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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.
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 -------------------
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'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
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.
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.
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...
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.
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
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.
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.
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"?
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.
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