XBox 360 Emulators for the PC

Funny thing is before Xenia some of the emulation developers were so emphatic and absolutely certain in their knowledge that xbox 360 games would take 20 years to have the hardware to emulated xbox 360 games, that they'd need 3-8 cores running at 15-20ghz or more to emulate.
I'm not an expert but I have done some crude emulation work and I think it depends very much on the target system and the approach taken.

If you look back at how 8-bit computers and consoles were initially emulated, it was often using brute force approach to emulate the entire system at a per cycle level - based on the fastest clock in that system.This is basically as good as it gets as long as you have detailed documentation about how the CPU, all of the chips, the RAM and buses operate. And this is necessary if you need to emulate something like a Commodore 64 because there were so many "unsupported hardware features" used in commercial games that if you don't emulate the VIC-II (graphics) chip exactly how it worked at cycle, scanline and register level, a bunch of software will spectacularly break.

More recently emulation has largely moved away from this approach - particularly for complicated target systems which often do have inate variances built into both the hardware and the software. If this is the case then you may be able to avoid cycle-level emulation (or at least for every subsystem) and employ smarter methods to emulate something. For example you wouldn't want to have to emulate the tri-core 3.2Ghz Xenon CPU at the per-cycle level in realtme if instead you can use a variety of JIT precompiler techniques to convert PowerPC code to 80x86 for the purpose of emulation.
 
Looking at the hardware design of the Xbox One I always felt that it would allow 360 backward compatibility. I think I said as much in a thread here somewhere. Now I just heard in the Giant Bombcast podcast interview with Kudo I think, and he explains that the 360 is indeed a true emulation. He specifically contrasts it with Xbox emulation on the 360, which were 'just Shims'. Here, the emulation is done in a VM that runs the 360 OS fully emulated, and the game thinks it is really on a 360. On the other hand, the VM is presented to the XboxOne as a game, so the Xbox One thinks it is running a game, hence all the streaming features and such are available. Some games require different features, but they always keep adding these to the overall emulator code base.
 
I wonder if someone will be able to extract the 360 emulator from the One and reverse engineer it for the PC? Since both use Win10 and DX12 surely that's got to be in for a chance?
 
I wonder if someone will be able to extract the 360 emulator from the One and reverse engineer it for the PC? Since both use Win10 and DX12 surely that's got to be in for a chance?
There should be a XO hack first. Also I do not think XO uses clean 360 images, but preprocessed.
 
Listening to Phil Spencer, he says, "the approach that we've taken is to emulate...the full 360 hardware layer." And, "the emulator runs exactly the same for all games." I imagine 'emulator' has varies different possibilities and some people may have specific connotations?
 
I tried sega gt 2002 on xenia it didn't work. Do i have to convert the xbe file?

Part two, it didn't fit before (there is a Jurassic Park game even :) ):
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I tried sega gt 2002/jet set radio future on the xenia emulator and it didn't work. What do i do?

thanks :)
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I tried sega gt 2002 on xenia it didn't work. Do i have to convert the xbe file?


I tried sega gt 2002/jet set radio future on the xenia emulator and it didn't work. What do i do?

thanks :)
the question is.. will it ever fully work? The specs of your machine might play a factor, I guess it is a very capable machine, I use a simple notebook most of the time so I don't think I will ever run Xenia on it and haven't tried. I believe fullspeed X360 emulation will happen eventually given enough interest.

Emulation refers to the ability of a computer program in a device to emulate (imitate) another program or device.

In order to be able to do this, the user needs hardware that is superior to the original console first. Then you have to make a program (the actual emulator) that sits between the hardware and the ROM, which has to be able to translate what the ROM is "saying" into what your computer can actually understand (emulation). That is a quite difficult task because unlike games running natively on the original hardware, games on an emulator don't have direct access to the hardware.

So in the case of a console like the X360 it might take some time, but it will work, eventually.

Btw, welcome to the forums!! Hope you enjoy your stay here.
 
Then it's not emulation...

Surely the emulation is on the 360 hardware not the 360 software it runs?

I assumed it was emulated hardware and then they broke games down into chunks of common code that was not performant and then rewrote thoes or similar to get performance up which is why games slowly trickle in (outside of legal effort)
 
You buried the lead.
The much more important emulator has made massive strides in the past year (4X or more improvement).
With any luck, games will be playable in another three years.

never heard about this emulator before your post, but aside from the lack of sound it looks very accurate. Xenia is a X360 emulator though. Isn't XQUEMU a Xbox, the original Xbox, emulator? Given NVidia secrecy it's quite an achievement it runs well, though the lack of sound may indicate how difficult it is to emulate the NVidia 5.1 sound chip.

As for Xbox 360 emulation, if Microsoft launched their X360 emulator for the PC, I'd buy it.
 
I'd love an original Xbox emulator as I'd love to be able to play some of the original Xbox games (especially Soul Calibur 2) without pulling out my Xbox. Bonus points if it also supports mods for Xbox games like you could do with a compromised Xbox. I have so many skin mods installed for Soul Calibur 2 and DOA 3.

Regards,
SB
 
Microsoft could possibly sell some 360 games on their store for PC, think RDR (360 emulated) exclusive on Windows 10 store... I think it would sell.

now back to reality, nice to see progress with the original Xbox emulator
even the official emulator on the 360 was not very good (poor performance, missing effects), so it's probably not going to be easy to get something on the level of Dolphin and PCSX2.
 
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