I fancied playing some old Xbox favourites recently & went looking for an emulator but haven't found anything, at least that does more than load the boot logo (very slowly) Anybody know the reason, is it just too hard too emulate (wasn't it marketed as the PC in a box?) or is there just no interest in doing it? I know it had nowhere near the amout of content that the PS2 or even Gamecube had, but there's plenty of really great games. Incl The Halos, Panzer Dragoon Orta, Otogi 1 & 2, Jet Set Radio Future, American Mcgee's Scrapland, Forza Motorsport, KOTOR 1 & 2, Oddworld Munch's Oddysee, Oddworld Stranger's Wrath, Breakdown, Phantom Dust, Conker Live & Reloaded, Dead Or Alive 3, Phantom Crash, Star Wars Republic Commando, Fable, Crimson Skies High Road To Revenge, Tao Feng, MechAssault, TES Morrowind, Jade Empire, PGR, PGR 2, Ninja Gaiden, GunValkyrie, Stubbs The Zombie etc. & it usually had by far the best version of the multiformat games too, seems a real shame there's nothing out there I'm sure plenty of those above would look absolutely glorious given the same attention in an emu like Dolphin. I'm aware that the xbox 360 is one powerful machine and that people had some trouble making a emulator work on a pc. I've done some research and what I've found is that some people use mac g5 for game servers running 360 games. I'm also noticed that they made guitar hero 3 for pc and a bunch of xbox 360 based games for it. Imagine Panzer Dragoon Orta or one of the Otogi's scaled up etc Mmmmm. () spoiler: Stole from GAF *from the guy that started working on an emulator* 'Xbox is just like a PC, it's easy to emulate!' Yes, we've all heard this silly and pointless argument a million times and it usually ends in the same, and rather ignorant conclusion (or should I say assumption) that just because the Xbox is PC similar, it's hardware should be relatively easy to emulate. That's a very wrong frame of mind. How hard can it be? Xbox's hardware is very complex and still poorly documented to this day. This requires some explanation. Is a PC easy to emulate? Well, I wouldn't say so myself. Take a look at the source code from bochs. A lot of source code/work isn't it? Emulating an x86 CPU is a lot harder than it sounds. I don't know where this mindless assumption comes from. Yes, there's loads of documentation on how the x86 processor works, but that doesn't exactly make it easy. First of all, the x86 instruction set is M-A-S-S-I-V-E! There can be at least 20 different versions of one instruction (i.e. There are many different versions of the MOV instruction, as well as INC, DEC, ADD, SUB, SHR, SHL, AND, OR, XOR etc.) and it takes time to implement them all. Of course, that's not exactly difficult. The real problem is that any modern x86 processor including the Pentium III can execute multiple instructions at once. So it's not like emulating a Z80 doing one instruction at a time. The actual algorithm and how x86 does this is undocumented and still unknown. In short, the Xbox's CPU can be emulated, but not accurately. Emulating any hardware by NVIDIA is not a walk in the park! The Xbox's GPU, the NV2A is often assumed just a GeForce 3. It's similar but not identical. It has some GeForce 4 capabilities too, so it's more of a cross between an NV20 and NV25. This is by no means easy to emulate either. NVIDIA's GPUs have very large register sets and afaik not even half of them have been discovered, and a large portion of known registers have unknown purposes. There is little to no documentation on how NVIDIA GPUs work. The best thing to do is to look at similar GPUs such as RIVA, TNT, and older GeForce cards. Some registers are similar, but not identical. Best photo viewer and organizer for mac. The best place to look for information is in open source drivers available on the net. Adding to the dificulty is that no one has ever discovered how pixel shaders work on NV2x cards, vertex shaders yes though.
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