Cxbx (Xbox1 Emulator) Update Options

[Xbox-Scene]

Cxbx (Xbox1 Emulator) Update Posted by XanTium | December 4 19:32 EST | News Category: Xbox

From Caustik's CXBX Blog: [QUOTE] shogun made some great progress on his Cxbx(info) branch. The game "Smashing Drive" goes in-game. He informs me the game can't be considered playable at this point, but it's stunning progress nonetheless. Read more and discuss on the ngemu forums here. [/QUOTE] Official Site: http://www.caustik.com/cxbx/

[disrockerdude]

woo! its still alive!

[xboxjason]

Sweet. Keep up the good work!

[Bandit5317]

Wow, I thought this project became vaporware. It's good to see that progress is still being made on it.

[pholly]

What's the point, you can just mod a real xbox and play all the games perfectly. This will never play every game and will probably never play any game perfectly. Total waste of time.

[yaazz]

Well actually, there is a pretty good chance that this emulator WILL support all games eventually.
There is another xbox 1 emulator that plays Halo 1 with a decently small amount of processing power. (I think you needed a 2ghz processor and a Geforce 4 video card...)
Since the Xbox had a 733mhz processor, this isnt a big jump at all!

Compare this to the SNES which needed a computer tens of times more powerful. 3 mhz in the SNES needed around 300 mhz to produce quality emulation.

[lazzeri]

Wich one will be released first? A working Xbox emulator... Or PS3 home? :-D

[proger]

What's the point, you can just mod a real xbox and play all the games perfectly. This will never play every game and will probably never play any game perfectly. Total waste of time.

You don't understand the point of emulation, do you?


Oh, and there was another man recently that got Futurama running, and I don't think it was mentioned here.
http://surr.no/cxbx-ds/

This post has been edited by proger: Dec 5 2008, 06:34 PM

[pholly]

You don't understand the point of emulation, do you?
Oh, and there was another man recently that got Futurama running, and I don't think it was mentioned here.
http://surr.no/cxbx-ds/

What's the point then since you're so smart.

[Craigsblackie]

What's the point then since you're so smart.

Debugging homebrew is easier if you dont have to run it on HW. I certainly didn't put all my gameboy advance homebrew on to a flash everytime I wanted to test it.

Also, whats the point in having nes, snes, megadrive, n64 etc emulators then if you can pick up the HW? Some people like to emulate legacy hardware.
You might not have working HW any more or not have the desire to replace broken HW to play games you own from yester-year.

[g8crapachino]

What's the point, you can just mod a real xbox and play all the games perfectly. This will never play every game and will probably never play any game perfectly. Total waste of time.

Let's see.... as of today anybody can play thousands of Arcade, SNES, NES, TG16, N64, PSX, GB, Genesis, GBA Games, etc all on their PC's or other devices. On those respective emulators a large majority of games play perfectly. It's irrelevent if not all games play perfectly, most do. The ability to play and continue to enjoy these games anywhere at anytime without owning all the hardware is the point.

For you to say XBOX emulation could never be done only makes you a very naive and completely short-sighted fool. The XBOX1 is based on a 733 Mhz pentium 3 and alot of off the self PC parts, there is nothing about it that cannot eventually be emulated on any relatively modern PC. Compared to more proprietary consoles such as the Sega Dreamcast, Gamecube, or N64 the XBOX 1 is probable easier since a majority of it's internal workings are very well documented withing the PC industry and thus require little reverse engineering.

This post has been edited by g8crapachino: Dec 5 2008, 08:53 PM

[pholly]

For you to say XBOX emulation could never be done only makes you a very naive and completely short-sighted fool. The XBOX1 is based on a 733 Mhz pentium 3 and alot of off the self PC parts, there is nothing about it that cannot eventually be emulated on any relatively modern PC. Compared to more proprietary consoles such as the Sega Dreamcast, Gamecube, or N64 the XBOX 1 is probable easier since a majority of it's internal workings are very well documented withing the PC industry and thus require little reverse engineering.

If that's the case at this rate it'll be 20 years before they get a game perfect on this, they've been working on it over 5 years and only got this far.

[_zlinky]

@pholly, Like proger said, it's pretty damn obvious you don't understand the point of emulation. It's an extra-curricular project that is done for fun (just like modding Xboxes and writing homebrew). It's not about what games you can get working to please the crowd of warez monkeys like yourself since you say you'd rather just mod an Xbox and run your illegal copies. If you've even paid attention to Cxbx at the slightest you'd notice that not everyone involved with this project works on it round the clock to get your favourite game playable. They have lives outside of the scene. If you're going to be a dick and have nothing constructive/useful to say, then don't say it at all.

The bottom line is that if you can do a better job yourself, you're welcome to try. Otherwise I suggest you sit down and shut the fuck up.

[_zlinky]

Sorry for the double post, I can't edit my last post.

Compared to more proprietary consoles such as the Sega Dreamcast, Gamecube, or N64 the XBOX 1 is probable easier since a majority of it's internal workings are very well documented withing the PC industry and thus require little reverse engineering.

No, actually the fact that Xbox is PC identical makes it much harder! Is a PC easy to emulate? Nope. It's a common assumption that Xbox is easy to emulate because it's like a PC. It's not, and I'll explain why...

1. The x86 CPU is NOT easy to emulate. Clocked at 733MHz that would require serious horsepower to emulate it at full speed (in software). Take a look at GameCube's CPU @400+MHz. You'd be lucky to get 30 fps in a GameCube emulator. Sure the x86 architecture is well documented, but if you look at the register sets for each instruction, you'll notice that it's MASSIVE compared to most CPUs. For instance, you might think there's only one MOV instruction, right? Well, actually there are about 30+ different versions of the MOV instruction. The same goes with others such as CALL, ADD, SUB, JMP, INT, and the list goes on. Another thing about it is the MMU. Any experienced emu author knows that's a bitch to emulate. The worst thing is the fact that it's an out-of-order execution CPU. So that means it's impossible to create a cycle accurate x86 CPU emulator.

2. NVIDIA GPUs are hard to emulate. They are very poorly documented and the GeForce3 is one of the most poorly documented of GPUs. Even a RIVA 128 is hard. To this day, I have yet to see anyone actually emulate an NVIDIA GPU of any kind! The register set of a GeForce GPU is much larger than that of many CPUs. Thanks to openxdkman, the NV2A is finally documented enough to be emulated, but not fully as the list of GPU registers is far from complete and fully documented.

3. NForce audio (afaik) has NEVER been documented! The NVIDIA SoundStorm APU (afaik) doesn't even have open source drivers (from both professionals and amatuers). If they do, please let me know The AC'97 is a different story, that's fully documented as well as the Motorola DSP 56xxx.

4. I'm not 100% sure if this is a problem, but since the Xbox has been known to have multiple different video encoders per version, emulation of the BIOS may have specific ties to a specific video encoder.

5. There are also other chipsets that aren't exactly PC identical. Xbox-Linux has helped document alot of things in this area, but not 100%.

I hope this clears the whole "Xbox is easy to emulate thing"

[yaazz]

Sorry for the double post, I can't edit my last post.


No, actually the fact that Xbox is PC identical makes it much harder! Is a PC easy to emulate? Nope. It's a common assumption that Xbox is easy to emulate because it's like a PC. It's not, and I'll explain why...

1. The x86 CPU is NOT easy to emulate. Clocked at 733MHz that would require serious horsepower to emulate it at full speed (in software). Take a look at GameCube's CPU @400+MHz. You'd be lucky to get 30 fps in a GameCube emulator. Sure the x86 architecture is well documented, but if you look at the register sets for each instruction, you'll notice that it's MASSIVE compared to most CPUs. For instance, you might think there's only one MOV instruction, right? Well, actually there are about 30+ different versions of the MOV instruction. The same goes with others such as CALL, ADD, SUB, JMP, INT, and the list goes on. Another thing about it is the MMU. Any experienced emu author knows that's a bitch to emulate. The worst thing is the fact that it's an out-of-order execution CPU. So that means it's impossible to create a cycle accurate x86 CPU emulator.

2. NVIDIA GPUs are hard to emulate. They are very poorly documented and the GeForce3 is one of the most poorly documented of GPUs. Even a RIVA 128 is hard. To this day, I have yet to see anyone actually emulate an NVIDIA GPU of any kind! The register set of a GeForce GPU is much larger than that of many CPUs. Thanks to openxdkman, the NV2A is finally documented enough to be emulated, but not fully as the list of GPU registers is far from complete and fully documented.

3. NForce audio (afaik) has NEVER been documented! The NVIDIA SoundStorm APU (afaik) doesn't even have open source drivers (from both professionals and amatuers). If they do, please let me know The AC'97 is a different story, that's fully documented as well as the Motorola DSP 56xxx.

4. I'm not 100% sure if this is a problem, but since the Xbox has been known to have multiple different video encoders per version, emulation of the BIOS may have specific ties to a specific video encoder.

5. There are also other chipsets that aren't exactly PC identical. Xbox-Linux has helped document alot of things in this area, but not 100%.

I hope this clears the whole "Xbox is easy to emulate thing"

I was always under the assumption that since you have to change the XBE file into an EXE file, you aren't emulating hardware in the traditional sense.
Care to shed some light on this?