9 ms·
I wish there was somewhere I could toss cash into a softmod bounty.
by mouse_ 2y ago
I wish there was somewhere I could toss cash into a softmod bounty.
- whalesalad 2y agoat this point is there any reason to use xb360 hardware? emulation on modern hardware has gotta be substantially better
- mouse_ 2y agoXbox 360 emulation is still really bad for most games, despite what some YouTubers would have you believe. But let's say in a few years it does become substantially better. There's still: • Nostalgia • Authenticity • Compatibility • Preservation • Cost of entry Even if 360 emulation does become practical, a 360 will still be cheaper than any gaming PC capable of playing those games.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- reassembled 2y agoJust this week a PC port of the 360 version of Sonic Unleashed was released that was accomplished via static recompilation techniques. It plays flawlessly and is really quite an impressive release. If this is possible now then emulation of these consoles might not be the only avenue to preserving their history.
- gjsman-1000 2y agoYes, but the graphics system for the game was completely reworked by people familiar with Sega's proprietary Hedgehog Engine. A straight recompile would have been unplayable.
- reassembled 2y agoInteresting, I didn’t know that. I suspect many casual observers don’t either. So you’re suggesting they did this work with proprietary info they’d gained through work with Sega and thus broke their NDA?
- csande17 2y agoNot necessarily -- a lot of external hobbyist work has gone into reverse-engineering Sonic Generations, which has an official PC port and is based on the same engine as Unleashed. Funnily enough, one of the most famous Generations mods is a project that ports over a bunch of levels from Unleashed. IIRC they changes the graphics pipeline to look and work more like the Unleashed one, too.
- perching_aix 2y agoThere's no meaningful technological difference between what that static recompilation tool can do for you vs. what hacking up Xenia can. I'd also hazard a guess that that port's GitHub repo will get DMCA'd eventually, and rightfully so. I really don't know why people keep doing this to themselves and to the communities they claim to love. This is about as far from a clean-room reimplementation and porting effort as humanly possible. It's not a forward-thinking, sustainable preservation effort at all.
- NegativeLatency 2y agoI also find it much less drama to sit down on the couch and fire up a console, than to have to: - startup PC - update PC - figure out why bluetooth controller won't pair to PC - finally get it working, and then have a game crash on you
- perching_aix 2y agoConsidering that the constant stream of system software and game updates became a thing exactly in the 7th console generation (x360 era), updates are a pretty funny thing to bring up in a comparison like this.
- NegativeLatency 2y agoYeah that’s fair, my consoles are mostly Nintendo or older systems
- reginald78 2y agoI went to fire up my old Xbox 360 to play dance central with my kids and of course it had developed RRoD while sitting on a shelf in my basement. It seems emulation is a no go for kinect games as well.
- hot_gril 2y agoXbox 360 and PS3 emulators are still borderline unusable on my new-ish PC. They're slow, glitchy, and/or hard to set up. Related to what the other commenter said, anyone who says these are good must have a lot of time to deal with it, whereas I just want the equivalent of sticking the disc into the console. GameCube is the newest thing I've had a decent experience emulating, and even that isn't 100% unless it's Melee with the Slippi optimizations (n.b. did not try DS or Switch).
- foldr 2y agoAn Xbox Series S does a fine job of playing Xbox 360 games and doesn't cost much.
- itishappy 2y ago> There are 632 games that have been made backward compatible out of 2,155 that have been released for Xbox 360. It's also going to struggle without a disk drive to play my physical collection. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_backward-compatible_games_for_Xbox_One_and_Series_X/S https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_backward-compatible_ga...
- KeplerBoy 2y agoIf you want to emulate a current console, try emulating the switch. I haven't looked into it much, but apparently it works better on modern hardware than on the switch itself. Not surprising given the switch aging hardware and power limit.
- mschuster91 2y agoThe Switch is a mainstream-ish ARM system. IIRC it maps really well to Apple's M system.
- hot_gril 2y agoBut the supposedly working Switch emulators only have experimental Mac support at best. Also idk if the CPU arch is really the hard part in general... we never got an Xbox 360 emulator for PPC Mac ;)
- jcranmer 2y agoThe 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 because the hardware just doesn't look like what modern hardware looks like. Furthermore, said era is also right after Denard scaling came to an end, which means that current hardware doesn't have that much better specs, at least in easy-to-use form, than the hardware of the time. If any game tried to take the hardware to its limits, it would be a real struggle to emulate it with regular computers.
- yieldcrv 2y agoso, the challenge is what’s interesting, or any specific title or application?
- tedunangst 2y agoxbox 360 is pretty close to modern graphics hardware; in fact it debuted modern shader arch a bit before it became the PC standard.
- pjmlp 2y agoThat would have been DirectX 8, which predates XBox 360 by five years.
- goosedragons 2y agoI think they're thinking of the original Xbox which had pixel shaders.
- pjmlp 2y agoEven 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 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.
- eddiewithzato 2y agoIt’s also the worst era to play natively. Bad textures and horrible frames per second.
- Retr0id 2y agoAssigning dollar values to this kind of work gets messy, fast. Imagine if someone iterated on the exploit presented in the article so that it became a persistent "softmod" - who gets the funds? Bounties also discourage open collaboration. For example, if person A has the first half an exploit chain and person B has the second, they're each incentivised to keep the information to themselves and try to get a full chain on their own to claim the bounty. Of course, this assumes they're financially motivated - but if they're not there's no point in the bounty in the first place.
- yieldcrv 2y agoBounties are free work contests for any potential beneficiary And the benefactor is designed by a committee who cant even agree on the value, winding up tossing pennies at the problem hoping someone in Malaysia salivates