Slashdot Mirror
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."
From the site: "I have put up some google ad links above to generate some support. The last sizeable donation has gone towards a development box for Sop Skrutt, and in the future it will help reimburse Xbox-Scene.com who is kind enough to host us (including the above rather large and expensive to host AVI file)." My condolences on your host's soon-to-be-slashdoted-to-hell server.
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!
Now you can play XBox games on a Windows machine! Think of all the lost revenue!
I can buy a Xbox for a 150 bukcs. Ill look at it when it becomes V1.0 Stable but for now Ill play the games faster than an emulator and save myself 151 dollars in time.
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!
Underling: Sir, there's a situation. I have good news and bad news.
Bill Gates: Alright, let me hear it.
Underling: The bad news is, someone has created an XBox emulator capable of playing a commercial game, and the public has become aware of it.
Bill Gates: Oh no! That's horrible! This could undermine H&E's entire business model! What's the good news?
Underling: The game is Turok Evolution.
Bill Gates: *Whew*
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
This is really great work but there's much more to be done before this is an All Purpose Xbox emulator. Currently, It only plays Turok. Which is based on the 4627 XDK. Other games based on this are:
Aggressive Inline
Battle Engine Aquila
EggMania
Kelly SLater's Pro Surfer
Rayman Arena
Sega GT 2002
Shadow of memories
So...when they get Halo to run on this thing, which one will run better: the PC version or the emulated X-Box version? I only say this because the current PC release runs like it's emulated already.
Gentlemen...BEHOLD!
-Dr. Weird
Does it emulate the Goldeneye memory card hack? I really want to install Linux on it...
Don't forget that parts of the XBOx are protected by trivial patents of Microsoft.
i ndex.en.h tml
See:
Microsoft and Patents
http://swpat.ffii.org/players/microsoft/
Bruxelles event
http://dot.kde.org/1081152462/
Web strike and demo
http://demo.ffii.org
Do I now have to plug in a modchip emulator?
What I expect is the Microsoft legal team serving them with papers before the next binary release.
There's a Mercedes gap too. I want one and can't afford one, but it's not government's job to do anything about it.
Now that I have finished turning my Xbox into a PC I can turn my PC into a Xbox! Hooray!
Well, they lose all the revenue from the sale of X-Boxes... Unless of course they're taking a loss on those, in which case this is actually good for Microsoft. Uh.
Actually they are taking a loss on the Xboxes. It is the packaged games that they are counting on to make their money back. This emulation technology, if abused, could (and probably will) encourage people to trade/download/serve illegal copies of the games so they don't have to pay for anything.
The author makes it quite clear that this is not his intention, and while that may or may not be a genuine sentiment, I think MS will probably come down on him with the DMCA somehow.
I'll need a $2000 computer to play a game that almost looks as good as the one played on the $150 console?
I think I'll stick with the real thing.
No, it's not up to date but it's better than nothing.
...but I'm afraid you meant Agent Under Fire. ;)
an Xbox is, what, $150??? How much is your time worth? I mean really, working on this kind of project seems to me to be a serious misallocation of resources.
Unless...
-- You can make the games play better
-- Do things you can't normally do with an XBox that are interesting and fun
-- Improve the development of XBox titles
-- Port other cool games to XBox more easily
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?
If I mod my xbox emulator to run Linux and then connect my xbox emulator to XBOX Live will Microsoft intall an updatethat disables my xbox emulator?
The Xbox is a loss-leader, which means each one sold costs them money. They make it up on the games. This means that every game sold to play on CXBX makes them more money than if you bought it to play on an Xbox.
So you're claiming that someone who is avoiding paying $149 for the console is suddenly going to pony up $49 a game to play on this emulator? I think not. The FIRST thing someone is going to do after downloading the emulator is to download some games.
Here's a
Are there any recommended tracker sites for files such as this? (non-copyright, one-off dl's)
-- In Soviet Russia, radio listens to YOU!
Xbox incorporates a non-standard DVD format that requires the DVD-ROM drive, at the firmware level, to handle reading the Xbox portion.
PCs only see an 11MB video that basically says "look, dumbass, this is an Xbox game so go stick it in your Xbox". (Maybe not in quite that harsh of language - I'm paraphrasing here)
You can't hook an Xbox Drive up to a PC, either... because the system won't recognize it as a valid DVD-ROM drive. Again, this is an issue with firmware (oddly enough, some standard DVD-ROM drives can be used on modded Xboxes to read backup discs).
This is why you have to use a modded Xbox to back up an Xbox game - the game material has to be read from the Xbox itself, then transferred to a PC.
This was intentional. It was meant to stymie hackers from simply reading the disc in a PC, or slapping an Xbox DVD-ROM drive into a PC and using that to read from.
The Xbox can handle games loaded from a DVD-R in UDF format, or even it's special Xbox DVD FAT format (burned as a "normal" disc image) - once it's modded. Why? Because it makes things easier for development. Developmnet Xboxes can be thought of as "half-modded" - developers can sign aps with a developer's key FOR THEIR XDK CONSOLES ONLY. Thus, they can test their releases with burned media (saving the expense of mastering a secure DVD and generating a signature).
So legitimate games cannot be used on a PC. Microsoft has locked themselves out of that market (albeit in the interest of copy protecting their software).
Yes but Piracy is also what got Microsoft where it is today. How many pirated copies of Win95/98/2000, Office 95/97/2000 are out there? Casual piracy is a huge part of the way Microsoft got to its monopoly position.
For the near term more people playing Xbox games will only lead to greater mindshare for Microsoft. Xbox 2 comes out and you have a whole other market of "Xbox gamers" who never bought the first gen console but are now hooked on Xbox games and might consider buying Xbox2 even thought they never owned Xbox 1.
Regarding it hurting sales, people who have an Xbox will most likely continue to buy retail games. They play on Xbox and Not a PC for a reason. Those that don't own an Xbox but download this emu to play Xbox games were never going to buy an Xbox or Xbox games in the first place. So how does MS lose revenue on games people had no interest of every buying?
I think the publicity will only help Microsoft and get more people using Microsoft products. Remember the way Microsoft does business on the PC side. In order to gain in their goal of World Domination, Microsoft would rather give their products away for Free then lose a customer. Even if that means "losing" money. *Tinfoil hat on* I wouldn't be surprised in 10 years if we found out that someone internal at MS "helped" this guy out in order to get more people using Microsoft products.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
The Xbox controller is essentially a USB device with a fruity plug. All it takes to get it running on PC is either cutting the end off and splicing on a male USB end or buying a 5-6 dollar adaptor that hooks into where the break is in the controller cord, plus appropriate drivers.
The other xbox emulator in the works, Xeon, can already play Halo to a large degree. Check it out
Moderation Totals: Flamebait=2, Troll=1, Redundant=1, Insightful=6, Overrated=1, Underrated=1, Total=12. (not mine)
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
Only on Slashdot is someone "doing a favor" for a company by emulating their console so that nobody buys it.
Somehow, your logic is:
Game sales > Game sales + X-Box sales
Completely insane and depressing.
MS loses a lot of money on every x-box sale.
So by not buying X-Boxes, they're magically recouping the money for those X-Boxes sitting at the store?
People that aren't willing to spend $150 to buy the official console that runs the games properly are, in 90 percent of cases, not going to be willing to shell out $50 for the official game disks and then go home and play them with buggy graphics and/or sound. Especially when they could buy the PC equivalent for a lot of the Xbox games for less and get a proper running game with full multiplayer support etc.
'Pirating the hardware' goes hand in hand with pirating the software. An Xbox emulator won't be causing an explosion in game sales any time soon.
Most likely, this will push virtually all of the borderline Xbox purchasers (who will be buying 10+ games over the ownership duration) to say 'Fuck it, i'll download the emulator onto my PC and get the DVD-Rs cheap off my mate Bob who's into all that piracy stuff'
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
People keep saying, "this is good for Microsoft because they lose money on hardware and make money on software, so pure software is good for them!"
In the pre-XBox days, Microsoft had a software games divison. They were already producing software. By that logic, they'd have no reason to make a console, because people always lose money on console hardware. Why didn't htey just stick with games for PCs?
They did it for "living room presence." Right now, or at least moreso 3 years ago, people thought of computers as a workstation. Microsoft's wants to push computers to all areas of the home, and the XBox in the living room is their foot in the door. By establishing a foothold in the console division, they'll be able to have future hardware generations integrate better with with normal PCs to give "ubiquituous computing" or some such.
Microsoft *could* make an XBox emulator on the PC, but they just don't want to.
The latest version is not linked on the downloads page.
as seen in the DreamX, attempting to connect to xbox-live with an xbox that has a different processor will get you banned.
d re amx_xbox/
http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/friendtech_
Capitalism isn't about trying to control a market. It's about selling something so good that people will buy it.
Trying to control a market stems from the idea that one should play the capitalism game just long enough to get to the point where one doesn't have to play by capitalism's rules anymore. It's not supposed to work that way. Your reward is not getting to lock out competitors, fix prices, and coast; your reward is enough money to keep playing. You can opt to keep selling your stuff as is, if it sells well, or make it better or different, if it's not; but you don't keep working, you can't expect to keep eating your cake.
Lately democracy seems to be based on the skybox, the Happy Meal box, the X-box, and the idiot box.
I can't wait to try this out. If I could run Linux on this emulator it would give me a way to put Linux on my x86 box.. Oh wait... That's right...
Platform lock-in.
If someone were to be able to play XBox games without owning an XBox, they are statistically less likely to actually buy said games. Because they haven't invested any money into the platform, they don't have that sense of loyalty / hazing that comes with a system purchase.
(warning, old numbers ahead) The average system sells with 5 games the first year, and 5 the second... After which it slopes off. What is likely to happen if people don't make an investment in hardware? Chances are, more people will use the opportunity to buy that one "must have" game (in my case, Ninja Gaiden), but will not pick up the other 4 per year. The "system seller" is a well-known effect, but what happens if people can satisfy that system seller desire without the system? Or what happens when people can emulate all 3 platforms consistently?
You want your players to make an investment in your hardware. It makes them better customers, more likely to come back and buy more games.
The ______ Agenda
As an Xbox developer, I thought this was interesting. I pointed it at my .xbe... And it did nothing. I'm a little drunk right now, so I'm not up for debugging it. It just pauses straight away. :(
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.
Doesn't work that way. Unlike PS1 (and PS2 IIRC) discs, Xbox games cannot be read in a PC CD/DVD-ROM drive. MS modified the DVD format that the Xbox uses to prevent easy ripping of games. All you see with a PC DVD drive is a short animation telling you it is not a DVD, and should only be placed in a Xbox.
The only way to use Cxbx is with a disc image that has been ripped using a modded Xbox.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
Just like with the Dreamcast, and we saw how very effective that was in preventing copying.
And then the real article says it was a 2.8GHz P4 with a GeForce FX5600.
The Xbox is hardly a 2.8GHz P4, guys.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!