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.
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.
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
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 :)
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..
I am pretty sure this is a hoax, anyone can confirm it actually works?
kawai
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.
I doubt that. SNES emulation is rampant because the the ROM files are only 250K-3,000K each. They can be stored in huge, free repositories and they don't take very long to download.
Anyone know how big an X-Box ROM file would have to be? Let's say they fill a DVD... that's about 6GB of data. Not many people have the bandwidth, time and hard drive space to download these files. The size also makes it much more expensive for someone to distribute the files... you can't just stick a 6GB file on an anonymous Geocities account.
Will X-Box emulation be rampant in 5 or 10 years when hard disks are bigger and bandwidth is fatter? Probably. But by then Microsoft will have introduced the HomeStation, and you'll be downloading your games from them via encrypted streams.
-Legion
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
Microsoft is losing money with every xbox they sell. They must sell eight games or so to every xbox owner to make it profitable. An emulator like this one could make people buy xbox games that do not own a xbox, isn't that a good thing, even for ms ?
You also say that this emulator could have already taken out a big chunk of xbox sales, I disagree even strong here. Console markets have almost nothing in common with the hardcore pc gaming market. Using an emulator like this one is simply to complicated for most console gamers. I have seen people complaining in a store that their PSone wouldn't play PS2 games. Do you really think that these people are smart enough to use an emulator like this ? They will not even know about it if it will work perfectly. I'm sure MS will try to sue them because they always want controll over everything.
Jan
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
Seconded. No way is this for real.
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
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.
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)
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.
And, even better yet... go throw $300 at a PS2 now, so you can throw another $100-150 for hardware when the network capability is available? After all, Sony is the most benevolent of companies, feeding the hungry and healing the sick. Downright charitable. Sheesh.
The console industry defined itself from its inception as an arena for hard-core capitalist corporations to milk maximum revenue from content providers and customers. Microsoft deserves a place in that wonderful market segment as much as any other.
If you want to exercise some philosophical consistency, remove Windows and Microsoft Office from every machine you own and/or use (no, you don't deserve to use stolen M$ software just because you disagree with their criminal business practices) and feel comfortable owning both a PS2 and an Xbox. If you want to gripe indirectly about the way a relatively free capitalist economy works, try making a difference for a change.
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.
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.
"not a hoax"
Wrong.
"the directX libraries are the same on the XBOX and a PC"
Wrong.
- An XBox developer
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.
Here's another X-Box Emulator supposedly........
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?
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?
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.
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
Offtopic? There's a real question as to whether the X-box emulator being discussed actually works, or is some kind of hoax or Trojan attack. Has anyone actually been able to download the thing and successfully run a game? Or has anyone established that the downloaded program can't possibly work.
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
I thought that Xboxen were all sold in bundles -- aren't you forced to take 3 games when you buy one?
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.
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.
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.
Yes, but by selling more units, they will produce more units. Assuming that they are selling below marginal cost, they could lose more by producing 10,000,000 units with 0 units of unsold inventory, than by producing 1,000,000 units with 500,000 leftover units. If you don't buy more units, they won't produce more, which puts a limit on the loss.
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.
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"?
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.
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.
Actually that is exactly what Plex86 and VMware do. Bochs and the x86 core in MAME are different because the program is designed to run on non-x86 architectures.
You are correct that you cannot completely virtualise an x86 PC. However, most instructions can be virtualised. The ones that can't require special handling - so one of the things that makes VMware complicated (and slower than you'd otherwise expect) is that it has to pre-parse code and insert handlers for those particular instructions.
The plex86 page has a lot of useful information on this.
... 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?
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
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
Huh? Which part of "they lose $90 per box" didn't you understand?!
You buy a box, they lose $90
You don't buy a box, they lose $0
You only help them recoup the cost when you buy the actual games.
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.
MS pays $100 to produce an XBox which retails for $75. Two things can happen: 1.) You buy the box, giving MS $75--net loss to MS=$25. 2.) You don't buy the box, giving MS $0--net loss to MS=$100.
Either that or I missed the marketing class which discussed how a company would lose more money if people bought its products than if they didn't.
-Legion
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.
Elbereth
Nope. Damn.
The only certainty is entropy.
You're assumng that Microsoft has a warehouse of these things pre-built that will never sell unless you step up to the plate to buy one. In reality they are only going to build enough to keep the channel full. For them to be left with unsellable inventory would mean that demand would have to dry up so fast that they couldn't adapt.
You're argument is like saying that you can make GM lose $10,000 by not buying one of their cars because then it'd be left to rot on a storage lot someplace. Yes, that'd be true if it ever happened, but in reality if demand slowed they'd cut down on production (well, duh!).
What your marketing class apparently missed is that companies usually sell products at a profit, not at a loss (as Microsoft is doing). Can't you see that it makes a difference?!!!
Yes, they will slow production if no one buys the units already there. They will still be out the initial money regardless (and probably pump even more money into marketing to try to sell the existing XBoxes).
For your scheme to work, people would have to buy up *every* XBox out there, forcing MS to build more, then buy those as well. There is a lower limit to the number of units that have to be sold before MS starts losing more money than they would if no one bought one of the many, many units already produced. The math is actually very easy for most people to understand.
-Legion
You're assuming that Microsoft already has, or at some point will have, more X-box's in the channel than they will ever sell without the cooperation of our wanna-screw-microsoft purchasers. I think you're wrong.
Their forecasting is not going to be perfect, and they have to err on the side of overproduction to avoid starving the channel, but I assert that the degree of overforcasting/building will only be to the degree that they have more money *temporarily* tied up in channel inventory than would be optimal; not that they will ever over-produce to the point that they exceed the remaining end-of-life sales of the product, which is your assertion.
Your scenario assumes Microsoft's forecasting and X-box sales to be catastrophically bad to a degree that is wishfull thinking and unrealistic.
Congrats, you're the first person to get it :-)
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?