4 ms·

It's actually amazing that Microsoft: - Paid developers to emulate a Pentium III (original xbox) on a PowerPC (360) in the first place - Subsequently paid dev

by nailer 6y ago

It's actually amazing that Microsoft: - Paid developers to emulate a Pentium III (original xbox) on a PowerPC (360) in the first place - Subsequently paid developers to do the effective opposite - emulate PowerPC (360) on x86 (one, series) Also consider it's far easier to emulate an original xbox on a one/series than it was on a 360

nix23 6y ago
Yeah amazing (me playing a DOS game on a FreeBSD PowerPC machine), Thanks anyway Microsoft ;)
- piva00 6y ago
  Playing one DOS game. Not supporting a whole platform and the software developed for it with a multitude of stakeholders (consumers, game developers, game publishers), lots of contracts and responsibilities to be held against those contracts. Verifying if each game runs properly on the emulation layer or if there will be unforeseen bugs later in the game progression due to some weird combination of programming voodoo and the system. I don't mean to say that given Microsoft's development power it's a massive achievement but it's an achievement and should be assessed objectively, not with snarky comments.
  - nix23 6y ago
    >Playing one DOS game. ?? No with dos-box you can nearly play all of them. It's just one emulator but then you have also NES SNES GB SGB Saturn Wii PS1/2/3 PSP Wine Atari Commodore etc...
    - dmonitor 6y ago
      Dolphin emulator is the 8th wonder of the world
      - nix23 6y ago
        Absolutely!!!! What a great piece of software.
danbolt 6y ago
I can imagine reworking the x86 processor should be straightforward, but I'd be curious about the cost of emulating the proprietary hardware inside the Original Xbox (eg: render pipeline, memory architecture, I/O, etc.). An example of this sort of thing can be well-observed emulating the Nintendo 64. The CPU is a plain-standard MIPS III, but emulating the console's graphics chip hasn't always been accurate for a long time. Disney-released games on the Nintendo Wii would toy with the write-back cache to prevent emulators from booting their games.[1] I can imagine the largest amounts of difficulty are outside the CPU for a polished-enough project. [1] https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2017/02/01/dolphin-progress-report-january-2017/ https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2017/02/01/dolphin-progress-rep...

by nailer 6y ago

nix23 6y ago

Yeah amazing (me playing a DOS game on a FreeBSD PowerPC machine), Thanks anyway Microsoft ;)

piva00 6y ago
Playing one DOS game. Not supporting a whole platform and the software developed for it with a multitude of stakeholders (consumers, game developers, game publishers), lots of contracts and responsibilities to be held against those contracts. Verifying if each game runs properly on the emulation layer or if there will be unforeseen bugs later in the game progression due to some weird combination of programming voodoo and the system. I don't mean to say that given Microsoft's development power it's a massive achievement but it's an achievement and should be assessed objectively, not with snarky comments.
- nix23 6y ago
  >Playing one DOS game. ?? No with dos-box you can nearly play all of them. It's just one emulator but then you have also NES SNES GB SGB Saturn Wii PS1/2/3 PSP Wine Atari Commodore etc...
  - dmonitor 6y ago
    Dolphin emulator is the 8th wonder of the world
    - nix23 6y ago
      Absolutely!!!! What a great piece of software.

danbolt 6y ago

I can imagine reworking the x86 processor should be straightforward, but I'd be curious about the cost of emulating the proprietary hardware inside the Original Xbox (eg: render pipeline, memory architecture, I/O, etc.). An example of this sort of thing can be well-observed emulating the Nintendo 64. The CPU is a plain-standard MIPS III, but emulating the console's graphics chip hasn't always been accurate for a long time. Disney-released games on the Nintendo Wii would toy with the write-back cache to prevent emulators from booting their games.[1] I can imagine the largest amounts of difficulty are outside the CPU for a polished-enough project. [1] https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2017/02/01/dolphin-progress-report-january-2017/ https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2017/02/01/dolphin-progress-rep...