Xbox Emulator Plays Retail Game
Ryan M. Pamplin writes "The critically acclaimed Xbox Emulator, CXBX, has made its way into Xbox history. Caustik has announced that "Turok Evolution" is now playable at real-time speed with comparable graphics to the Xbox while utilizing nearly the same graphics hardware found within the Xbox itself. The development of CXBX will continue to advance at rapid pace. Expect many additional titles to become playable upon the release of the next binary in the near future. A DivX video, binary, and GPL'ed source is available at the website."
With the games possibly (depending on how good the emulator gets..) now having a far wider audience, there'll be a far larger demand for P2P downloads. I wonder if the MS anti-piracy protection will be up to the job - it certainly seems pretty simple to run games on 'modded' xboxes - I wonder if they've been depending on the fact that the games are designed for the console only to protect them from rampant copying...
And I bet that new releases will have to pass an internal 'breaks the emulator' test before they're let out into the wild (it'll only mean the emulator has to cope with the differences, of course...)
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
MS is going to pull the DMCA on this as soon as we get done with their server.
Talk about misery loving company.
Striking fear in the authors of godawful fanfiction, I am here, appearing in darkness, Tuxedo Jack!
Run on the xbox itself.... it could serve as a nice piece of game backup software - you could back up your games and play with the back up copy using the emulator on your box!
If Microsoft actually released an approved Xbox emulator, it could have a win-win situation...
Sure, there would be some piracy, but I think there's still a big market for Xbox games and PC users who dont want consoles.
Really though if you think about it, they are doing microsoft a favor. MS loses a lot of money on every x-box sale. If people can buy the games without having to buy the system MS still makes money from the game sales and doesn't have to offset the $100 or so they lose per unit.
Of course a lot of people that use this, will be using it in order to also copy and download x-box titles without paying for them. It's that group of idiots that give the entire emulation scene a really bad name.
On Wall Street they say "buy low, sell high" On the pad we say, "buy high, sell high" Isn't that somehow better?
Why didn't microsoft do this themselves, they keep saying that the money comes from games, not hardware, where they lose money on each unit sold. Also, we know that the hardware inside the Xbox is essentially a PC, dumbed down. If they sell a cheap emulator, they can reap money from games sold, plus they could have the copy-protection built in. This project can circumvent that. MS really dropped the ball here.
Because with Xbox games, the same game can be sold to two different kind of people:
The PC owner, and
The Console owner.
Whereas at the moment, no PC owner will buy an Xbox game if he doesnt also own a console.
One development cost for two different platforms = huge savings.
actually I'm waiting for it..
because the fuckers left coop out of the pc version.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
You mean reverse engineer Pentium 4 and GeForce support... wait a minute.. that doesn't sound right :).
It's actually running (as you stated) X86 architecture hardware, so reverse engineering a compatability layer for the hardware is, erm, not really an issue. Unless you're using a Power5 chip, I suppose.
You're reading Slashdot. Of course you like Linux and pc hardware
One Xbox costs Microsoft about four hundred dollars to build. This does not include marketing, development and other business costs. Currently, you can go to any store and buy an Xbox for about two hundred dollars. So, if you go buy an Xbox, its somewhat equivalent to stealing two hundred dollars from Microsoft.