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Xbox360 –> Windows Executable Converter (2017)
- Laaas 3y agoHow does this compare with Xenia?
- monocasa 3y agoIt doesn't actually run any games.
- comprev 3y agoNeeds (2002) in the title
- monocasa 3y agoThese (incredibly HLE emulators for Microsoft consoles trying to live off the idea "hey, it can't be that different than Windows, right?") emulators like CXBX for the original Xbox don't tend to work super well. There's such a huge impedance mismatch between the environments expected by this code versus what actual Xbox hardware can provide (remember that games run in kernel mode and quite a few drivers are statically compiled and optimized into the games) that it's just way less surface area to go the full system emulator approach in the first place. So what you see is some tech demo samples perfectly and maybe a couple of bespoke games working OKish, but then the complexity burden overwhelms the project and it kind of stagnates.
- Shekelphile 3y agoThis emulator isn't taking the 'CXBX approach'. CXBX does not recompile the binary and relies on common system/graphics api calls not being inlined and easily replaceable with windows equivalents, which absolutely doesn't exist in any 360 game binary for all the important things.
- monocasa 3y agoThe point is that it's still HLEing all of the imports (like CXBX). Just going the extra mile and full system emulating pays massive dividends. No, it's not close enough to Windows in super subtle ways, so don't take the bait of the import names being the same.
- Shekelphile 3y ago> The point is that it's still HLEing all of the imports (like CXBX). You have a fundamental misunderstanding here. HLE in the style that CXBX does it is not possible for 360 games as every userland library is static linked and LTCG is enabled by default (maybe required for MS cert?) for release builds. Nearly everything is inlined and impossible to replace with calls to matching windows APIs as a result. Xenia and rexdex both emulate the kernel at the syscall level and don't touch userland at all. > Just going the extra mile and full system emulating pays massive dividends. Maybe for security research and correctness purposes, it has little practical value for ps3/360 gen emulation and beyond.
- monocasa 3y agoOn original Xbox even more libraries are statically linked than 360 (they had nothing like xam.xex) and heavily inlined even without LTO because the code style at the time heavily used C macros.
- dang 3y agoRelated: Recompiler: Porting Xbox360 Executables to Windows - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15474393 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15474393 - Oct 2017 (58 comments)
- woolion 3y agoAt this point, is it still worth it to post these manually? Checking all post submissions, keeping only the ones with sufficient engagement, and a little summary line "7 other submissions ignored, the oldest dating from Oct 2018" Maybe I'm too lazy, but that really sounds like something I would let a computer automatically do.
- supriyo-biswas 3y agoTechnologically the task can be automated by scraping each submission when it’s submitted, calculate the sentence embeddings of the article, and compare the new submissions with other embeddings. However, that’s how you become a Facebook style social network with “more you might like” and whatnot.
- woolion 3y agoI agree, hn clearly stays minimal on purpose, which is why I put the last disclaimer line. >with “more you might like” In itself that's a very good feature, it becomes a problem with a host of other patterns to transform discoverability into addiction. Most often these 'bad recommendations' are high engagement content (controversial, or low-value but high attractiveness clickbait) that are purposefully known by the platform to only be tangentially related to the content, if at all.
- dang 3y ago> scraping each submission when it’s submitted Even that is surprisingly hard! Hard enough that we had to stop working on it when we realized that it's a startup, or at least a major undertaking, in its own right.
- stevefan1999 3y ago
- bob-09 3y agoSince Xbox360 is PPC, does this convert to x86_64?
- monocasa 3y agoYes, it recompiles.
- deaddodo 3y agoThe main README explains their approach. It disassembles PPC, generates equivalent C++ and compiles that into the target ISA (amd64).
- stavros 3y agoIs it not completely crazy that this is even possible? This sounds like wizardry to me.
- anthk 3y agoQemu does something similar. And Box86 does that while keeping 3D acceleration on converting X86->ARM linux binaries. https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86 https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86
- actionfromafar 3y agoIt also depends on how strictly you want preserve the behaviour of the asm.
- ilyt 3y agoIt's quite common way to get good performance out of emulated code, althought usually it's JIT. But yeah, it is crazy complex
- Gordonjcp 3y agoWell, think about it this way - suppose you have a block of C code and you compile it to object code, like: if (hitByMissile == True) { lives--; if (lives == 0) playing = False; } ; next address is 0x8f02 it might turn into: ld a, (4011h) jr z, 8f02h ld a, (4020h) dec a ld (4020h), a jr z, 8f02h xor a, a ld (0x4021h), a ; next address is 8f02h That might disassemble back to C as: if (var4011 != 0) { var4020--; if (var4020 == 0) { var4021 == 0; } } like that. Less readable, because we have no variable names, and not identical to the source code but probably close enough, but the important thing is we don't care if we understand it or not. If we declare a variable that our original code stores at 4020h in a 16-bit address space, but it ends up somewhere wildly different in our 32-bit address space because we're recompiling on a newer machine, we don't care - we just care that the name gets used consistently. If you then read through the disassembled source you could start to piece together what the variables are, though.
- kevingadd 3y agoSomething like this was even easier for XNA games, since you could download a bundle of C# dlls and exes from your console and then after a quick decryption process, patch them to swap the dependencies. I reverse engineered a couple games this way and was able to boot them part-way within a couple hours (of course, endianness and console-only shader instructions were a problem.)
- heywhatupboys 3y agoHow I miss XNA
- tomsato 3y agoI vaguely remember this being done for FEZ back in the day. Funnily enough, the same is true for a number of cross-platform frameworks. One that sticks out was a port of David Cage game (which was largely written in lua) and making huge progress on porting the runtime from PS3 to PC.
- anthk 3y agoUnder OpenBSD you still have xnaify to wrap and run C# games with MonoGame or whatever was called.
- xvilka 3y agoThere is a demand for XEX[1] file support in Rizin/Cutter, by the way, to simplify the reverse engineering workflow. [1] https://github.com/rizinorg/ideas/issues/10 https://github.com/rizinorg/ideas/issues/10
- herunan 3y agoIs it HN’s gaming emulators day? 4 posts in the last 12 hours regarding emulators. Xbox360 –> Windows Executable Converter (2017) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36705223 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36705223 The Simpsons Hit and Run leaked source code https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36703711 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36703711 PCSX2 is an open source PS2 Emulator https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36702084 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36702084 Xenia: Xbox 360 Emulator https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36702731 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36702731
- alexhaber 3y agoThe Simpsons Hit and Run got an official PC release
- causality0 3y agoI look forward to the HN discussions of Citra and CEMU.
- genocidicbunny 3y agoI'm guessing it's somewhat related to the recent news about emulators on the Xbox consoles.
- npongratz 3y agoAlso in the last day: RPCS3 – Open Source Playstation 3 Emulator https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36690498 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36690498
- mdtrooper 3y agoIs "xbox360 -> m$win exe -> wine/proton" posible?
- hospitalJail 3y agohahahaha I love the way you think. Just wanted to thank you for the creativity.
- kernal 3y agoThe readme was detailed and enjoyable to read. More projects should do this.
- dehrmann 3y ago> Xbox360 is not yet abandonware :) Considering a new Xbox Series X will play most Xbox 360 discs (or at least the ones you care about), it's not even close to abandonware.