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.

Comments

Hoax?

[icemind]

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:

http://mediaviewer.ign.com/mediaPage.jsp?media_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

Damn that long link. ;) But anway, I'm 99% sure this is fake.

- icemind

Re:It's Fake

[beee]

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? Someone like, perhaps, your fellow editors who posted the story?

Re:Hmmm...

[theancient1]

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.

I'd wonder if it's that simple. There may be other indirect relationships at work. For example, might it be possible that ownership of the X-Box drives game sales? If you've got an X-Box in your living room, you might be more likely to purchase games for it. Or, you might be less likely to buy a competitor's product and start spending half of your gaming budget on its games. Relationships like this are almost impossible to predict, but they have to be considered.

Eventually, they'll also want to start selling online services -- the more people who own an X-Box, the more potential subscribers they'll have. And there's also the bragging rights that go along with having the best-selling console.

In addition, they have to be concerned about the long-term effects -- some number of months from now, they'll be breaking even on the X-Box sales, at which point they won't want to have an emulator around. It's only in the beginning that they lose money. Similarly, while DVD burners aren't an issue now, they may become a problem by the end of the product's life cycle.

Slashdot Editors forgot about their comments

[Calle Ballz]

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.

You people just don't get it.

[talks_to_birds]

• "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."

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

Re:FAKE !! FAKE !! FAKE !!

[atam]

A good analogy would be this: the PSX has a 33 mhz processor in it. Somehow, I really doubt that old 386, one of similar power to the ancient PSX, lying in the basement would be a good platform to run PSX roms on. The Xbox is of equivalent power to modern PC's. Traditionally, one must have far greater power than the original console to emulate its games with decent speed.

This is general true for emulating a console game machine based on a different processor than your native machine. So to emulate a PSX you have to emulate a MIPS R4400 processor on your x86 PC. And it could be very slow. However in the case of XBOX, it uses X86 processor just like a PC. So there is a potential huge saving for not needng to emulating the foreign CPU. In addition, it is likely that the XBOX uses a bastarded version Windows/DirectX (MS is preaching Windows Everywhere (TM), don't they?). So once the difference could be configured out, it is possible to write a layer to map the XBOX calls directly to the PC Windows/DirectX environment.

I am not saying that it could be easy. But there is a hugh pool of knowledgable people who are very proficient in low level details of Windows API. So I am pretty sure that eventually we would have an XBOX emulator that runs at decent, maybe even native speed.