X-Box Emulated (Not)

Hmmm... by Outlyer · 2002-01-12 05:33 · Score: 5, Interesting

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+)

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----------------- "I have a bone to pick, and a few to break." - Refused -------------------

Re:Hmmm... by theancient1 · 2002-01-12 06:18 · Score: 3, Insightful

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.
Re:Hmmm... by Namarrgon · 2002-01-12 11:03 · Score: 5, Informative

No, that definitely won't work, for the reasons below (and probably others):
- All Xbox games are made on dual layer (DVD-9) discs, and the OS & game are booted from the second layer. As no DVD writer (under at least $5k anyway) will write dual layer discs, coping the games is not an option (unless the firmware is modified to bypass this restriction).
- All Xbox executables are encrypted & signed using public-key encryption (don't know what strength). This would have to be broken, or the key(s) obtained before any executables could be patched or even executed.
- A filesystem driver/emulator might have to be written (it's a modified form of FAT32).
- There's still the matter of the unified memory architecture. Some games will require this, in order to directly modify textures or polygon data, or simply to get the data throughput required. At best, a regular-PC-based emulator will run such a game quite slowly; at worst it wouldn't run at all.
- There is already an Xbox hardware "emulator", made available by MS to lower-tier developers. However, this is more a set of instructions about what PC hardware to use (i.e. GF3, DX8) to make something that approximates final Xbox hardware. It will certainly not run final Xbox games.
Alternatively, an emulator could be made to work at the hardware level (intercepting register calls etc from the monolithic DX/driver dll), running all system software unmodified - which would restrict it to GeForce3/4 hardware at least, possibly on an nForce chipset (which has the same sound hardware) - or raise the CPU requirements considerably to emulate these.

--
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?

Re:way to go! by inversesinewave · 2002-01-12 05:37 · Score: 3, Interesting

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..

It's Fake by bparrish · 2002-01-12 05:42 · Score: 5, Interesting

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:It's Fake by baptiste · 2002-01-12 05:52 · Score: 5, Funny

LOL - I think /. needs a new section "Hoax of the Day" :)

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Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
Re:It's Fake by Juan|Corral · 2002-01-12 06:01 · Score: 5, Informative

Yup, "xbox.vxd" is a file from Wolfenstien actually..

"snd3d.dll" and "xboxkrnl32.dll" appear to be some sort of messaging program dll's.

The actual exe seems like it just loads BMP images when started.

Oh well, nice prank..
Re:It's Fake by beee · 2002-01-12 06:16 · Score: 3, Insightful

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?

--

+ Donald Gunth
+ Email: dgunth@quicktek.net
"Caffeine is the greatest lubricant ever created." -ESR

Re:way to go! by Legion303 · 2002-01-12 05:43 · Score: 3, Informative

Even better, don't buy any. MS has already spent the money to produce XBoxes--if you buy one, you're just helping them recoup some of that cost. By not buying one, they're still out the total cost. Which brings us to: "Total Cost of Ownership" for MS. Got to be in the millions.

-Legion

Re:Does this actually work? by Mr.+Marabou+Man · 2002-01-12 05:43 · Score: 3, Redundant

It is a hoax, look at the pics, its the official screens from the games, wit a photoshopped title bar and menu ... :P

As an Xbox developer... by MaestroSartori · 2002-01-12 05:47 · Score: 5, Troll

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...

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Sartori

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Game dev and music blog

Linux boot disc for XBox coming soon? by Maul · 2002-01-12 05:52 · Score: 5, Informative

It is my understanding that the XBox has some sort
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 /. have suggested that documentation was somehow leaked about the protection scheme.
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

Hoax? by icemind · 2002-01-12 05:52 · Score: 5, Insightful

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

Unbelievable. Un-fucking-believable. by Gridle · 2002-01-12 05:53 · Score: 5, Informative

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. :)

Re:Unbelievable. Un-fucking-believable. by SteveX · 2002-01-12 06:07 · Score: 5, Informative

The XBox HD contents have been dumped; read up on it at www.xboxhacker.net. It's going to be a lot of work for anyone to make an emulator, or even to get unsigned code to run on the box - but some progress has been made..
The XBox uses the IDE password mechanism to prevent you from dropping the drive into a PC and reading it, but if you connect the drive to the PC *after* the XBox has unlocked it (without resetting the drive), then you can read from it. Course your PC BIOS didn't see it at boot so you need to write custom software to talk to it.. but that's been done..
The folks at xboxhacker are very determined. It's fun to watch.
Re:Unbelievable. Un-fucking-believable. by Jimmy_B · 2002-01-12 09:02 · Score: 5, Informative

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)

That is absolutely false. The XBox's CPU is just an Intel CPU, which most home computers have something similar to, so not much needs to be done to emulate that (maybe emulate a few instructions, or shift opcodes). The video is handled through DirectX and an nVidia video chip; again, most people already have something similar, and minimal translation is necessary.

People said that emulating the Nintendo 64 was impossible, but that was done, not by emulating the hardware at a low level, but through high-level emulation. Compatibility is slightly less, but it's orders faster.

The fact that the XBox hasn't been fully reverse-engineered yet is an obstacle to making an emulator, yes, and this particular "emulator" is clearly a hoax, but it is by no means impossible.
Re:Unbelievable. Un-fucking-believable. by josh+crawley · 2002-01-12 09:52 · Score: 3, Interesting

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.

The contents of the files are.. by Gridle · 2002-01-12 06:02 · Score: 5, Informative

I actually went and checked the files.

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.

Re:uhoh... by David+E.+Smith · 2002-01-12 06:03 · Score: 4, Informative

Okay, that link is now broken. And since I host it, I should know. :-)

This appears to be one doozy of a hoax. I just snagged the file and uploaded it to Mr. Web Server - I haven't even virus-scanned it. Which, since the "xbox.vxd" file appears to come right outta Quake 3, you may want to do.

I don't know if it does ANYTHING, much less anything good or bad. I don't have a Windows box to test it on.

Exercise caution...

Re:way to go! by bojolais · 2002-01-12 06:04 · Score: 5, Informative

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.

WARNING: POSSIBLE TROJAN OR HOAX!!! by JackAsh · 2002-01-12 06:15 · Score: 3, Redundant

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

FAKE !! FAKE !! FAKE !! by Zurk · 2002-01-12 06:17 · Score: 5, Informative

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.

Re:FAKE !! FAKE !! FAKE !! by atam · 2002-01-12 10:03 · Score: 4, Insightful

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.

Re:Emu X-box by AndrewHowe · 2002-01-12 06:20 · Score: 5, Informative

"not a hoax"
Wrong.
"the directX libraries are the same on the XBOX and a PC"
Wrong.
- An XBox developer

Slashdot Editors forgot about their comments by Calle+Ballz · 2002-01-12 06:31 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.

Re:Does this actually work? by CaseyB · 2002-01-12 06:48 · Score: 5, Redundant

Appears. The problem is that is DOES none of those things. The dlls and vxd are bogus files, copied from other software and renamed. The rest is just a simple VB application that shows menus and fails to initialize the video, so you can't run anything.

You people just don't get it. by talks_to_birds · 2002-01-12 07:27 · Score: 3, Insightful

"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

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Hmmm... Nope. by Namarrgon · 2002-01-12 12:15 · Score: 5, Informative

Your standard DVD-R discs are single layer only. Xbox games (and most movies) are DVD-9, dual layer discs. No consumer-level drive will write dual layer discs.

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"?

Currently Xbox emulation is infeasible. by Gridle · 2002-01-12 13:48 · Score: 4, Flamebait

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.

Re:Currently Xbox emulation is infeasible. by Jimmy_B · 2002-01-12 14:49 · Score: 4, Interesting

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 by spectecjr · 2002-01-12 21:50 · Score: 4, Interesting

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

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