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The 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 regu

The 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 ago
so, the challenge is what’s interesting, or any specific title or application?
tedunangst 2y ago
xbox 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 ago
  That would have been DirectX 8, which predates XBox 360 by five years.
  - goosedragons 2y ago
    I think they're thinking of the original Xbox which had pixel shaders.
    - pjmlp 2y ago
      Even 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.
trashface 2y ago
PS3 was wacky, but the 360 wasn't that different from a PC at the time. There were some differences in rendering API, it had a few features not available on PC hardware. And the CPU cores were actually slower than an equivalent intel, but you had 6 of them, rare for the time. If your game was relatively portable and already used a API relatively close to D3D, it wasn't too hard to bring it up on the 360. I worked on a 360 game FWIW.
- jamesfinlayson 2y ago
  Which game?
  - trashface 2y ago
    It was an early xbox live arcade game. Not AAA.
- rekoil 2y ago
  Xbox 360 is also a PowerPC architecture, which on its own makes it quite a bit different from normal PC hardware, and even if that's a target that's more common to emulate there's still heavy performance losses in doing so. It might have been easier to port to because of good OS design, but running games for it will still be inefficient compared to running on actual hardware.
  - iforgotpassword 2y ago
    360 emulation was already quite good a year ago, now there's even an experimental fork of xenon that does recompilation for even more performance.
- rickdeckard 2y ago
  Regardless of the D3D-like API-layer (which helped Microsoft compensate for the peculiarities of PowerPC), they're both PowerPC architectures. You apparently don't know the Story how Sony spent big R&D-money with IBM to transition from MIPS to the custom PowerPC Cell Architecture, while IBM was already selling parts of this development to Microsoft for Xbox 360, and Microsoft ultimately beating Sony in market-launch with a chipset Sony partially financed...[0] There's a nice book about it from two of the IBM Chip-Designers called "The Race for a New Game Machine" by David Shippy and Mickie Phipps [0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2009/jan/01/sony-xbox-ibm https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2009/jan/01/sony...

yieldcrv 2y ago

so, the challenge is what’s interesting, or any specific title or application?

tedunangst 2y ago

xbox 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 ago
That would have been DirectX 8, which predates XBox 360 by five years.
- goosedragons 2y ago
  I think they're thinking of the original Xbox which had pixel shaders.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    Even 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.

trashface 2y ago

PS3 was wacky, but the 360 wasn't that different from a PC at the time. There were some differences in rendering API, it had a few features not available on PC hardware. And the CPU cores were actually slower than an equivalent intel, but you had 6 of them, rare for the time. If your game was relatively portable and already used a API relatively close to D3D, it wasn't too hard to bring it up on the 360. I worked on a 360 game FWIW.

jamesfinlayson 2y ago
Which game?
- trashface 2y ago
  It was an early xbox live arcade game. Not AAA.
rekoil 2y ago
Xbox 360 is also a PowerPC architecture, which on its own makes it quite a bit different from normal PC hardware, and even if that's a target that's more common to emulate there's still heavy performance losses in doing so. It might have been easier to port to because of good OS design, but running games for it will still be inefficient compared to running on actual hardware.
- iforgotpassword 2y ago
  360 emulation was already quite good a year ago, now there's even an experimental fork of xenon that does recompilation for even more performance.
rickdeckard 2y ago
Regardless of the D3D-like API-layer (which helped Microsoft compensate for the peculiarities of PowerPC), they're both PowerPC architectures. You apparently don't know the Story how Sony spent big R&D-money with IBM to transition from MIPS to the custom PowerPC Cell Architecture, while IBM was already selling parts of this development to Microsoft for Xbox 360, and Microsoft ultimately beating Sony in market-launch with a chipset Sony partially financed...[0] There's a nice book about it from two of the IBM Chip-Designers called "The Race for a New Game Machine" by David Shippy and Mickie Phipps [0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2009/jan/01/sony-xbox-ibm https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2009/jan/01/sony...