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Xenia - An Xbox 360 emulator
- tasoeur 13y agoThat's a great project and I'm going to dive into the source pretty soon! However I'm not sure I really like the tone used in the README.md... :/
- lowmagnet 13y agoThat's rather neat, even though it can't run the games. I can understand the tone in the README.md because a lot of 'gamers', even the technically oriented ones, expect a lot from the word 'emulator'.
- legacy2013 13y agoyea, a lot of people would be submitting issues that they can't run a game without those first disclaimers
- yareally 13y agoSadly, they probably still do even with the disclaimer. Just my experience with dealing with similar audience to emulators (mobile apps) and making a disclaimer the top line of your summary.
- dippyskoodlez 13y agoThe amount of traffic this is going to get is probably a bit nuts, so it's pretty well deserved imo. If your feelings are hurt by someone not wanting to get hammered with idiotic requests/e-mails about a very clear alpha 'project', you should maybe reconsider your ISP payments.
- Freestyler_3 13y agoAgreed, A good note to not trust anything claiming to be the finished/working version of this is in its place. But I can't but wonder how those people get there anyway. Linkbait? First many people get lured in then hope some are going to help, be rude to the rest and tell them to get off. mhh I don't know...
- dippyskoodlez 13y agoIt sounds more like a Linus approach of being productive rather than caring about being PC. Worrying about joe schmoes feelings that will just blindly expect a perfect product is the last thing I would want for a hobby. He seems to know his stuff, so I think talent will attract talent.
- Untit1ed 13y agoMakes sense... can you imagine how many 12 year olds are gonna find this as a result of googling "Xbox 360 emulator" and send him poorly spelled emails about how to install it on their parents' iPad?
- catilac 13y agoI agree. I can't stand the tone. OSDev.org does a good job of managing peoples expectations without insulting people. Its possible to be clear and concise without resorting to using abusive language.
- jyrkesh 13y agoAs others have said, the word "emulator" draws a distinct crowd who is otherwise (almost) completely non-technical. Having frequented a lot of developer forums for both, I'd say it's analogous to many of the sorts of threads you get about Android development on XDA.
- afhof 13y agoThe "I'm doing this and I don't give a damn about you" attitude I think has at least some merit. If the lead programmer is good, its better if he/she can say no. If there is a correlation between being an asshole and being successful I haven't seen it.
- tiger10guy 13y agoWell put.
- anonymousab 13y agoCan't exactly download/build this on my current machine. What does it actually do so far?
- dippyskoodlez 13y agoStep 1.) read the readme.
- anonymousab 13y agoNo currently supported features, but I assume it actually does...something. Or serves some early purpose towards the development of a 'complete' emulator.
- justin_ 13y agoThe developer made some interesting posts about how the emulator will work on his blog a couple years back: http://www.noxa.org/blog/ http://www.noxa.org/blog/
- snowman41 13y agoGreat link, thanks.
- whalesalad 13y agoOne thing I've wondered... And this is somewhat unrelated, is why the Xbox One doesn't run 360 games. One of the core features of it's OS is the fact that everything is running in a modified Hyper-V environment. So why couldn't MS have emulated the 360 on the hypervisor?! Will be cool to see this project progress and hopefully running on an Xbox One dev kit.
- onedev 13y agoThe 360 ran a PowerPC instruction set while the Original Xbox and Xbox One run x86 architecture. The game would have to be rewritten to run on Xbox One. I'd assume this makes it difficult.
- bhouston 13y agoYou can convert instruction sets on the fly, the technology has been around for a while. One big commercial failure that was partly relying on this was Transmeta and their Code Morphing Software: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Morphing_Software http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Morphing_Software Here is a more general article on the topic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_translation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_translation
- whalesalad 13y agoThat's the whole point of a VM right? OS X could run PowerPC apps with Rosetta when they went Intel. I just assumed that we could do the same since the Xbox One has a beastly processor compared to the aged 360 one.
- bhouston 13y agoRosetta was based on QuickTransit technology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickTransit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickTransit
- brigade 13y agoPPC OS X apps didn't need any low-level system emulation; they could only talk to hardware via the kernel, and they could only talk to the kernel via system libraries. So at kernel boundaries you could simply translate the PPC system call to x86. Whereas basically all consoles expose low-level system stuff to the game, such as memory-mapped IO, low-level GPU commands, TLBs, DMA, etc. All of this can't be emulated without a large amount of overhead. At least 6th and especially 7th generation consoles have such complex timings that emulating the clocks of different parts isn't generally needed. And it's possible that Xbox 360 and PS3 require games to go through their kernel for a lot of hardware access; I don't know.
- xanth 13y agoTime to start the cease and desist countdown.
- Natsu 13y agoWhile there are other ways to screw up, like promoting illegal ROMs, emulation itself is legal thanks to Sony vs. Connectix.
- PhasmaFelis 13y agoI'm amused by how many video game emulator devs insist that they're not for playing video games. (MAME is another big one.)
- martindale 13y agoIn at least the current legal framework, this declaration of intent is [supposed] to help avoid lawsuits. In theory, the emulation of a system, in and of itself, is not illegal. The copying or unlicensed use thereof, is.
- noxa 13y agoAnd why is that difficult to believe? My previous emulation project (https://code.google.com/p/pspplayer/ https://code.google.com/p/pspplayer/) was the same kind of exercise: do something no one else had done and learn a lot doing it. As a hobbyist the act of doing something is far more fulfilling than the output.
- PhasmaFelis 13y agoIt's not difficult to believe, it's just funny. Devoting an enormous amount of time and energy to understanding and reproducing a device whose only purpose is to play video games while insisting that you're not interested in video games is a pretty funny thing to do. I mean, I obsess over odd stuff too, I'd guess most of us do, but it's important to keep a sense of humor about it.
- noxa 13y agoOh, for sure. I thought you were implying that I only was doing it to play/steal/etc games (as many people assume). I've got a pile of awesome Japanese import games I picked up the last time I was there that I'd love to play, but the region locking on the real consoles prevents me. If I had an emulator, that wouldn't be a problem. Not the only reason I'm doing this, of course (I could just buy a Japanese console), but it's a reason nonetheless :)
- 13y ago
- noxa 13y agoAuthor here. Yeah, the readme is meant to scare off people. Even with it I still get people on IRC or email asking me if they can play game X or where they can get a copy. The note about no downloads is for all those who download 360 emulators from shady YouTube links and such - there's a surprising number of fakes packed with malware and viruses floating around. Status of the project is that it's coming along well, after a long period of inactivity. Many games get to title screens though don't draw much. I'm really hoping AMD gets its shit together and releases Mantle soon, as that will make emulating the GPU related things significantly easier.
- MartinCron 13y agoTotally off-topic, but I think that's a pretty cool name. I've been looking to marine life for name inspiration myself.
- frik 13y agoMaybe upload some screenshots, or videos?
- fidz 13y agoA little bit OOT, why do you use .jp for the domain?
- ck2 13y agoHow many C&D have you gotten from Microsoft's well funded lawyers yet? Hopefully you are not in US but they are pretty embedded in every country at this point.
- andrewf 13y agoI'm really curious about which new (Windows 8-only) APIs are potentially useful.
- noxa 13y agoThere are a bunch related to D3D, and I'm currently using RtlAddGrowableFunctionTable in the JIT to get proper stack walking (previously this was really painful). There are also some kernel primitives I'd like to take advantage of once things are working to do some cool memory tricks and hopefully speed things up.