X-Box Emulated (Not) 432
evilpaul13 submitted linkage to news about an X-Box
Emulator. It requires a pretty high end video card and a DVD
player, and doesn't yet support joysticks, but it does emulate 3 of
the X-Box games (which is what, half the games available for the
system yet? :) Todays PS2 Addiction: Tony Hawk 3. But I still am
tempted to get an MSX-Box if only to handle my DOA addiction. UPDATE by HeUnique:Is this emulator a fake? according to these messages
in the XBox Hacker web site - this is a fake one. Could someone actually try it?
Update: 01/13 by J : The consensus in our comments is that this is a hoax, and the paranoid would do well to treat it as a trojan or virus. Sorry.
Broken site.. (Score:1, Informative)
uhoh... (Score:2, Informative)
(This mirror may only be good for a few hours! Grab it whilst you can!)
Re:Hmmm... (Score:1, Informative)
Last time I checked my local Fry's, I found a Pioneer DVD-R for around $500. Price of DVD recording has dropped drastically and continued to drop.
I'm not too familiar how MS handled how to lock their DVD-ROM games, but if it's anything like Sony's DVD-ROMs, then it only takes time to crack it.
Of course, prices of DVD-R drives will eventually go down, and the cycle will repeat itself.
One thing I wonder about the emulator. Would it be possible to somehow create a DVD image off of an XBOX game, store it on your computer, then have the emu read off of that image...
I guess it only takes time, eh?
Fake (Score:0, Informative)
- Take the "snd3d.dll" file and open it in notepad. Search for "MSN Messenger". You'll see this file came from MSN Messenger. Same goes for the "xboxkrnl32.dll".
- Take the "xbox.vxd" file and throw it into notepad. Search for "wolfenstein". You'll see that this came from RTCW.
Sheesh, I could find better journalism from a real Taco.
Re:way to go! (Score:3, Informative)
-Legion
Linux boot disc for XBox coming soon? (Score:5, Informative)
of protection scheme on both the games and the hardware so that
1) You can't play games without the proper key on
them in the XBox.
2) Games won't play without the XBox's key.
I might be wrong, or oversimplifying it, but
this is my understanding. The Games require the XBox key, and the XBox requires a Game's key.
It is apparent that these people who made this,
provided that it works (I haven't tried it yet, since I've got no XBox games), must know SOMETHING about this if my understanding is correct.
Some people on
Either that or it was cracked. Neither would
surprise me.
If this is the case, then I'm wondering if this
information could be used to make a Linux install
disc for the XBox, one that had a valid key to be
played.
Can anyone with any more knowledge of the XBox give
any insight on the possibility of this?
Unbelievable. Un-fucking-believable. (Score:5, Informative)
At the moment, no computer on this planet has enough juice to emulate the Xbox (No, not even the supercomputers which have 9,600 CPUs - because multiple CPUs don't make it any faster to emulate a single CPU), not to mention that nobody has been able to dump the contents of the HDs, the DVDs nor has anybody been able to crack the encryption of the Xbox BIOS. Additionally, the unified memory architecture makes it impossible to emulate the Xbox on a PC like a virtual machine. An interpretive or dynamic recompiling CPU core with everything else re-implemented is the only way, and that simply won't happen during the next decade because of the sheer complexity of such a project and because of getting sued to hell by Microsoft.
They've just renamed a bunch of common files to make it look neat. But no matter how much you want it to be true, it is just a poor fake.
In a related matter, no much how you want the Xbox MAME [otakunozoku.com], you will never get it. The developer cannot release his port, because software developed on the Xbox dev kit can't be released to public domain. Just stick with the good old PC versions [mame.net], which are also available for *nix / Linux [mame.net].
It's a hoax... (Score:2, Informative)
Can a PC DVD drive even read an X-Box disk?
Re:It's Fake (Score:2, Informative)
Re:It's Fake (Score:5, Informative)
"snd3d.dll" and "xboxkrnl32.dll" appear to be some sort of messaging program dll's.
The actual exe seems like it just loads BMP images when started.
Oh well, nice prank..
The contents of the files are.. (Score:5, Informative)
snd3d.dll is from MSN Messenger
xbox.vxd is a data file from Return to Castle Wolfenstein
xboxkrnl32.dll is from Trillian (another messenger program)
xbox_emulator.0.35.exe is a Visual Basic program compiled to .exe form that uses the c:\con\con trick to induce the Blue Screen of Death on unpatched Win9x systems.
Re:uhoh... (Score:4, Informative)
This appears to be one doozy of a hoax. I just snagged the file and uploaded it to Mr. Web Server - I haven't even virus-scanned it. Which, since the "xbox.vxd" file appears to come right outta Quake 3, you may want to do.
I don't know if it does ANYTHING, much less anything good or bad. I don't have a Windows box to test it on.
Exercise caution...
Re:way to go! (Score:5, Informative)
The console industry defined itself from its inception as an arena for hard-core capitalist corporations to milk maximum revenue from content providers and customers. Microsoft deserves a place in that wonderful market segment as much as any other.
If you want to exercise some philosophical consistency, remove Windows and Microsoft Office from every machine you own and/or use (no, you don't deserve to use stolen M$ software just because you disagree with their criminal business practices) and feel comfortable owning both a PS2 and an Xbox. If you want to gripe indirectly about the way a relatively free capitalist economy works, try making a difference [habitat.org] for a change.
Re:Unbelievable. Un-fucking-believable. (Score:5, Informative)
The XBox uses the IDE password mechanism to prevent you from dropping the drive into a PC and reading it, but if you connect the drive to the PC *after* the XBox has unlocked it (without resetting the drive), then you can read from it. Course your PC BIOS didn't see it at boot so you need to write custom software to talk to it.. but that's been done..
The folks at xboxhacker are very determined. It's fun to watch.
FAKE !! FAKE !! FAKE !! (Score:5, Informative)
The PC DVD drives cant even read XBOX disks. i tried it out and it has a fancy splash screen and shit but it doesnt do anything with an XBOX DVD loaded. DONT DOWNLOAD IT. it seems to modify files (possibly). i whacked up a ghosted image of win on a spare PC and ran the software. it didnt do anything with an XBOX DVD and it seemed to modify a few files (i ran sentinel on the partition before and after running it). i dont knwo if it is a trojan..i just reghosted the entire machine in case.
Re:Emu X-box (Score:5, Informative)
Wrong.
"the directX libraries are the same on the XBOX and a PC"
Wrong.
- An XBox developer
Another Emulator (Score:2, Informative)
Fake? Yup. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Unbelievable. Un-fucking-believable. (Score:5, Informative)
That is absolutely false. The XBox's CPU is just an Intel CPU, which most home computers have something similar to, so not much needs to be done to emulate that (maybe emulate a few instructions, or shift opcodes). The video is handled through DirectX and an nVidia video chip; again, most people already have something similar, and minimal translation is necessary.
People said that emulating the Nintendo 64 was impossible, but that was done, not by emulating the hardware at a low level, but through high-level emulation. Compatibility is slightly less, but it's orders faster.
The fact that the XBox hasn't been fully reverse-engineered yet is an obstacle to making an emulator, yes, and this particular "emulator" is clearly a hoax, but it is by no means impossible.
Re:As an Xbox developer... *bogus* (Score:2, Informative)
Can I have a toke, too?
GeForce 3s have one vertex pipeline for T&L and vertex shaders, the Xbox GPU has two vertex pipelines. Theoretically, that's twice the T&L power of a GeForce 3 already.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Informative)
- All Xbox games are made on dual layer (DVD-9) discs, and the OS & game are booted from the second layer. As no DVD writer (under at least $5k anyway) will write dual layer discs, coping the games is not an option (unless the firmware is modified to bypass this restriction).
- All Xbox executables are encrypted & signed using public-key encryption (don't know what strength). This would have to be broken, or the key(s) obtained before any executables could be patched or even executed.
- A filesystem driver/emulator might have to be written (it's a modified form of FAT32).
- There's still the matter of the unified memory architecture. Some games will require this, in order to directly modify textures or polygon data, or simply to get the data throughput required. At best, a regular-PC-based emulator will run such a game quite slowly; at worst it wouldn't run at all.
- There is already an Xbox hardware "emulator", made available by MS to lower-tier developers. However, this is more a set of instructions about what PC hardware to use (i.e. GF3, DX8) to make something that approximates final Xbox hardware. It will certainly not run final Xbox games.
Alternatively, an emulator could be made to work at the hardware level (intercepting register calls etc from the monolithic DX/driver dll), running all system software unmodified - which would restrict it to GeForce3/4 hardware at least, possibly on an nForce chipset (which has the same sound hardware) - or raise the CPU requirements considerably to emulate these.
Hmmm... Nope. (Score:5, Informative)
Xbox games MUST be dual layer; the Xbox boots off the second layer. You might be able to squeeze a movie onto a single layer disc (though not the extras - there wouldn't be room), but even then you'd have to decrypt it with DeCSS or similar first.
DVD-Rs are made to the DVD-General standard, which has an unwritable key data track, precisely so you can't just bit-copy CSS-scrambled content to them. DVD-Authoring discs allow this, but they're unusable by consumer DVD-Rs (and the drives are a LOT more expensive).
Bleh this fake is old.. (Score:1, Informative)
crypt.dll
732 KB (749,568 bytes)
Monday, December 04, 2000, 2:10:36 PM
MFC-Anwendung Advent
Copyright (C) 2000 http://www.gitd.de & http://www.anyMOTION.de
http://www.gitd.de
German IT Development
German (Standard)
Advent.exe
grphx.dll
56.0 KB (57,344 bytes)
Wednesday, May 05, 1999, 10:22:00 PM
NOTEPAD.EXE from Windows 98
xbox.vxd
4.18 MB (4,387,088 bytes)
Tuesday, October 24, 2000, 1:12:02 AM
Main executable for Red Alert 2
Copyright © 1999 Westwood Studios
Sun.exe
Command & Conquer : Red Alert 2