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

Hmmm...

[Outlyer]

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+)

It's Fake

[bparrish]

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.

Re:Currently Xbox emulation is infeasible.

[Jimmy_B]

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.

IO ports and HD access shouldn't pose a problem because they're not speed critical (HD would actually be faster, because of faster drives), and the 3D hardware is not the problem you seem to think it is. The "actual graphics chip" *does* exist on the PC side; nVidia sells near-identical cores to Microsoft and to PC motherboard manufacturers. Plus, the games are probably only interfacing with a DirectX library implementation somewhere on the XBox hard disk, so that can be trapped and redirected into the PC DirectX library.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

IT IS A TROJAN

[spectecjr]

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.