Hey, thanks for the infos! That was a great post man... Feel free to increase your postcount with more of the same whenever you feel like it. 
I'm drunk and I feel like making rediculous conjectures: PS2 emulation with the X360?
- Thread starter Shogmaster
- Start date
Shogmaster
Regular
ector said:Yep, porting Dolphin to the 360 would be fun, maybe I'll do that if a chip comes out
(i'm one of the two authors)
Oh, and dolphin basically only uses the gpu for rasterization, all T&L and similar are currently done on the CPU for compatibility. I only wrote a tev combiner->pixel shader recompiler, started on a recompiler to convert as much as possible of the transform pipeline to vertex shaders but never finished. This is one of the reason it is so slow.. another reason is the endian-ness problem which is especially annoying on the gc since display lists are built of lots of unaligned packed data... Yet another reason is that our PPC->x86 recompiler never was very good
All of these would be non-issues on the 360. One core for virtualizing the gekko, one for parsing gfx commands and feeding the xenos gpu, and the third one for the rest
[edit] damn this post became smiley heavy ;P
As much as I'd love a GC emulator on the PC or X360, the fact that I couldn't use the GC discs themselves makes the whole thing a bit less attractive. I really don't want to get involved in downloading ROMs.....
Unless there is ways to make regular DVD drives of X360 or PCs read the GC discs, I much rather have a PS2 emulator or a XBox emulator.
Apoc said:
Really? Why not?
Is it a software block or something?Shogmaster
Regular
Apoc said:
What's important is that the disc themselves are just regular DVD9s so that they can physically be read by regular DVD drives. The software block can be circumvented by the emulator itself.
Shogmaster said:
The block can't be circumvented by a emulator, you would need a hacked firmware for your dvd drive to be able to read data from a xbox disc. And no, the discs are not regular dvd9s. They have some odditys in them. If you could read a xbox disc using software to "unlock" the data people would stop doing their xbox isos connecting the xbox to the pc via ftp and transfering this way the games data files.
Shogmaster
Regular
Apoc said:
Still, these are things that can be circumvented by software (firmware qualifies as such). These are far easier to solve than problems that has to be solved by hardware alterations, such as different focal width laser for the optical media (DC), or drive that spins the opposite way (GC).
Shogmaster said:
GC does not spin the disc backwards. The disc content is encrypted using 2 or 3 barcodes on the disc itself(you can see them in the middle section of the data area sometimes) and the drive firmware uses the barcodes to decrypt the data. Once past the disc drive, the data is entirely unprotected. The Viper modchip for Gamecube replaces the disc drive firmware and allows it to read normal miniDVD's burned using ISO's ripped from a normal Gamecube.
Gamecube does not require any signed executables like Xbox, which is why homebrew stuff is pretty easy to get going. All you need is the broadband adapter and Phantasy Star Online Ep1/2.
scooby_dooby
Legend
Shogmaster said:
If it could have been done, it would have been done by now.
Currently to back up XBOX games you need to put it into the XBOX drive, connect from your PC using the ethernet cable, and backup the game to your PC HDD. You're basically FTP'ing the files from your XBOX DVD drive.
It's slow and tedious.
The XBOX mod community is huge, there's literally dozens of applications written for the XBOX, and if there was an easy way to have PC drives read the discs it would have been done by now.
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