Why is it not possible (I'm guess it isn't possible as not one has done it yet) to write a NES/SNES/MegaDrive emulator for the Xbox360 using XNA?

It is possible, but not practical. I’ve been working on a NES emulator using XNA as a purely academic project and it *does* work on both Windows and the 360. There are some limitations, however. The XNA Framework uses XACT for sound and doesn’t expose a raw audio device, so you can’t push PCM data to it, so sound is out, at least for me. You're not running native code either, so performance isn't exactly what you'd expect, even simple emulators need a *lot* of optimization to perform well.

So yes, it can be done. Will you see one available for download sometime soon? Probably not, but if you know your stuff you can write/port one to XNA pretty easily.

And no, I’m not releasing it. Ever.

-h

so you actually paid 99 dollars for XNA? Why?