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FAQ: Xbox 360 Emulation

102K views 64 replies 27 participants last post by  microdev 
#1 ·
Okay, now that I have moderator rights over the Xbox forums, time to shed some light on this.

1. Q: Is there an Xbox 360 emulator?
A: No. There are no Xbox 360 emulators that exist as of yet. In fact, many FAKE Xbox 360 emulators have surfaced all over the web and youtube. So if you see one claiming any REAL commercial game compatibility, it's safe to assume it's a fake.

2. Q: Why is there no Xbox 360 emulator?
A: The answer(s) to this are both simple and profound.
  • The hardware required to emulate it (in software) does not exist. It doesn't matter if you have a quad-core, hex-core, or even 12 cores, that's NOT enough to emulate Xbox 360.
  • The hardware isn't well documented enough to get any real results. There's enough to emulate simple homebrew and some basic hardware features, but not enough to emulate a commercial game such as Halo 3.
  • The majority of experienced Emu authors want nothing to do with it. That's the killer in a nutshell.

3. Q: Can it be done?
A: Depending on the approach and implementation, yes. I (and another emu author who will remain namless) do believe it can be done to a certain extent.

4. Q: Are you going to write a Cxbx 360?
A: Don't hold your breath.

5. Q: Can the 360 be HLEd with Direct3D9 like how Cxbx does with Xbox1?
A: Yes. This possibility arose when the 360 SDK was leaked. There are two versions floating around, but this doesn't actually make it much easier at all.

6. Q: What would it take to emulate 360?
A: It's too early to tell. Just assume your machine is not capable of handling it. One thing is already clear, you'll [most likely] need a Direct3D11 class GPU to handle it's tessellation engine, and I'm quite sure that you'd be limited to 64-bit OSes.


Normally FAQs don't need disscussion, but I'll go ahead and leave this open for any more input.
 
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#2 ·
Nice faq Blueshogun

And if there will ever be xbox360 emulator it will be interesting to see what kind of a hypercore it needs to emulate game like call of duty 2 and then something like gears of war 2.

Glad that we atleast have a enough powerful machines to emulate the last gen machines. Ps2 had something like 450mhz processor and it needs 3 ghz dual core to get playable results and pcsx2 is very optimized and has alot of speedhacks.

But yeah i think that will also need more than one man to start that huge project.

And we still need to get the original xbox emulated, which is coming along nicely.

I think we will not see a xbox360 logo in ngemu frontpage for a few years:D
 
#4 · (Edited)
6. Q: What would it take to emulate 360?
A: It's too early to tell. Just assume your machine is not capable of handling it. One thing is already clear, you'll [most likely] need a Direct3D11 class GPU to handle it's tessellation engine, and I'm quite sure that you'd be limited to 64-bit OSes.
woot, 64-bit and ATI 5870 :drool: (not really interested in 360 emu).
I was wondering if xorloser's work on xex, "could" have anything to do with emulation? (before he was told to C&D)
 
#11 ·
There is comming more and more documentation.
Problem is, its takes a lot of time.

But for who is interested.

Home of the Hitmen
There you can find more information, documentation and Ida dissambler modules.

Thanks to Home of Hitmen as always :)
thx shadow,that is mean someone gone/want to try to make 360 emulator :emb: I will gladly be tester for that :thumb:
 
#12 ·
this does not mean someone is trying to make a emu.
it only more information... for if someone is willing to spend time in it.

Hitmen is a person who likes hacking hardware and console and programming on it.
I found his website years ago while he was developing psx software on Psyke.. thats a alternative of Yarozee.

But the info can help when people want to build there own 360 emu.
 
#13 ·
Sorry to bump this, but i have a question.
I am using game making software (Unity to be precise) that can compile for xbox360. Now, the question is, if i make series of simple demos (like cube without textures, or light samples, or just some basic input controlls), can this be helpful in emulation or it doesn't matter? Maybe in that way someone can pinpoint some functions. What do you think?
 
#14 ·
it can always be usefull when there are samples.
specialy when someone is interested into trying to create a xbox 360 emulator.

However, for now at this moment.. there is nobody working on a xbox360 that i know of.
So dont get your hopes up. that you will get a xbox 360 emulator soon.

But testing samples are always welcome.. if you can also place sources in it. then developers can read the code what is in it.. and try to emulate the same.
 
#17 ·
#20 ·
Xenia sure looks very confident. It looks like the new hero is coming.
However, it's interesting that he's claiming that it could be done on existing hardware.
Did he?

[...]

With all of the above analysis I think I can say that it's not only possible to emulate a Xenon, but it'll likely be sufficiently fast to run well.

To answer the first question above: by the time a Xenon emulation is up to 95% compatibility the target host processors will be plenty fast; in a few years it'll almost seem funny that it was ever questioned.

[...]
Personally I think his conclussions about GL vs D3D are a bit strange after saying the above though. - I'm pretty sure that the hardware manufactures can be convinced to create GL extensions to do the necessary things in shaders (if no such extension exists by now, or by the time the emulation is reaching a point where workarounds no longer work for emulating these).


I have a lot of respect for noxa, pspplayer was great and I had him on my watchlist since then. Best luck to him with this new project.
 
#22 ·
the first feasibility question isnt that, the first is emulation is currently possible then to see if a pc is powerful enough and even then it isnt the second question as a real feasibility report will go into complete detail on how the emulator should be done, meaning the process behind it, a detailed timeline and such before answering such a question as you can never know 100% and unless you do what I said then and only then it is feasible to make an educated from real proof to guess to see if pc are powerful enough...

also i think so is never an answer ever for a feasibility question, feasibility report must contain answers in complete detail that refer to actual documentation, i guess you never know since it looks like you have never written a feasibility report...

also who cares pc isnt powerful enough, usually emulator devs dosent even consider that before coding an emulator project hence why there are emulators of systems that are too powerful for pcs, they just do it to see if it can be done....

lastly when writing a feasibility of xbox360 emu, the gaol is to see if it can be done and having to consider a pc is powerful enough to run it shouldnt be factor in it nor be a part of it any shape or form as in such a report it will see if current pc processors, video cards and directx 11 is able to emulate the games, not performance wise but whether it can run it 100%, like render everything, is it possible to do software side of things since the games are optimised for the multicore cpu used by xbox360 therefore such a question isnt needed as it has no factor in just seeing if an emulator is currently possible
 
#25 ·
He has written code.
- He mentioned a closed github repo a few times and even gave specific file names.

noxa is a great coder and he also knows the value of documentation.
He takes his time, but once the repo goes public the code quality will be well above average (- and unfortunaly that is not too common in the game-emulation scene).
 
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