Slashdot Mirror
X-Box Emulated (Not)
evilpaul13 submitted linkage to news about an X-Box
Emulator. It requires a pretty high end video card and a DVD
player, and doesn't yet support joysticks, but it does emulate 3 of
the X-Box games (which is what, half the games available for the
system yet? :) Todays PS2 Addiction: Tony Hawk 3. But I still am
tempted to get an MSX-Box if only to handle my DOA addiction. UPDATE by HeUnique:Is this emulator a fake? according to these messages
in the XBox Hacker web site - this is a fake one. Could someone actually try it?
Update: 01/13 by J : The consensus in our comments is that this is a hoax, and the paranoid would do well to treat it as a trojan or virus. Sorry.
Thats it Taco, way to go and vote with your dollars, show microsoft you dont support their actions by buying there stuff!
But I still am tempted to get an MSX-Box if only to handle my DOA addiction.
Oh, well thats ok then, I forgive you, after all if you dont buy this console and give money to the proverbial devil, you'll die as you dont get to play some game!
I'm not getting anything on the page at all.
I wonder if it's running of an X-Box?
Why emulate it when all it does is play PC games anyway. Wait a few months and you will be able to get all the games for X-Box on your PC.
I thought we were more concerned with emulating the PC on the Xbox...Now someone has to go and emulate the Xbox on the PC...BTW -- the link is dead. (Already!)
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Not really supprising that it got emulated. All it takes is time --theKiyote
over 500$ they charge over here in Europe for the X-Box this could be an alternative until prices drop.
Too bad there are no good games for the X-Box
wow ... as i write this there arent even any fFirst posts, and it's already slashdotted!
or MS' lawyers are really really quick to strike
I hope Microsoft sues the author of this emulator, who has probably already taken a BIG chunk out of the sales for the X-Box.
X-Box is expensive, and most gamers are poor and already own a computer. In these economic times, they will probably opt for the slightly poorer play/graphics quality and the small amount of work involved in getting and installing the emulator.
The console is meant for more than simple game play - Microsoft is intending to build lots of new gaming methods and communications in it due to its ability to connect to the internet. People who opt out and choose the emulator will miss out on all of this stuff.
Choose what you will, but consider the consequences carefully.
Goat sex free since 2001
Working link here (http://people.freenet.de/linar/).
If Microsoft is smart, they'll ignore this. Why? Well, they're losing around $150 USD per console, and they make the money from the games. If you buy your own high end PC, pay full sticker, and then buy their games, you're saving them money, and they're still getting their cut from the development fees for the game.
Best of all, since no method for copying DVD games exists (well, not for under $5,000) it's not like piracy will be the issue.
By the way, for those of you who think Apple Superdrive or the HP DVD+RW machine will help, think again; they don't have a capacity to store most of the XBox games; as they only support 4.7gb DVDs, and the majority of XBox games are dual-layered (i.e. 8gb+)
----------------- "I have a bone to pick, and a few to break." - Refused -------------------
(This mirror may only be good for a few hours! Grab it whilst you can!)
... is to be able to run the XBox emulator under Wine :-)
Working
StarWars Starfighter
UFC: Tapout
NHL 2002
Partially Working
Halo
The Simpsons Road Rage
Arctic Thunder
Kabuki Warriors
F1 2001
Not Working
NASCAR Heat
Hardware Requiremens
At least 1GHz Athlon/Duron/P3/P4
Nvidia Geforce Video/ATI Radeon only
256MB RAM
DVD ROM Drive
Known Bugs
Video flickering in some Games
Sporadic crashes.
Slow Performance on P3 Systems
General Problems with Intel CPUs
Not compatible to Kyro graphics
No Joystik support yet
OpenGL support only for nvidia gForce 2/3
No Gamepad Support yet
Hogsback
There's the problem, Microsoft makes money on the X-Box consoles, and every emulator out there will just provide another way to run X-Box games without having Microsoft take the nearly-hundred-dollar hit on hardware that the system itself costs them. So, even though Microsoft might try and sue, it's kind of an amusing situation in that the more people running emulators there are who buy games, the more money Microsoft actually makes.
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
Doesn't the X-Box have standard x86 PC hardware in it? something like a 600mhz x86 proc and (i think) an nVidia graphics chip
This is not the greatest sig in the world, no. This is just a tribute.
Link works for me BTW
So, OK people! Everybody download this beta before MicroS shuts it down!
They're gonna be on this link stink on a dead horse.
You can't take the sky from me...
the fFirst thing i thought: cool! i dont have to buy MS crappy stuff!
but as yet, no ROMS have been made available it seems. so fFor the moment I (and anyone like me) is still sans XBOX
Considering what is known in the XBox reverse engineering world right now, I am absolutely shocked (and pleasantly so) that someone has come up with an emulator so quickly. First of all, XBoxHacker reports that the BIOS has four copies of itself and a whole host of protections to make sure that hackers don't try to overwrite it with their own code. Secondly, the BIOS boot code is hidden somewhere and isn't actually in the BIOS that the processor chip sees when it starts up at FFFF:FFF0; the community surmises it's in a hidden ROM somewhere, which is making reverse engineering a much more difficult task.
;-)
I would love to know how these guys did it--and I'm not going to rule out that someone provided them with the XDK or a whole host of internal docs to accomplish this.
At any rate, massive, massive props. I'll bet Microsoft has visited that site a few times in the last couple days.
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
It's more of a wrapper. Think about it, what is it emulating? The XBox uses an x86 cpu, direct3d, and a standard HD. No actual hardware is being emulated, instead they are just wrapping function calls to conventional PC calls. Either way I can't wait to play DOA3 on my CPU :)
...with no games. Seeing as they make all their money off the games and not the hardware...
If people just buy X-Box games to play with this emulator (without buying an X-Box), then won't Micro$oft get more money? Remember, they lose quite a bit on the hardware, and try to recoup their losses with the software.
I am pretty sure this is a hoax, anyone can confirm it actually works?
kawai
Never ever ever ever ever ever believe an emulator is real until you see it running on a PC in front of you.
The page
/. post?
Welcome to the XBox Emulator by Linar
Here you can download the latest beta of our XBox Emulator. Most of the Games will work, but there is still much work to do.
News
11.01.2002
Version 0.35 is out. Some minor bugs are fixed
9.01.2002
We now have some sponsors, and we search for new members to join us.
7.01.2002
We had some Hardware Problems, so the release of the patch will be later, but check out the current version it should work well.
There will be an update to version 0.35 soon. It fixes the "Insert DVD" Error Message.
Screenshots
Here are some Screenshots, more will be added soon:
What, you expected pictures in a
Download
Download the file here: XBox Emulator Beta 0.34 (3MB)
Game Compatibility List
Working
StarWars Starfighter
UFC: Tapout
NHL 2002
Partially Working
Halo
The Simpsons Road Rage
Arctic Thunder
Kabuki Warriors
F1 2001
Not Working
NASCAR Heat
Hardware Requiremens
At least 1GHz Athlon/Duron/P3/P4
Nvidia Geforce Video/ATI Radeon only
256MB RAM
DVD ROM Drive
Known Bugs
Video flickering in some Games
Sporadic crashes.
Slow Performance on P3 Systems
General Problems with Intel CPUs
Not compatible to Kyro graphics
No Joystik support yet
OpenGL support only for nvidia gForce 2/3
No Gamepad Support yet
Contact
When you find any Bugs, or when you have questions about the Emulator, feel free to contact us: linarstudios@gmx.net
I think everyone in the world knew that a system built like a computer would be easily emulated on a computer. However, the speed at which this emulator came into the public eye is astonishing. Now.. if only i could find a PS2 emulator to play Final Fantasy X....
AJ
-------
artlu.net
it doesnt seem to recognize the video. specifically, "run emulator" gives the error "Unable to initialize video device".
yes, i've tried a bunch of different settings on this.
i just mention it, y'know, so if anyone else has this error, maybe you'll take some comfort knowing you're not alone. maybe you know a work-around.
(actually, it could just be my video card is too weak)
Heh. Damn, that was quick. I mean.. really. Isn't this some kind of speed record??
In the end though this is just good for microsoft though. In the end, the x-box is about nothing more than continuing to lock in game developers to win32ish platforms. Anything which convinces more developers that they can just stick with the x-box (annd by association, anything which makes more people play or buy x-box games) is good for microsoft because it just makes their monopoly that much harder to break..
Seriously. i'd say more than half of the inertia that keeps microsoft where it is is games. MS knows this, and they know that they have to knock out things that could provide a path by which other platforms could become viable competitors to their gaming platform.. you really think the bungie buyout was about Halo? Nuh uh. It was about burying Bungie's (quite good) in-house cross platform game development library-- at the itme about the only one of its type.
But more importantly, Microsoft kills off companies through anticompetitive BS all the time. Losing .01% of market share of one of their lower-profit products is the least that can be done to them.
They subsidize the cost of the box hoping to regain the money when you buy games. If you use the emulater you save them then cost to helping you buy the box!!
MSX ??? MicroSoft eXtended ???
/. buying an 8 bit box with a microsoft BIOS ???
someone in
it's the end of the world...
What ? Me, worry ?
The included xbox.vxd in the program is just a renamed Quake file
The xboxkrnl32.dll is a file from the Trilliam messenger program.
I'd run a virus scanner if you ran this fake emulator.
Hasn't Taco heard of these things called HOAXES? This crud is old news and unfortunately not the real deal. Let me explain.
- Take the "snd3d.dll" file and open it in notepad. Search for "MSN Messenger". You'll see this file came from MSN Messenger. Same goes for the "xboxkrnl32.dll".
- Take the "xbox.vxd" file and throw it into notepad. Search for "wolfenstein". You'll see that this came from RTCW.
Sheesh, I could find better journalism from a real Taco.
Now I can play XBOX and MS can kiss my ass on making any money off the hardware on me.
Ahh the power of EMUs
Although the site is sparse on technical details, it's not hard to guess how they did it.
Since the Xbox games use a Win32/DirectX API, they probably just threw away the Xbox-specific stuff and linked the binaries against the standard Windows DLLs.
I really doubt these guys even looked at the Xbox BIOS.
It's fake, folks. Thank you, please drive through.
Oh yeah, and go visit RetroGames for REAL emulator news.
Welcome to the XBox Emulator by Linar
Here you can download the latest beta of our XBox Emulator. Most of the Games will work, but there is still much work to do.
News
11.01.2002
Version 0.35 is out. Some minor bugs are fixed
9.01.2002
We now have some sponsors, and we search for new members to join us.
7.01.2002
We had some Hardware Problems, so the release of the patch will be later, but check out the current version it should work well.
There will be an update to version 0.35 soon. It fixes the "Insert DVD" Error Message.
Screenshots
Here are some Screenshots, more will be added soon:
----snip couple of photoshop gifs----
Game Compatibility List
Working Partially Working Not Working
StarWars Starfighter
UFC: Tapout
NHL 2002 Halo
The Simpsons Road Rage
Arctic Thunder
Kabuki Warriors
F1 2001 NASCAR Heat
Hardware Requiremens
At least 1GHz Athlon/Duron/P3/P4
Nvidia Geforce Video/ATI Radeon only
256MB RAM
DVD ROM Drive
Known Bugs
Video flickering in some Games
Sporadic crashes.
Slow Performance on P3 Systems
General Problems with Intel CPUs
Not compatible to Kyro graphics
No Joystik support yet
OpenGL support only for nvidia gForce 2/3
No Gamepad Support yet
Contact
When you find any Bugs, or when you have questions about the Emulator, feel free to contact us: linarstudios@gmx.net
What I don't fathom is why people release these game consoles where they lose money on the hardware to make up for it on the licensing. I mean heck, just release some VM for a broad base of PC hardware and charge people license fees to publish for it. Then sell
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Has anyone tried the executable? (I haven't - I'm not that brave to try an unknown executable - especially when it claims to do something that probably hasn't been figured out yet)
.zip contains a .vxd, which implies it's for Windows 95/maybe Windows 98 (but not 2000/XP).
No mention of how to start a game - I doubt an Xbox DVD game will show up as a clickable title in Windows explorer.
What version of Windows is the emulator for? The
MS has done a lot of work on the Xbox to make hacking difficult (including encrypted OS). Although it's possible that someone has gotten around this, it seems unlikely.
On the other hand, it does run a Pentium III, so you're not a complete dipshit, right?
Is your company running tools written by ma
I'd take with a BIG pinch of salt. Why? Well, lets see: the DVDs are encrypted, and the decoding is done in hardware (as far as I know). The GeForce 3 doesn't have the same hardware capabilities as the Xbox GPU, and grinds to a halt in a 1.7GHz system when trying to do similar effects to the ones I run fairly easily on an Xbox. And those two are just off the top of my head. I think this is fake. Even if its not, it'll run like a dog when the graphics card can't do the T&L and shaders in hardware...
--
Sartori
Game dev and music blog
I may not be the first naysayer, because I'm reading at +2, but if there are other more informative posts than mine, please mod them up. Anyway, I don't have any xbox games, but if you strings xbox.vxd, it looks like it has code from *wolfenstein* (the new one) in it. "maps/*.bsp", "Wolf 1.0.0", "D:\....\WolfSP.pdb" ... this doesn't seem right. I wonder if this code is really actually ever used by the emulator!
I'll post more on this thread if I find more, I just wanted to get the word out.
Does anyone even check these stories out before they get posted?
It's a Hoax.
Hoax. Did I mention it's a Hoax.
I don't think we are going to see complete emulation because there a few things that the NV2A chipset can do like some of the shader operations (and games like Shrek that use them out the wazoo and nearly max out internal bandwidth while doing so) that just aren't possible on other existing video chipsets, or are terribly impractical on a non unified memory system (like treating your z-buffer as a texture and processing it back through the shaders - putting your AGP bus into a read dword/write dword back loop would kill all performance)
The games they have working are games that probably don't use features that were new to xbox/NV2A chipset, or stress the system to its limits. i.e. games that closly resemble their PC counterparts. Later Xbox releases are much more likely to take advantage of the system's features and push it to limits, makeing them much harder to emulate.
However, this could change once nVidia releases it successor to the NV20/GeForce 3, as that product may include all of the functionality of the NV2A chipset used in the Xbox. The Unified Memory/bandwidth situation will remain a problem and bottleneck though.
Still, I don't think this will make a big difference - I prefer playing my console games on a console and my PC games on a PC, and I suspect most people who play these games will be the same way.
(Opinions expressed are solely my own and do not represent those of my employer)
It is my understanding that the XBox has some sort
/. have suggested that documentation was somehow leaked about the protection scheme.
of protection scheme on both the games and the hardware so that
1) You can't play games without the proper key on
them in the XBox.
2) Games won't play without the XBox's key.
I might be wrong, or oversimplifying it, but
this is my understanding. The Games require the XBox key, and the XBox requires a Game's key.
It is apparent that these people who made this,
provided that it works (I haven't tried it yet, since I've got no XBox games), must know SOMETHING about this if my understanding is correct.
Some people on
Either that or it was cracked. Neither would
surprise me.
If this is the case, then I'm wondering if this
information could be used to make a Linux install
disc for the XBox, one that had a valid key to be
played.
Can anyone with any more knowledge of the XBox give
any insight on the possibility of this?
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
Must be. a) The XBox DVD drive spins backwards to read the data b) It lists Soul Calibre 2 as a working game. Soul Calibre 2 isn't even out yet, not even in the arcades. Oh, and c) They stole the screenshots from IGN, for example:
i d= 171619&object_id=16612&media_type=R&ign_section=27 &page_title=The+Simpsons+Road+Rage+review+on+xbox. ign.com&adtag=network%3Dign%26site%3Dxboxviewer%26 adchannel%3Dxbox%26pagetype%3Darticle&return_url=h ttp%3A%2F%2Fxbox.ign.com%2Freviews%2F16612.html
;) But anway, I'm 99% sure this is fake.
http://mediaviewer.ign.com/mediaPage.jsp?media_
Damn that long link.
- icemind
Is this for real? People are still arguing here.
DOA3 have great graphics and makes for some good fun, especially if you're not playing alone. But Project Gotham Racing is extremely addicting.
Slashdot has sunk to a new low. We all knew it had absolutely no journalistic integrity, but come on, you could at least use your brains before accepting this sort of submission. And the previous screw-up, 100:1 lossless compression. Yeah, right. Why the hell are people so gullible these days?
:)
At the moment, no computer on this planet has enough juice to emulate the Xbox (No, not even the supercomputers which have 9,600 CPUs - because multiple CPUs don't make it any faster to emulate a single CPU), not to mention that nobody has been able to dump the contents of the HDs, the DVDs nor has anybody been able to crack the encryption of the Xbox BIOS. Additionally, the unified memory architecture makes it impossible to emulate the Xbox on a PC like a virtual machine. An interpretive or dynamic recompiling CPU core with everything else re-implemented is the only way, and that simply won't happen during the next decade because of the sheer complexity of such a project and because of getting sued to hell by Microsoft.
They've just renamed a bunch of common files to make it look neat. But no matter how much you want it to be true, it is just a poor fake.
In a related matter, no much how you want the Xbox MAME, you will never get it. The developer cannot release his port, because software developed on the Xbox dev kit can't be released to public domain. Just stick with the good old PC versions, which are also available for *nix / Linux.
Under the DVD options it asks for the decryption type. The options it offers are DeCSS or RSA. Does this mean that DeCSS is incorporated into the software? If it does, would that make this software illegal? Also, what was the license on DeCSS?
Just wondering.
~A.
student of animation and the fine arts
Perhaps the X-Box will become an all purpose standard for gaming hardware (much like in the early days of sound cards when the Soundblaster was the standard and all other brands attempted compatibility with it).
If all new video cards had "X-Box compatibility", wouldn't it make game development a little easier? New features could always be added, but the X-Box could define a base set of features that developers could depend on. In effect this could maintain the benefits of console development (fixed hardware) while allowing competitive products to keep the market price down (of course, Microsoft is the only one with enough monopoly power to actually sell below cost) and allow new features to be added if necessary.
Yay, for journalistic integrity on Slashdot yet again. When this got sent around some X-Box lists I'm on last week we quickly found out this was a hoax. The "emulator" is some random files zipped up and all the "screen shots" very conveniently happen to be exactly the same as some posted on the web.
Can a PC DVD drive even read an X-Box disk?
You have all been trolled by Slashdot.
Since the site was /.'ed I couldn't get the files to check out.
In any case, if it as hoax as being reported, most of my comments still stand - that the archeticural differences and unique chipset features of the xBox would be the hardest things to emulate in a way that provided adequate performance.
I still remember when UltraHLE came out - and with that in mind, I don't dismiss the possibilut of Xbox emulation - I just don't think it'll be practical in a way like MAME is for a long, long time.
(Opinions expressed are solely my own and do not represent those of my employer)
are the posts saying the MS should be happy as the console is sold at a loss and the games at a profit. I would be very suprised if Microsoft's plans stop at the X-box being a gaming console. While they might not be too peeved by this development as they'll make money on the games, I would bet that this emulator does mess up the overall X-box strategy. Dunno, maybe I'm giving them too much credit but with a network connection and a 8 gig disk it would seem to capable of much more....
You should think a little more before you post next time.
I wish someone would explain to me why xboxkrnl32.dll is essentially a renamed msn messenger dll. Check the string references in that. It seems like it is the exact same thing that msn messenger would use. Maybe its a virus using msn messenger to spread info about your computer/trojan sending ip address/etc. I would be careful people.
http://donroberto45.homeip.net/Files/xBoX-Emulator .0.35.zip
My server isn't very fast so take it easy
Editing the xbox kernal dll shows it's obviously not a kernal dll. Come on, trillian? Doesn't anyone check this stuff out? bparrish is right, this is bunk bunk bunk fubarred bunk.
Like someoen said, I saw this link a week ago I think and remember reading that it was a hoax.
So, I can emulate a $299 system with a $1,000 computer? Yeah, that's good. ;) Well, at least I hope they had fun making the emulator. :D
(Please note use of smilies.)
Seriously, I think one of the best things that might come out of this is the ability to un-offically upgrade the hardware. I doubt Mircosoft would want to support upgrading the hard-drive, for example. But if folks like this can learn enough about the Xbox system to allow the more technically inclined to upgrade, it might prolong the life and usefulness of the system.
Sony's PS2 can upgrade its hard drive, Xbox can't (yet). I'd love to be able to replace the 8G HD in the Xbox with a 100G one. Maybe soon I'll be able to.
Oh, and on the evil empire front, Sony can be evil too. Both the PS1 CD player and the PS2 DVD had problems in the early models, which Sony was loath to ackowledge. And Sony ran my Dreamcast off the market. But if Microsoft can get a decent share of the market, maybe Sony won't be quite so cavalier with their systems.
If you need more experience trollbusting, check out adequacy.org. Everything there is a troll, so you should be able to pick up on the style quickly.
snd3d.dll is from MSN Messenger
xbox.vxd is a data file from Return to Castle Wolfenstein
xboxkrnl32.dll is from Trillian (another messenger program)
xbox_emulator.0.35.exe is a Visual Basic program compiled to .exe form that uses the c:\con\con trick to induce the Blue Screen of Death on unpatched Win9x systems.
Profiling the exe reveals that it makes no calls to any of the included files. The fact that there was a VXD(Which can only be loaded on Win9X) was clue enough that it was fake.
Running an editor through the files reveals that the vxd file is indeed a quake file (it references q3key several times)
one of the dll files references msnmail
Profiling the exe revealed it didn't even link with directX at all.
So I think slashdot should check before they post crap like this.
The hard drives are either 8GB or 10GB (depends on which manufacturer's drive was used in a particular Xbox). It's probably the case that only 8GB of the 10GB drives is used - just to make all platforms consistent.
It runs a *very stripped down* kernel that's based on the Win2K kernel - it doesn't run Win2K.
Come on. Everyone figured out this was fake a week ago.
Does anyone actually check out stories before they're posted? Or is this one of those things where you write a story, and then later post a small retraction on the 4th page.
1.5 million units with the average of 3 games sold with the unit. This makes the Xbox the most sucessful console launch in history. There are over 50 titles now, with 150 by Q3 of 2002. CmdTaco, is spending more time bashing MS than reporting on valid news stories, but once the Xbox runs Linux, it'll be "okay". I wonder why Slashdot didn't report the Linux PDA YOPY is being canceled.
Is it me or is everything real on /. these days just boring crap.
"A new moon has been discovered." yippee. "Some courts did something with some lawyers." oooh.
How about "Apple to release iWALK PDA"
"XBOX Emulator on PC"
See my point?
-J
The emulator is another FAKE HOAX!. The author created a fancy front end then added a bunch of "support" DLL's with legitimate sounding names to trick eveyone.
The files snd3d.dll and xboxkrnl32.dll, which I assume were suppose to make you believe are the sound and Kernal library files for the emulator are 100% identical. They are also files from MSN messenger.
The xbox.vxd file is actually from Red Alert.
Grphx.dll is actually the german language notepad. (rename it to notepad.exe and it runs)
Rename crypt.vxd to crypt.exe and you get some christmas demonstration program
http://www.xboxemu.fr.fm/... I think that someone suggested the screenshots were cut-and-pasted digicam pictures. ;)
Rule 'o' Thumb: If it's on the internet, it must be true!
Does HeUnique even read the messages on his own site? Folks here figured out pretty quickly that it's obviously a fake, and he posts an update to the story asking someone to try it.
It works EXACTLY the same under wine as it does in windows, which is kinda nice.
This story is old and yes it is fake. Look at the screenshots closely does it look kindy cheesy? How come the window's borders are sharp looking while the games have a fuzzy compressed look to it? Another attempt by slashdot for their "bias" attempt to bash Micro$oft.
some people will believe anything, anyway i must go i have to watch britney and finish off my PS2 emulator
This isn't redundant if you can't get to the site in the first place.
Read the Slashdot FAQ! They basically take the stance of FoxNews... We report... YOU decide!
This is definitely a hoax because all the screen shots are from game review sites.
http://www.askthevoid.com
I just downloaded it and tried to run Halo, no luck. I meet the published reqs: P3 1Ghz, GF3, SbLive, WinXP, 512MB ram, DVD player, so there's no reason for the software not to work. The program didn't even attempt to access my DVD drive.
Running strings on some of the files revealed a bunch of QuakeIII/Team Arena/Wolfenstein strings, and on another of the files a whole bunch of Microsoft Messenger/Trillian stuff.
This made it appear as though the software was a hoax of some type, and some of the files were just filler.
I tried logging connections at my Linksys while running the software but didn't see anything going on. At all.
I'd suggest to every interested party that they download the software - just in case it is proven to work later and Microsoft goes ballistic and forces people to take it down - but don't run it until someone posts a proper disassembly of the program. Please also keep in mind where this is coming from - some random site in Russia. Not to say anything bad about our frozen neighbors, but there's been a lot of scams from that area.
Caveat Emptor.
JackAsh
guys...dont try this. its a FAKE. and its possibly a TROJAN.
The PC DVD drives cant even read XBOX disks. i tried it out and it has a fancy splash screen and shit but it doesnt do anything with an XBOX DVD loaded. DONT DOWNLOAD IT. it seems to modify files (possibly). i whacked up a ghosted image of win on a spare PC and ran the software. it didnt do anything with an XBOX DVD and it seemed to modify a few files (i ran sentinel on the partition before and after running it). i dont knwo if it is a trojan..i just reghosted the entire machine in case.
What is unusual about this? Slashdot is 'the Onion' of the tech world. They never print anything serious here.
Companies don't just write a game VM because, while it may be cheaper for the company, a console is cheaper for most people. Hardcore PC gamers may have a GHz athlon with a top-of-the-line video card, DVD-ROM, etc., but a sizeable portion of the console population does not.
Heck, I do Linux development, and I only have a dual p2-350 with a gf2mx. Having a really fast system might be nice, but what I've got is sufficient for what I do. The fact I prefer console games coupled with the fact that the cost upgrading my box to something sufficiently new would be many times more than a $300 unit (a PS2 in my case) pretty much ties it up. (I like avoiding the Microsoft tax, too. ;-))
For most families, upgrading their box doesn't happen often, if ever. If they have a sufficiently new machine, it may have what it takes to play current-generation games. If not, the idea of opening up their box and finding the necessary parts to play a game is probably not something they want to hassle with. On the other hand, spending $200-300 on a drop-in solution where they can pick any game off the shelf and know it works is quite desirable. After all, they probably did the same thing with the rest of their "home entertainement system" (DVD player, stereo system, TV, etc.).
Since most of the time companies actually make money on their consoles, this is all just icing on the cake. People want a simple product, they want the games, and companies profit on both and get a wider audience to boot. Developers like it for all the reasons that have been discussed repeatedly (single uniform platform, optimized for gaming), thus line up to make games.
In the end, having a VM would be nice for users who already have high-end machines, but that's just not a large enough audience. Doing both would be nice, but supporting a VM on a wide range of platforms would be a major cost with little revenue. (Mostly support costs, theoretically you could make up what a console would profit you from off-the-shelf prices, but there's also "piracy" to contend with.) Arguably, you'd never get the same level of optimization, either. (Developers like having low-level hardware access.)
Console hardware is just a better business decision for most places.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
UPDATE by HeUnique:Is this emulator a fake? according to these messages in the XBox Hacker web site - this is a fake one. Could someone actually try it?
Read the comments on your own website! Plenty of people have tried it, it is a simple application designed to give a video error message (Unable to initialize display, or something)... to make people think it's just their box. Read the comments above me, and giving a few more minutes, below me as well... A majority of them are people's personal experiences.
fucking pathetic loser. What a fucking talking meat puppet you are
Could someone actually try it?
Taco, why don't you try it yourself?
Expected Response:
     But I run Linux!
So try it under WINE!
I just ran every virus scanning software imagineable after running the emulator and nothing turned up. Hopefully this is just someone having fun at our expense...
"Sometimes nothin' is a pretty cool hand." - Cool Hand Luke
Fucking loser.
Why do you fucking pieces of shit all sound alike! Lets see, first you steal some shit, then you work overtime to justify it and make yourself sound like a fucking hero.
If you are going to steal shit, just DO IT! don't justify, as that is an indication of your talking monkey brain's inability to purge 100% of humanity (logic and reason) from itself, so you must do something to purge the rest of it. Fucking loser! I recommend a 357 lobotomy
"You are about to load a .DLL executable that has not been verified for use with Wolfenstein"
.dll and .vxd files are like infected. If you don't believe me, open Winzip, right click on each of the above files and click "View with Notepad.exe" and do a search for part of the above phrases like "MSN" or "Wolfenstein".
The xbox.vxd file is a Wolfenstein, likely RtCW file. From the snd3d.dll file: "You have successfully logged on to MSN Messenger."
From the xboxkrnl32.dll file: "Error: Connection to MSN failed because the servers are too busy."
The xbox_emulator.0.3.5 file only seems to contain error codes following the lines "loading x-box files". I think it's safe to say that this is A HOAX. Furthermore, those people who have run it should check for virii on their systems, as the included
Well, its never a good idea to reply to cowards, but here goes:
Steal?
Oh really? Funny, its a way to use games you HAVE TO PURCHASE on another device than the one it was written for.
There is no theft here buddy-boy, this is called "fair use", say it with me now, fair....uuuuuse.
Dats right.
You can't take the sky from me...
The ONLY company to ever have made ANY profit off a system by producing the hardware at such a low cost in the past 5 years has been the *bling bling* Nintendo Gamecube. They can lower the cost down to $99 and still make a few bucks on their system. It is well know the console devs such as Sega (Dreamcast), Sony (PS2), and Microsoft (XBox) are all LOSING money off the system they sell. The real money is made by the GAMES they produce themselves. Until recently, no one ever made a cost effective console. This is why Nintendo's profits this past quarter have been their highest in the entire companies history.
Here's another X-Box Emulator supposedly........
The idea isn't to copy the entire DVD. The idea is to copy what is necessary to play the game. If you tear out all the movies and music, you're left with just the game. There was no insight here. Just some guy who obvisouly has never pirated games. Think back sometime ago when none of us had broadband connections or CD burners, how did we do it then?
I'm guessing before long people will be tearing out the gameplay portion of the disk, compressing the video with DivX and the music with MP3.
This isn't revolutionary, it's not even surprising. Someone concluded like I did. What OS is it running? What API is it? What kind of architecture is it? Duh, some bastardized version of windows, along with Direct X 8.X, all on x86. Fooey. My PC has more power than this thing does, Athlon 1800XP, 1G DDR, ATI 8500, 100G 7200 WD HD. I will not buy an Xbox, nor will I buy the games, of course I will pirate them as I steal from the companies I don't like and I buy from the companies that I do!
Something that would be revolutionary is if someone wrote a GameCube emulator.
Best guess is that if this thing is real there is a fair amount of "stealing". I'm willing to bet microsoft has a bunch of copyrighted and patented instructions in the lower layers. The act of emulating those functions according to the law may be considered copyright infringement.
There is also no mention if there is a copy of the xbox bios included in the download. Considering the short amount of time from the xbox release and the release of this supposed emulator I doubt anyone has had the time to completely reverse engineer a "compatible" xbox operating system. (afaik the xbox doesn't run plain vanilla win2k or wince but a bastardized version of the win2k/nt kernel)
While I don't doubt that emulating the xbox is possible, microsoft probably spent 1/5 the budget on developing the system and the remaining 4/5 on obfuscating and copyrighting the lower level operation. Even if you do emulate it, based on the assumed (yeah I know assuming is bad) IP protection, the MS lawyers probably have form letter style injunctions ready to go.
-- Button up, your ignorance is showing
GForce hards do T&L and a whole host of shaders in HARDWARE already. It's already been pointed out the GForce within the XBox is a weaker version of the bottom line GForce3. A Ti200 and Ti500 will eat it alive in performance.
Sorry bro, but no PC has the power to emulate an XBox? The XBox IS A DAMN PC. And a slow one at that! My normal PC blows it out of the water without even hickuping. Your video in that thing doesn't even come close to my high end GForce3 card because they SKIMPED on feature sets and dumbed it down to make it more AFFORDABLE.
Give someone a 700mhz CELERON and they think they can blow home PC's away. Geesh. Get a clue buddy.
Ninety percent of the articles put up as "news" on /. are just to generate post volume.
The vast majority of the "news" that gets posted is really "olds", and the rest is just bait.
Take it from someone who's been on here a *long* time...
t_t_b
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
could this be the real one?? www.xboxemu.fr.fm saw the link somewhere on that xboxhacker site
This just boggles the imagination!!
How could they create it so quickly?? I mean the product has only been released months ago and already an emulator exists? The development speed is simply amazing!!
No, wait... isn't the XBox a PC running Windows?
It's quite possible that the people you just asked to run that TROJAN for you might be a little bit at you at the moment. So now you're intentionally taking actions to destroy other people's machines, simply because they're running Windows? If this "emulator" was for Linux, would you be as quick to post "hey, this emulator called autol33tr00tkit looks like it might be fake, anyone want to try running it on their machine so I don't have to?"
Unless they broke the encryption they are going to have a tought time doing an emulator. They are also going to have a tough time from Microsoft's legal department.
Actually, it work damn too well in wine to be a real application
1) look at the screenshots, they're .gif's and the gui part looks fine, but you easily see the compression on the display from the orginal jpeg's the guy used to fake them with
2) "Not compatible to Kyro graphics"...
3) xbox.vxd from the download is a return to castle wolfenstein file
etc. FAKE. ok?
The original X Box Emulator is available from this address:l .
http://www.iamlost.com/features/x31/x-frame.htm
Of course you need Windows 3.1 to run it!
Mr. Smoove
Wow, this is the first time I hear about a hoax that resulted to be fake.
Hmm, how would that be? First post a buggy emulator, add some DLLs from messengers and games as a filler to make it look fake, but make it work on some hardware to show it really isn't one?
It is truely a hoax!!!
strings xbox.vxd |grep -in "wolfenstein"
8234:Wolfenstein-1
8471:has not been verified for use with Wolfenstein.
10212:Wolfenstein
It takes no longer than a minute to verify.
Shame on the slashdot maintainers for rushing this article.
Woah. I mean woah.
/. as any kind of standard for either journalism or writing (and much of the time, not even news).
/. placing an article to web site which is more than likely (by the evidence of the messages here, I'd say very likely) is a hoax. Now they, again, on the front page - are asking people to download it and try it out.
Now I've never upheld
But this is ridiculous.
Here we have
Hey. Did anyone ask the question -
What if this was a virus?
Real smart.
inky.
UPDATE by HeUnique:Is this emulator a fake? according to these messages in the XBox Hacker web site - this is a fake one. Could someone actually try it?
Umm...how about...no? Instead, why don't YOU try it out and tell US how it works (or, more likely, doesn't work) since YOU submitted the story. Better yet, why don't one of the editors fire up one of their Win9x boxes (don't lie and tell me you don't have one) and give it a whirl. It's not like they have much else to do.
Don't forget to back up all of your data first. Please provide the readers with all of the results, be they nothing, overwritten files or HD, BSV, trojan exploit, reflashed BIOS, or (unlikely) an actual working emulator.
CD writers were not commonly available for a few years when the first CD games emerged.
:)
Just wait a couple of years
- The X-Box uses an Intel Pentium III processor, which is used by most PC's (OK, most PCs use something in Intel's Pentium family of processors, or use AMD Athlons which work at least as well.)
- X-Box games run on a stripped down version of Windows NT/2000/XP, and use the DirectX API to handle all the snazzy graphics & sound. There may be a few differences, but PCs have been running multiple flavors of Windows and using DirectX to run games for years.
The hardest part of figuring out how to emulate X-Box is figuring out how to decrypt the games after reading them from the disk. That may mean reverse-engineering the X-Box's decryption code (naughty) or extracting the decryption keys from the X-Box's firmware (even more naughty.) Then it's just a matter of translating X-Box DirectX calls to PC DirectX calls & working out twenty million little compatibility issues.Meldroc, Waster of Electrons
But I still am tempted to get an MSX-Box if only to handle my DOA addiction.
And would you be happy to know that you are supporting the Evil Empire in the process? Do the only thing that makes sense - boycott the slimy evil-doers.
well there's no trojan inside it - at least nav ce 7.6 doesn't think so. All it told me was it couldn't initialize the video, and it looks like the current version they stripped the version symbols out of the .dll/.xvd files. Classic signs for a trojan - but unless he invented the virus like this morning...
From this news, we can see Microsoft is selling their xBox at a really affordable price. It does look like they are not making money from it and we are getting a good deal. But if you think about it, their marketing plots - they will be getting much more revenue back from the games sold for xBox! Too bad for them! With Emulators now working for a few xbox games, which I believe many more games later, and games copied all round the net, they will really care about their encription, security, and the hackers that time. Microsoft's Xbox Set for Japanese Debut
UFC Tapout isn't even out yet.. how do you know it doesn't work? The XBox runs on an Pentium! Why does using one break it? The XBox also uses a form of Direct3D, not OpenGL so what is this about support for it? Also I hear the D3D it uses was modified to work better with special hardware features in the video card, ones not in the GF3 or even the soon to be released this year sometime GF4. clear these things up for me.. i'm confused.
I quote from the file xbox.vxd...
// id Software and Activision will NOT ask you to send this file to them."
"wolfconfig.cfg
so if by id Software, they mean Microsoft, and by activision, they mean Bill Gate's pockets, then nothing is changed, because this is not a real xbox emulator/wrapper.
those are just problems with Windows....
That screenshot from Simpsons Road Rage dates from around E3. There were a lot of changes made to the art between then and the release at the end of October. See the arrow at the top of the screen? In the final version of the game, it is a pointing hand. Unless they stole a pre-alpha build of the game and somehow made it work on the emulator (it wouldn't work on a real Xbox - we were on pre-production hardware then), then someone's not being entirely truthful here. Nice hoax though.
just looking at the files through text viewer and there is a lot of jargon in the files having to do with msn .... and also the vxd is rather wordy also ....
.. rather odd it think for a xbox emu to mentioning something about a free ware chat app
and the 3dsnd.dll mentions somethung about trillian
Music the Paint dancefloor the canvas your body the brush
GForce hards do T&L and a whole host of shaders in HARDWARE already. It's already been pointed out the GForce within the XBox is a weaker version of the bottom line GForce3. A Ti200 and Ti500 will eat it alive in performance.
Can I have a toke, too?
GeForce 3s have one vertex pipeline for T&L and vertex shaders, the Xbox GPU has two vertex pipelines. Theoretically, that's twice the T&L power of a GeForce 3 already.
If Microsoft is smart, they'll ignore this. Why? Well, they're losing around $150 USD per console, and they make the money from the games. If you buy your own high end PC, pay full sticker, and then buy their games, you're saving them money, and they're still getting their cut from the development fees for the game.
Wait a minute.... So audio/video/media hw producers do buttloads of research to constantly improve performance/capabilities of their products while reducing costs to the end consumer while software entertainment companies continue to take advantage of those improvements in games that are becoming more and more real all the while every single one of them has to pay Microsoft royalties/licensing fees/kickbacks/bribes/whatever during the process?
How is that different from a pre-Xbox world?
moto411.com
...how did you discover this, excuse my stupidity.
http://www.keithandbarry.btinternet.co.uk/
From the xbox.vxd file:
say_team:Wolf 1.0.0Three keys down for a button!
Good prank though, got him 50,000 hits on his site in a day.
-Vic
That's a fairly irresponsible post that CmdrTaco published. If that fake contains a virus of some sort, you just screwed a bunch of people. Regardless of whether people are dumb enough to run it without a virus scan, it's just the wrong way to go about it. I'm not sure what else CmdrTaco does at VA (and it's honestly none of our concern), but he really should check the story out before posting it or not post it at all. That goes for all the reviewers @ /.
/. articles. Yes, there are alot of story submissions, but most people would rather have 1/2 the number of stories if they were known to be accurate.
/. appears to do or know very little in the way of Quality Assurance. And obviously, this post is not part of  "Stuff that matters."
;-)
This isn't a flame, just being honest about the quality of
"News for Nerds."
News is only as good as its source.
I'm ranting now
I just thought I would let the world know that the Norton doesn't detect any kinda foul play here. I scanned the file and it came back clean...so though it appears to be a hox, it doesn't appear to be a damaging one!
Unstable Apps: Our Android Apps Don't Suck
a Beowulf Cluster of these.....
If I custom wrote a virus today, do you really think that NAV would detect it as such? Don't be lulled into a false sense of security by imperfect security measures.
PC gamers are nothing but a bunch of lamers?
That's why you need something like Virtual PC to try this kind of stuff out before you hose up your "production" system.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Why?
Think about it, do you actually think any emulator would want to run such games in a window?
Also, under requirements it says you need a ATI Radeon or Geforce3. Umm, doesn't the X Box work on a GF3 and not an ATI chipset? If so, then wouldn't games fail to work or display properly on the ATI card since they're programmed for the GF3? It also states it uses OpenGL, why not DirectX, Microsoft's brain-child?
As well, why would it need that much ram? The X Box has only 64 MB of RAM, therefore the games should function fine under a system with 128 MB of RAM.
And to add to that, you need a P3/P4/Athlon? Hell, the X Box uses a Celeron 733! I doubt you would even need a processor faster than 733 MHz as a 500 MHz processor would probably do the job.
As stated by a lot of other people, it is a fake.
Clue Number 1 this isn't real:
When you go under options. There are so called "special options", such as Z buffering, Fog, Texture Compressing and more. These aren't check boxes though, they are a radio button. It isn't like the Xbox only uses one of these options at a time...
Unstable Apps: Our Android Apps Don't Suck
just by looking at the min. requirements. the req. page states GeForce class 3d card as a minimum while the XBox has pixel shader capabilities that cant be emulated by software. the XBox will probably be the one of the easiest consoles to emulate as soon as PC 3d GPU hardware catch up with the XBox NV2A - its the only console ever that runs x86 code.
To know its a fake.
Why does this image have jpeg compression errors and why is it so fuzzy when its a gif?
And what's the weird jpeg ringing noise around the spaceship in this gif image?
Simple answer: I think they stole some promo screenshots and used MS-Paint with a bmp to gif convertor to fake their site.
These guys might want to be careful, I hear the Vanuatuian government doesn't look kindly upon scammers.
If anyone here speaks Bislama, can you tell me if there's a hidden meaning to the word Linar?
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
I cracked the xboxkrnl32.dll file open as a resouce in Visual C++. The dialog boxes, icons, and strings are all directly stolen from MS Messenger (the msgslang.dll file, if anyone is interested). Definitely a fake.
Slashdot has been hitting new lows on a consistant basis for about 14 months. Sure there were foul-ups before but usually one of the editors would admit their mistake. Not really the case anymore.
But think of it like this. An article such as this, about a hot new technology that you can have for free drives a lot of traffic to the slashdot site. How so? It is a lot more than just the initial people who read the article. Many forward a link off to their friends via email or chat. These people hear it was "broke" on slashdot so when it doesn't work they go there and peruse all the messages looking for a solution.
Slashdot exists solely on AD revenue. Let's all not forget that if the impressions don't maintain a high enough level some positions will have to be eliminated from the slashdot staff. Because of this don't ever expect an editor to call out another for doing a shitty job. They all protect each other because its the only way to protect themselves.
Honestly CmdrTaco should have been relegated to nothing but coding long ago. He is not an "editor".
--- I do not moderate.
Mod this up!
.Net framework installed, and it can ONLY emulate HALO, but it should improve in future versions.
Well, if that xBox emulator is fake, how about this one?
It says you need to have the ORIGINAL xBox DVD drive in your computer,
So if the emulator reported on in the story is fake with lots of features, it might be a good idea to check out a real one that has less features.
http://www.xboxemu.fr.fm/
This one is even better. You have to use the actual DVD Drive from the Xbox. Hello?
SEJames
...written in Delphi (the exe anyway). The xboxkrnl32.dll file contains stuff relating to msn messenger, as does the snd3d.dll file.
.exe anyway) but I can't be bothered :) This was just a quick look.
The big xbox.vxd file starts with just data with no strings, followed by a bunch of stuff that has come from Return To Castle Wolfenstien, looks like the multiplayer one. At the end of the file is the string "The Dark Side has you" and "d:\wolf\src\Release\WolfSP.pdb" which again is from RTCW, but the single player one...
I'd dissasemble some of it (the
From the guys page: We have now 50000 visitors, thank you all.
Thanks to Slashdot, we've just given this guy 50,000 hits according to his page. At least he thanked us....
"I don't trust goats," --To Catch a Spy
the vxd is a file from return to castle wolfenstein and the two dlls are from MSN messenger. The executable makes changes to your system and the contents look as if it also modifies the registry
the website hints that it is created by Uli Riehm, a german 17 year old.
This is pretty bad for an article like this to be posted without confirmation of its functioning, considering that 50000 people could have a possible trojan because of this.
Exactly where does it say that it requires games to be purchased? nowhere? oh, there goes your arguement. The problem with emulators is that they virtually never check copy protection, so i could play a dvd-r just as easily. THAT is the theft.
That site's screenshots are even more fake-looking. You won't be happy until we wipe out our drives, will you?
I survived the Dick Cheney Presidency 7 to 9 AM 7-21-07
UPDATE by icemind: This emulator is a fake. according to these messages on the slashdot forums - this is a fake one. Could someone at /. try reading their own comments section??
Finally, it shares its memory with the CPU. It reads its geometry data directly from main memory, rather than transferring it over an AGP bus. This gives it multiple GB/s to read non-static vertex data, and allows the CPU to assist in preparing it. Its performance with dynamic geometry will destroy any add-on card. And developers can & will take full advantage of the architecture's strengths, unlike any PC developer, who has to cater for dozens of configurations.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
So... buy lots of XboXes and use them as diskless workstations, advertising displays, etc... anything but buy the games.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Xbox games MUST be dual layer; the Xbox boots off the second layer. You might be able to squeeze a movie onto a single layer disc (though not the extras - there wouldn't be room), but even then you'd have to decrypt it with DeCSS or similar first.
DVD-Rs are made to the DVD-General standard, which has an unwritable key data track, precisely so you can't just bit-copy CSS-scrambled content to them. DVD-Authoring discs allow this, but they're unusable by consumer DVD-Rs (and the drives are a LOT more expensive).
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
You are a dumb bastard. You can't believe the emulator is fake on account of only the screenshots.
This emulator is version 0.0.3 so it is very new. Many said an xBox emulator couldn't be made this quickly so it was clear that an emulator almost at 1.0 would be fake.
r00t! r00t!
7'm4rr4 1'll h4v3 5oooo l1NUZ b0X3n fUk y4ll 5h17 uP!!!
What's the prob of an XBox emulator? K, anyone who do something like that has my huge respect, but isn't the Xbox x86 hardware and a Windoze-like OS? So emulating is not as hard as emualting MIPS or so....isn't it? 4130BMX_LoCal
I find it funny that a website trying to reverse engineer a MS product uses IIS.
this fake is old, wonders me that sladshot bring the site now, there start some weeks before and we laugh here in germany all the time over this site.. here some file infos...
crypt.dll
732 KB (749,568 bytes)
Monday, December 04, 2000, 2:10:36 PM
MFC-Anwendung Advent
Copyright (C) 2000 http://www.gitd.de & http://www.anyMOTION.de
http://www.gitd.de
German IT Development
German (Standard)
Advent.exe
grphx.dll
56.0 KB (57,344 bytes)
Wednesday, May 05, 1999, 10:22:00 PM
NOTEPAD.EXE from Windows 98
xbox.vxd
4.18 MB (4,387,088 bytes)
Tuesday, October 24, 2000, 1:12:02 AM
Main executable for Red Alert 2
Copyright © 1999 Westwood Studios
Sun.exe
Command & Conquer : Red Alert 2
You posted this crap without checking it out? Where's the QC? IS this turning into geeknews?:)))
This has truly made my day. If this is a benign hoax that doesn't drop any malware or rootkits or open any back doors or do anything else nasty, I think it's great. Of course, if there is any sort of malware involved my attitude about it does a complete 180. But if this was a totally harmless prank I find it absolutely hilarious.
The only Internet prank that beats this one was this: the "Daria Movie Rumors Site." Unfortunately it looks like the site is now history, but basically it was a vicious satire on Hollywood, Teen Movies and related topics, and included a hilarious fanfic that was sort of an extended "Daria" episode as if it was written by the "I Know What You Did Last Summer" screenplay. Very beautifully done. Too bad it's gone.
This story needs a new icon. "It's Funny. Laugh."
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Didn't you read what I just said? Or didn't you want to understand? The completely different memory architecture makes it impossible to emulate it like a virtual machine. You'd have to wrap your high level emulation around every opcode that gets executed, and by doing this, you wouldn't be gaining anything over a traditional interpretive or dynamically recompiling emulator. The speed requirements of this are unbelievable. Even if you could recompile whole blocks of code into tightly optimized emulation loops, there are many more things that need consideration on the emulation side such as IO ports, HD access, interrupts, proprietary 3D hardware - so what if DirectX is used? Its interface to the actual graphics chip does not exist on the PC side, so you'd have to emulate all that as well.
FYI, emulating x86 on x86 does not make it any simpler than some other CPUs on x86. In fact, it is one of the most dreadful tasks one can imagine. Writing a CPU core for MIPS chips is a breeze compared to emulating a complete x86-based system with all its quirks, strange behaviours and design stupidities.
Emulating a Nintendo 64 was never impossible, as Mike Tedder (aka Breakpoint) proved years before the high level emulators - which, if I may say so - are essentially real-time ports of the games to PC code and not emulation at all. The MIPS opcodes are dynamically recompiled into x86 code in memory, the graphics chip calls are trapped and translated into native 3D API calls, the sound chip playlists are simply thrown at the sound card. This is also why the high level emulators will never run more than Mario 64 and Zelda 64 without ugly hacks, since both the CPU, graphics and sound chips can be reprogrammed and none of the current emulators can handle this. Your compatibility estimate of "slightly less" is several magnitudes wrong. Of course there has to be an exception - I've understood that Project64 actually emulates the RSP microcode (3D manipulations, audio functions) instead of faking it on a high level. But it also requires a lot faster computer.
I never said emulating Xbox will always remain impossible. At this time however, because of current CPU speeds and the sheer complexity of the Xbox system, you cannot expect to see an emulator. Not for at least five years, probably closer to ten.
Why do so many people think that emulating the x86 processor on an x86 is as easy as pie? One of the many things that the x86 can NOT easily do is emulate itself via hardware. If it were that easy, don't you think Bochs, VMWare, and the x86 emulation cores in MAME would have already implemented that? If you wanted to emulate the XBOX you would have to emulate the Pentium III just like you would have to emulate a MIPS R4300i for the N64, a MIPS R3000 for the PSX, etc. *plonk*
Microsoft sure as hell wouldn't condone anything *illegal* now, would they...
You mean somebody with a real emu would post obviously fake screenshots?
I thought only the big-time software companies did that.
I survived the Dick Cheney Presidency 7 to 9 AM 7-21-07
BWAHAHHA i cant believe most of you are falling for this farce!, look at the pictures hmmm "partially working - halo" hmm well the screenshot looks perfect to me, OpenGL support only , soooo youre saying that rather then natively pass the instructions to the card , the pc will firstly interpret everything via the cpu and then pass it to the gfx card for processing....errrr......that would take quite the cpu ie : utter BULLSHIT , dont believe this bollocks
yes, journalistic integrity is important, but i'd rather too many stories posted than too few. if only they'd stop rejecting mine...
WHAT Linux boot disc? This isn't exactly a Dreamcast.
The link I posted to an emulator is real. I checked the files and they are real. You need to be bitchslapped, your account I mean. What this emulator does is modest compared to the emulator in the article. etc etc
...It didn't require you to sign up for MS Passport to save your high scores.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I survived the Dick Cheney Presidency 7 to 9 AM 7-21-07
The magical part of the xbox is the memory architecture. It may use standard SDRAM, but it uses a unified memory addressing scheme, which no existing PC uses - and in order to redirect it you'd have to trap every memory access made by the CPU, but this is AFTER you've reverse-engineered the northbridge to figure out what addresses map to actual chips, which addresses map to the sound card, to the video card, etc.
Not to mention that the HD has an IDE password chip, and in order to even dump the disc you have to first unlock it on a running xbox and then mux the IDE bus back into a PC. It's been done, but now they have raw bits. And believe me, MSFT is not going to be so silly as to make the HDD a standard FAT32 or NTFS drive. For that matter, I highly doubt the DVDs are in UFS format either.
The fact that the graphics hardware is made by NVidia and based on a GF3 core doesn't mean the full chip is a GF3, or that it uses the same pinout, or even the same surrounding support logic as an AGP card.
Tis better to shut thy mouth and be thought a fool, than to open it and remove all doubt.
Just TRY to DVD-R an x-box game.
Try.
They're written backwards, -just for that-.
You can't take the sky from me...
This took 30 seconds. Went to xbox.ign.com, looked at simpsons road screenshots, and found
i d= 171619&object_id=16612&media_type=R&ign_section=27 &page_title=The+Simpsons+Road+Rage+review+on+xbox. ign.com&adtag=network%3Dign%26site%3Dxboxviewer%26 adchannel%3Dxbox%26pagetype%3Darticle&return_url=h ttp%3A%2F%2Fxbox.ign.com%2Freviews%2F16612.html
http://mediaviewer.ign.com/mediaPage.jsp?media_
if that doesnt work, it's the "Mr. Plow Owns You" from the media page off of http://xbox.ign.com/reviews/16612.html . Note that the screenshot is exactly the same, including the earnings home has made thus far.
And that's that.
... you see the letters "MSX" and immediately think of an old Japanese computer platform.
I thought so at first myself, but right now I am running "Luigi's Mansion" in a window
Well, I ran Super Mario 64 in a window... on a Macintosh Performa 6230 with a 75 MHz PowerPC processor. The N64 has a 93 MHz MIPS processor plus a 60 MHz Reality Coprocessor.
(All 6220s and 6230s had video input.)
Will I retire or break 10K?
Does the Gameboy Advance have a more powerful graphics card than most computers?
Yes. Its 2D hardware is much more powerful than the computer in your microwave or coffee maker.
There was a Macintosh PS2 emu hoax going around a few months ago. Just a hoax, of course.
I have your PS/2 emulator right here. Bochs emulates a PS/2 nearly perfectly and can run many of the most popular games released for the PS/2. Strangely enough though, it can't run games made for the original PlayStation. Rumor has it that if you type a secret code into VMWare, you can also get a PS/2 emulator that way.
(In other words, computer != PC, and PS2 != PS/2.)
Will I retire or break 10K?
"The emulation community didn't think the N64 could be emulated at all."
What a crock. How the hell would you know anyway? You're probably just some R0mz0R k1dd13 anyway. Name one emulator you've written/helped debug, or one game you've had a hand in translating/hard-typing. The "emulation community" (at least the REAL one, not the imaginary one you refer to) did NOT think there would NEVER be N64 emulation - however, we DID think that there wouldn't be N64 emulation QUICKLY. Christ, look how long it took the SNES to be fully, correctly emulated! The PSX is still somewhat iffy on the emulation stakes, the N64 emulators are still seriously in development (ie NOT COMPLETE). PS2, GCN, and XBox emu's won't be a reality for years, and even then they'll be bare-bones. Tool.
Maybe the slashdot editors could actually try it before posting? Or do none of the slashdot editors have windows boxes because they're too good for that?
<grub> Reading
1. The majority of you are unthinking gullible morons.
2. It's not "X-Box". It's not "XBox". It's "Xbox".
THIS APP IS A TROJAN OF SOME KIND
Call me a coward if you like, but I'm not installing it.
SEVERAL OF THE FILE IN THE ARCHIVE ARE PART OF THE TRILLIAN MULTI-INSTANT MESSENGER APPLICATION
Check it out for yourself -- open up the archive, and then the individual files in your favorite hex editor. Scroll to the end and start looking through the strings.
Oh, and it also has Wolfenstein 3D embedded in it as well -- or so it seems.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Any reason you can't take the Xbox's DVD drive, drop it in a PC, and write ripping software?
My server
ive been scanning trough the files, and this is what ive found out:
;)
xbox.vxd - actually a file from Quake 3
snd3d.dll - Comes from MSN Messenger
xboxkrnl32.dll - Comes from MSN Messenger
So, to say at least it is a fake, and might even contain a trojan, but im not sure yet about this
CHAOSiTEC
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Damn, i deleted my one liner
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I guess the writing is on the wall. After years of crowing about open architectures and such, M$-lovers see their beloved company move into the biggest chunk of P.C.-gaming with their own PROPRIETARY BOX! Of course Linux-users are all too familiar by now with the fact that many P.C. components are designed with proprietary-only Windows API's in mind... essentially closing the door on the "open architecture" holy grail. Might as well buy a Mac for computing (no M$-crap) and an XBox for games and be done with it!
Because games writers have to write to the lowest common denominator of the hardware their game is going to run on. The whole point of games consoles is that the hardware is fixed and games developers can therefore take it as a given and exploit it... it also means they are cheap to manufacture.
Emulation is the reason why i have decided not to get an x-box. It should be relatively easy to emulate an xbox, since it's basicaly a pc. I mean, if people can emulate a system that is completely different from a pc (ie: playstation 1), this should be a piece of cake. The only problem would be you would need a realy kick ass video card, something better than the geforce 3, so emulation will probably need a geforce 4 or something. Or maybe the extra features of the x-box gpu could be emulated in software if your cpu is SIGNIFICANTLY faster than the cpu of the x-box. I seriously doubt we will see an emulator for at leat a year though. People will have to either copy(illegal) or reverse-engineer(may be illegal, depends on what country the emu writer is in) the bios, as well as get detailed specs on every aspect of the hardware. So by the time they have an emulator, there should be a nice collection of games. Lets just hope microsoft sees it as a way to sell x-box games to people with PCs, and doesn't freak out like Nintendo and Sony. Hell, if they were smart they would write one themselves, that way they can make sure that the emu doesn't bypass any copy protection on the CDs. I would gladly pay 75$ (I am Canadian, everything up here costs 25%-50% more, but we make 25%-40% more money) for an X-box emu.
In fact, Xbox apps are normally developed and run on Win2K during development. The final move to the console is mostly an exercise in linking and copy protection, along with timing and resource limitation checks.
with Katz infamous drone war conflaberation and now this post, what are the requirments to become a "poster" is it 50 karma? lenght of use? i read the FAQ and didnt find anything applicable. or did i miss something in the faq?
The More Knowledge you have the Luckier you Get- J.R. Ewing
And the paranoid would do well to treat this as a trojan? Why would one have to be paranoid to think that a file from a random website offering a completely false set of features under false pretenses might possibly be something it's not?
/. for security advice. Nice bullet you guys dodged there.
Note to self - never EVER ask
inky
inky
Hey, idiot!! It is a FAKE!!
Damn, the idiocy of slashdot posters has reached an all time high with this "story".
Score: 2, Insightful?
It's a fake, you moron.
Hmm...
MS loses $100 for each Xbox sold. So, a Slashdot moron decides to spend $300 to buy an Xbox and no games, just to try to hurt MS.
Result: MS loses $100, but Slashdot moron loses $300.
Gee, what a good idea!
-- "my guess is cmdrtaco got it fFully running."
Are you really that dumb? cmdrtaco has zero credibility. This story has zero credibility.
The slashdot faithful want so much for Xbox to fail (God knows why), that they glom onto any story that might appear to hurt Xbox, even when the story is clearly fake.
Pathetic.
XBOX uses a PowerPC processor NOT x86
Elbereth
Nope. Damn.
The only certainty is entropy.
It can be emulated very easily, but no emulater (atleast as I've heard of) are out yet. Be sure to buy that 2.2 ghz :p
The French zataz.com magazine demonstrates that this emulator is a hoax! www.zataz.com/zataz/news.php?id=492&file=10.html
Tell me if you know some emulator for PS 2 that is WORKING because I am tired to listen about FAKE EMULATORS? ps: X BOX EMULATOR IS FAKE BUT WITHOUT TROJAN VIRUS. SNake
Congrats, you're the first person to get it :-)
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
No it dosnt. The gamecube uses a powerpc chip. Xbox uses a mobile cleron 733(well a bastard chip much like it).
I laughed my head off seeing that sig. It's nice to see some people on Slashdot aware of the other really good open source project. Cheers.
The only certainty is entropy.