X-Box Emulated (Not)

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.

This is an amazing feat

[InterruptDescriptorT]

Considering what is known in the XBox reverse engineering world right now, I am absolutely shocked (and pleasantly so) that someone has come up with an emulator so quickly. First of all, XBoxHacker [xboxhacker.net] reports that the BIOS has four copies of itself and a whole host of protections to make sure that hackers don't try to overwrite it with their own code. Secondly, the BIOS boot code is hidden somewhere and isn't actually in the BIOS that the processor chip sees when it starts up at FFFF:FFF0; the community surmises it's in a hidden ROM somewhere, which is making reverse engineering a much more difficult task.

I would love to know how these guys did it--and I'm not going to rule out that someone provided them with the XDK or a whole host of internal docs to accomplish this.

At any rate, massive, massive props. I'll bet Microsoft has visited that site a few times in the last couple days. ;-)

I think emulator is the wrong word....

[chronos2266]

It's more of a wrapper. Think about it, what is it emulating? The XBox uses an x86 cpu, direct3d, and a standard HD. No actual hardware is being emulated, instead they are just wrapping function calls to conventional PC calls. Either way I can't wait to play DOA3 on my CPU :)

Re:But this way Microsoft doesn't lose money...

[Anonymous Coward]

You're wrong. They lose money on the console and make it on the games. Secretly they'd like it if you bought the games and not the console.

P.S. - Hey Taco, how is it OK to support Sony and not MS in the console wars? Is Sony the underdog?

Re:Bad for the economy

[guttentag]

...the author of this emulator, who has probably already taken a BIG chunk out of the sales for the X-Box.

I doubt that. SNES emulation is rampant because the the ROM files are only 250K-3,000K each. They can be stored in huge, free repositories and they don't take very long to download.

Anyone know how big an X-Box ROM file would have to be? Let's say they fill a DVD... that's about 6GB of data. Not many people have the bandwidth, time and hard drive space to download these files. The size also makes it much more expensive for someone to distribute the files... you can't just stick a 6GB file on an anonymous Geocities account.

Will X-Box emulation be rampant in 5 or 10 years when hard disks are bigger and bandwidth is fatter? Probably. But by then Microsoft will have introduced the HomeStation, and you'll be downloading your games from them via encrypted streams.

How they did it

[Anonymous Coward]

Although the site is sparse on technical details, it's not hard to guess how they did it.

Since the Xbox games use a Win32/DirectX API, they probably just threw away the Xbox-specific stuff and linked the binaries against the standard Windows DLLs.

I really doubt these guys even looked at the Xbox BIOS.

Hoax?

[icemind]

Must be. a) The XBox DVD drive spins backwards to read the data b) It lists Soul Calibre 2 as a working game. Soul Calibre 2 isn't even out yet, not even in the arcades. Oh, and c) They stole the screenshots from IGN, for example:

http://mediaviewer.ign.com/mediaPage.jsp?media_i d= 171619&object_id=16612&media_type=R&ign_section=27 &page_title=The+Simpsons+Road+Rage+review+on+xbox. ign.com&adtag=network%3Dign%26site%3Dxboxviewer%26 adchannel%3Dxbox%26pagetype%3Darticle&return_url=h ttp%3A%2F%2Fxbox.ign.com%2Freviews%2F16612.html

Damn that long link. ;) But anway, I'm 99% sure this is fake.

- icemind

Re:It's Fake

[beee]

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? Someone like, perhaps, your fellow editors who posted the story?

Re:Hmmm...

[theancient1]

If Microsoft is smart, they'll ignore this. Why? Well, they're losing around $150 USD per console, and they make the money from the games.

I'd wonder if it's that simple. There may be other indirect relationships at work. For example, might it be possible that ownership of the X-Box drives game sales? If you've got an X-Box in your living room, you might be more likely to purchase games for it. Or, you might be less likely to buy a competitor's product and start spending half of your gaming budget on its games. Relationships like this are almost impossible to predict, but they have to be considered.

Eventually, they'll also want to start selling online services -- the more people who own an X-Box, the more potential subscribers they'll have. And there's also the bragging rights that go along with having the best-selling console.

In addition, they have to be concerned about the long-term effects -- some number of months from now, they'll be breaking even on the X-Box sales, at which point they won't want to have an emulator around. It's only in the beginning that they lose money. Similarly, while DVD burners aren't an issue now, they may become a problem by the end of the product's life cycle.

Re:This is an amazing feat

[Anonymous Coward]

Score: 3 ?????

It's a fake, you moron.

Slashdot Editors forgot about their comments

[Calle Ballz]

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?

Read the comments on your own website! Plenty of people have tried it, it is a simple application designed to give a video error message (Unable to initialize display, or something)... to make people think it's just their box. Read the comments above me, and giving a few more minutes, below me as well... A majority of them are people's personal experiences.

You people just don't get it.

[talks_to_birds]

• "Does HeUnique even read the messages on his own site? Folks here figured out pretty quickly that it's obviously a fake, and he posts an update to the story asking someone to try it."

Ninety percent of the articles put up as "news" on /. are just to generate post volume.

The vast majority of the "news" that gets posted is really "olds", and the rest is just bait.

Take it from someone who's been on here a *long* time...

t_t_b

Re:FAKE !! FAKE !! FAKE !!

[nomadic]

This should have raised a lot of red flags...I mean, 2 months after the xbox is released would they really have something? Look how long it took to get Wine to even work partially...

Re:FAKE !! FAKE !! FAKE !!

[Grahf666]

Does the Gameboy Advance have a more powerful graphics card than most computers? No.

There was a Macintosh PS2 emu hoax going around a few months ago. Just a hoax, of course.

The really obvious thing that raises bells in my head is how much CPU/graphics power would be needed to emulate any next gen system. You need an okay system (PII, Voodoo 2) to emulate an N64/PSX with decent frames. There aren't aren't any Dreamcast emulators that can even run full games, and that thing's been out for years. Barring some new emulation technology that has been discovered, it is absolutely preposterous to think that this would NOT be a hoax.

A good analogy would be this: the PSX has a 33 mhz processor in it. Somehow, I really doubt that old 386, one of similar power to the ancient PSX, lying in the basement would be a good platform to run PSX roms on. The Xbox is of equivalent power to modern PC's. Traditionally, one must have far greater power than the original console to emulate its games with decent speed.

The pictures of the games they show are most likely screengrabs from a real Xbox. Where they taken from the emulator (assuming it is real at all, which it isn't) I would expect to see extreme visual artifacts, probably no textures, and maybe a fps counter reading ".1 fps."

Re:FAKE !! FAKE !! FAKE !!

[atam]

A good analogy would be this: the PSX has a 33 mhz processor in it. Somehow, I really doubt that old 386, one of similar power to the ancient PSX, lying in the basement would be a good platform to run PSX roms on. The Xbox is of equivalent power to modern PC's. Traditionally, one must have far greater power than the original console to emulate its games with decent speed.

This is general true for emulating a console game machine based on a different processor than your native machine. So to emulate a PSX you have to emulate a MIPS R4400 processor on your x86 PC. And it could be very slow. However in the case of XBOX, it uses X86 processor just like a PC. So there is a potential huge saving for not needng to emulating the foreign CPU. In addition, it is likely that the XBOX uses a bastarded version Windows/DirectX (MS is preaching Windows Everywhere (TM), don't they?). So once the difference could be configured out, it is possible to write a layer to map the XBOX calls directly to the PC Windows/DirectX environment.

I am not saying that it could be easy. But there is a hugh pool of knowledgable people who are very proficient in low level details of Windows API. So I am pretty sure that eventually we would have an XBOX emulator that runs at decent, maybe even native speed.

Re:Wrong, wrong...

[WzDD]

Actually that is exactly what Plex86 and VMware do. Bochs and the x86 core in MAME are different because the program is designed to run on non-x86 architectures.

You are correct that you cannot completely virtualise an x86 PC. However, most instructions can be virtualised. The ones that can't require special handling - so one of the things that makes VMware complicated (and slower than you'd otherwise expect) is that it has to pre-parse code and insert handlers for those particular instructions.

The plex86 page has a lot of useful information on this.