I'm amused by how many video game emulator devs insist that they're not for playing video games. (MAME is another big one.)
Never been curious enough about how something works to try to replicate it?
Xenia - An Xbox 360 emulator
51–60 of 74 posts
Re: Xenia - An Xbox 360 emulator
#52One thing I've wondered... And this is somewhat unrelated, is why the Xbox One doesn't run 360 games. One of the core features of it's OS is the fact that everything is running in a modified Hyper-V environment. So why couldn't MS have emulated the 360 on the hypervisor?! Will be cool to see this project progress and hopefully running on an Xbox One dev kit.
You'll see a lot of technical answers, all of which are valid; but the overriding reason is that if you're playing your old 360 games, you're not buying new Xbone games. Microsoft takes a loss on every console sold; if you're not regularly purchasing new games at retail prices, they're not interested in serving you.
I don't think Microsoft and Sony think that way. Look at the extraordinary lengths Microsoft and Sony went to in the previous generation to provide back compat -- Microsoft wrote an amazing Xbox emulator, Sony build a whole expensive mini version of the PS2 into early models of the PS3.
And this generation it seems that Sony is trying to provide PS3 emulation using their cloud gaming system.
Some of the benefits of back compat to platform holders:
1) Encourages customers to upgrade sooner and to choose the compatible platform.
2) Increases the roster of games during the first few years of the new console's life.
3) Extends sales of the previous generation hardware and software. (Software because it can be played on both old and new hardware, and hardware because there's more new software available.)
Re: Xenia - An Xbox 360 emulator
#53Author here. Yeah, the readme is meant to scare off people. Even with it I still get people on IRC or email asking me if they can play game X or where they can get a copy. The note about no downloads is for all those who download 360 emulators from shady YouTube links and such - there's a surprising number of fakes packed with malware and viruses floating around. Status of the project is that it's coming along well,…
Maybe upload some screenshots, or videos?
Re: Xenia - An Xbox 360 emulator
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Xbox 360 used a PowerPC instruction set. It would seem unlikely that emulation could be efficient enough to have it work reliably good and fast.
It isn't necessary to purely emulate every instruction, you can cache translated code segments like a JIT compiler does. It has been done before for fast x86 emulation on a VLIW chipset: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Morphing_Software More details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_translation#Dynamic_bina...
Don't know how it is with the modern console games but at least in the old days the developers where relying on all kinds of tricks that made really accurate emulators difficult to make. See for example the story about "perfect snes emulator" [1]
[1] http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-o...
Re: Xenia - An Xbox 360 emulator
#55Author here. Yeah, the readme is meant to scare off people. Even with it I still get people on IRC or email asking me if they can play game X or where they can get a copy. The note about no downloads is for all those who download 360 emulators from shady YouTube links and such - there's a surprising number of fakes packed with malware and viruses floating around. Status of the project is that it's coming along well,…
A little bit OOT, why do you use .jp for the domain?
Re: Xenia - An Xbox 360 emulator
#56I'm amused by how many video game emulator devs insist that they're not for playing video games. (MAME is another big one.)
And why is that difficult to believe? My previous emulation project ( https://code.google.com/p/pspplayer/ ) was the same kind of exercise: do something no one else had done and learn a lot doing it. As a hobbyist the act of doing something is far more fulfilling than the output.
It's not difficult to believe, it's just funny. Devoting an enormous amount of time and energy to understanding and reproducing a device whose only purpose is to play video games while insisting that you're not interested in video games is a pretty funny thing to do.
I mean, I obsess over odd stuff too, I'd guess most of us do, but it's important to keep a sense of humor about it.
Re: Xenia - An Xbox 360 emulator
#57Author here. Yeah, the readme is meant to scare off people. Even with it I still get people on IRC or email asking me if they can play game X or where they can get a copy. The note about no downloads is for all those who download 360 emulators from shady YouTube links and such - there's a surprising number of fakes packed with malware and viruses floating around. Status of the project is that it's coming along well,…
A little bit OOT, why do you use .jp for the domain?
All the other TLDs (xenia.com, etc) are squatted/taken. And .jp is cool :)
Re: Xenia - An Xbox 360 emulator
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
And why is that difficult to believe? My previous emulation project ( https://code.google.com/p/pspplayer/ ) was the same kind of exercise: do something no one else had done and learn a lot doing it. As a hobbyist the act of doing something is far more fulfilling than the output.
It's not difficult to believe, it's just funny. Devoting an enormous amount of time and energy to understanding and reproducing a device whose only purpose is to play video games while insisting that you're not interested in video games is a pretty funny thing to do. I mean, I obsess over odd stuff too, I'd guess most of us do, but it's important to keep a sense of humor about it.
Oh, for sure. I thought you were implying that I only was doing it to play/steal/etc games (as many people assume). I've got a pile of awesome Japanese import games I picked up the last time I was there that I'd love to play, but the region locking on the real consoles prevents me. If I had an emulator, that wouldn't be a problem. Not the only reason I'm doing this, of course (I could just buy a Japanese console), but it's a reason nonetheless :)
Re: Xenia - An Xbox 360 emulator
#59One thing I've wondered... And this is somewhat unrelated, is why the Xbox One doesn't run 360 games. One of the core features of it's OS is the fact that everything is running in a modified Hyper-V environment. So why couldn't MS have emulated the 360 on the hypervisor?! Will be cool to see this project progress and hopefully running on an Xbox One dev kit.
Unlike most of the replies made to your question, I don't think the big problem for Microsoft was emulating PowerPC on an x86 platform to make emulation happen. The real problem with emulating both the PS3 and Xbox 360 is that they were the first consoles with an incredibly complex GPU. The GameCube and PS2 already have chips that are incredibly hard to emulate, and you need a high end PC to do it. The Xbox 360 GPU is much more complex than what's in the GameCube - it's two generations ahead of it with two incredibly complex generations of GPU functions you have to emulate on other hardware. The Xbox 360 GPU can be seen as the very first chip in the generation of GPGPUs to which today's GPUs still belong. It really was a beast of a machine in 2005.
Different GPUs work very differently internally, and the 360 GPU probably is vastly different internally than what's in the Xbox One, despite both being made by the same vendor. The incredible amount of specific GPU hardware optimization, the incredible EDRAM bandwidth and other things that need to be emulated for emulation to work is incredible. That even ignores the performance characteristics of the Xbox 360 CPU - it outperforms even the highest end Haswells today in very specific scenarios (and Microsoft has no hope to emulate this on the weak Xbone CPU). Props to the OP for starting such a daunting project.
If you look at Dolphin's system requirements, the Xbox One does not quite have the power to even emulate a GameCube, a console like the Xbox 360 with an IBM PowerPC CPU and an ATI/AMD GPU but from 2001 instead of 2005. It could never hope to emulate an Xbox 360. It makes me wonder what kind of regular PC hardware is needed eventually to run something like Halo 4.
Re: Xenia - An Xbox 360 emulator
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
You'll see a lot of technical answers, all of which are valid; but the overriding reason is that if you're playing your old 360 games, you're not buying new Xbone games. Microsoft takes a loss on every console sold; if you're not regularly purchasing new games at retail prices, they're not interested in serving you.
I don't think Microsoft and Sony think that way. Look at the extraordinary lengths Microsoft and Sony went to in the previous generation to provide back compat -- Microsoft wrote an amazing Xbox emulator, Sony build a whole expensive mini version of the PS2 into early models of the PS3. And this generation it seems that Sony is trying to provide PS3 emulation using their cloud gaming system. Some of the benefits of b…
The PS* cloud gaming system I would imagine has very little to do with the PS4 and everything to do with the PS Vita, televisions, phones, tablets. All of which are desperately in need of something to differentiate them from their competitors.