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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.
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 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
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 -------------------
... is to be able to run the XBox emulator under Wine :-)
Well technically Microsoft loses about $90 per system sold. So if you really want to hurt MS, buy a ton of them but don't buy any games..
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.
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....
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.
Let's leave the Slashdot 'no news' story out for a minute. Let's focus on the TRUE emulation for a minute.
1: It is known that the CPU inside a Xbox is a 733P3.
2: The ram is standard sdram, and there is a known ram 'hack' to add more (being there is connections on the motherboard to do so.
3: The HD is a standard IDE HD, using standard 'home use' parts.
4: The graphics chipset (by Nvidia), could probably be 'instruction linked'to that of a heavily modified Geforce3. I know of no better way to describe this other than comparing the Voodoo2 Chipset to the N64 console. Using a High Level Emulation layer, N64's calls were mapped easily to the Glide DLL that of a Voodoo2
My idea would to map the instructions found on the HD and the Game dvd's to determine patters of data, and write interfaces (along with a processing power of a another 733P3 (used to preprocess the data for the gfx card) and a Geforce3. With the BIOS matter, I'd dump memory from RAM and look for telltale signs of mirroring of the BIOS in ram. If that wouldn't work, use a Linux boot disk (the netplay one) and have debug tools to pull the encrypted BIOS image off to another medium. My premise is that if the console can decrypt it (and can start the machine up), we can decrypt it too, by hand if nessisary.
Josh Crawley
ps: The emulation community didn't think the N64 could be emulated at all.
As for the N64, the UltraHLE emulator runs a large percentage of games; yes, it does so with some hacks, but on consoles, the only programs you need consider are the successful commercial ones, not thousands of freeware programs with thousands of different sets of quirks. DirectX HAL comes to the rescue here; the games shouldn't be touching the hardware except through DirectX, to which calls can be trapped. I've gotten the distinct impression that Microsoft started with a PC and modified it until they had something suitable to sell as a console. Yes, it will certainly take time to reverse-engineer the thing to the point where it can be emulated. However, Microsoft's laziness may well mean that the XBox and PCs are surprisingly similar. I also think that the hardware of five to ten years from now will be absolute overkill for emulating an XBox.
Of course, until someone cracks the XBox BIOS, we're both on speculation, which makes this argument rather pointless.
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