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.
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
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.
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.