essentially perfectly out-of-the-box, short of some regression causing issues.

You should give it a retry sometime if you can / want to. That said, I should probably let you know that the community can be slightly hostile, and they will ask you do the legwork if it's not a misconfig but a suspected regression (they'll want you to bisect the build where the choppiness appeared). You'll also want to run the topic by the volunteers in the #help channel on their Discord before opening an issue ticket on GitHub, as their GitHub issue tickets are not for support, only for actual issue / feature request tracking.

Re: Hacking the Xbox 360 Hypervisor Part 2: The Bad Update Exploit

#99

Post by goosedragons »

pjmlp wrote: post #95
tedunangst wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

xbox 360 is pretty close to modern graphics hardware; in fact it debuted modern shader arch a bit before it became the PC standard.

That would have been DirectX 8, which predates XBox 360 by five years.

I think they're thinking of the original Xbox which had pixel shaders.

Re: Hacking the Xbox 360 Hypervisor Part 2: The Bad Update Exploit

#100

Post by pjmlp »

goosedragons wrote: post #99
pjmlp wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would have been DirectX 8, which predates XBox 360 by five years.

I think they're thinking of the original Xbox which had pixel shaders.

Even that is a bit of a strech, at it got released one year after DirectX 8 was made available, and was powered by GeForce 3 class hardware, which naturally came first on PC.

> The GeForce 3 was unveiled during the 2001 Macworld Conference & Expo/Tokyo 2001 in Makuhari Messe and powered realtime demos of Pixar's Junior Lamp and id Software's Doom 3. Apple would later announce launch rights for its new line of computers.

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_3_series

Naturally outside PC, there were other stuff predating programmable graphics, however if we stick to the PC, XBox follows PC, not the other way around, specially since the first one wasn't that great versus PlayStation 2 in market share, even if there were some great games like Halo and Fable.

Post reply on HN