Warez'ing aside.. why isn't there an x-box emulator?

[LordJezo]

Think about it..

X-Box runs a Windows based OS, uses a normal IDE hard drive, uses an standard motherboard with ram and cpu, and a standard video card, uses DVDs.. the thing is a computer in small box with a green logo on it.

If they can emulate arcade games built on all sorts of different platforms, why hasnt someone been able to get an x-box running on Windows?

 

[ElFenix]

the OS has so little overhead on the xbox and you can code to the metal really easily, so going through windows then dx then emulator might eat too much resources

 

[MercenaryForHire]

Originally posted by: ElFenix
the OS has so little overhead on the xbox and you can code to the metal really easily, so going through windows then dx then emulator might eat too much resources

*applause*

- M4H

 

[LordJezo]

Originally posted by: ElFenix
the OS has so little overhead on the xbox and you can code to the metal really easily, so going through windows then dx then emulator might eat too much resources

So how about..

Why hasnt anyone been able to boot the x-box os on a standard x86 based machine?

Make it like a dual boot system.. Windows XP as one choice, Linux for another, X-Box for a third..


They they could code to the metal on the box.. and since its the same stuff that is in an x-box it should work the same.. no?

 

[bleeb]

The reason why no one has created an emulator is because there isn't a great selection of games to play ANYWAYS...

 

[BornStar]

I've always wondered if game creaters bothered to put throttling in their code. Since all of the games are only supposed to run on the xbox, it's possible running the game on a faster processor would make the gameplay speed up.

 

[DevilsAdvocate]

Originally posted by: bleeb
The reason why no one has created an emulator is because there isn't a great selection of games to play ANYWAYS...

Seems to me that someone would do it for the sake of doing it.

 

[MercenaryForHire]

Originally posted by: LordJezo

Originally posted by: ElFenix
the OS has so little overhead on the xbox and you can code to the metal really easily, so going through windows then dx then emulator might eat too much resources

So how about..

Why hasnt anyone been able to boot the x-box os on a standard x86 based machine?

Make it like a dual boot system.. Windows XP as one choice, Linux for another, X-Box for a third..


They they could code to the metal on the box.. and since its the same stuff that is in an x-box it should work the same.. no?

No.

It is not the same stuff.

- M4H

 

[RagingBITCH]

Originally posted by: BornStar18
I've always wondered if game creaters bothered to put throttling in their code. Since all of the games are only supposed to run on the xbox, it's possible running the game on a faster processor would make the gameplay speed up.

No AFAIK - the souped up 1.4ghz XBox's don't.

 

[BillGates]

Originally posted by: RagingBITCH

Originally posted by: BornStar18
I've always wondered if game creaters bothered to put throttling in their code. Since all of the games are only supposed to run on the xbox, it's possible running the game on a faster processor would make the gameplay speed up.

No AFAIK - the souped up 1.4ghz XBox's don't.

That's correct - the OEM XBox games are written with the "stock" clock rates and RAM capacity in mind. The XBox units with faster CPUs or more RAM generally see the most benefits when running emulators and Linux.

There is a company that adds 1.4GHz CPUs and more RAM. They reported having better load times for OEM games - I'll see if I can find it.

 

[BillGates]

Originally posted by: BillGates

Originally posted by: RagingBITCH

Originally posted by: BornStar18
I've always wondered if game creaters bothered to put throttling in their code. Since all of the games are only supposed to run on the xbox, it's possible running the game on a faster processor would make the gameplay speed up.

No AFAIK - the souped up 1.4ghz XBox's don't.

That's correct - the OEM XBox games are written with the "stock" clock rates and RAM capacity in mind. The XBox units with faster CPUs or more RAM generally see the most benefits when running emulators and Linux.

There is a company that adds 1.4GHz CPUs and more RAM. They reported having better load times for OEM games - I'll see if I can find it.

XBox-Scene.com review

 

[PricklyPete]

Originally posted by: RagingBITCH

Originally posted by: BornStar18
I've always wondered if game creaters bothered to put throttling in their code. Since all of the games are only supposed to run on the xbox, it's possible running the game on a faster processor would make the gameplay speed up.

No AFAIK - the souped up 1.4ghz XBox's don't.

It's not the hardware...it's the software that BornStar is talking about. I read a review of the souped up Xboxs and it looks like they had mixed results with diffferent games. Some were timed properly and some were not resulting in games that became unplayable on the new processor. The souped up Xbox had an option to half it's speed, but since this still did not result in the 733Mhz of the actual processor, there were still timing issues.

As for the topic on hand. I agree with ELFenix that you have a lot more layers to deal with with the PC to run an emulator. As for the Xbox OS booting up on a regular PC...very unlikely. The motherboard, graphics "card", etc. are not off the shelf items (although they are very close to the nForce MB and Geforce4 cards. I'm sure the Xbox OS is fined tuned for that hardware and only contains drivers for that exact hardware. You would have to hope that starndard Win32 drivers for your hardware would work with the Xbox OS. I would imagine that MS would put some things in there to make the process as difficult as possible.

 

[Thraxen]

There is.... but AFAIK it only runs Halo.

 

[RagingBITCH]

Originally posted by: PricklyPete

Originally posted by: RagingBITCH

Originally posted by: BornStar18
I've always wondered if game creaters bothered to put throttling in their code. Since all of the games are only supposed to run on the xbox, it's possible running the game on a faster processor would make the gameplay speed up.

No AFAIK - the souped up 1.4ghz XBox's don't.

It's not the hardware...it's the software that BornStar is talking about. I read a review of the souped up Xboxs and it looks like they had mixed results with diffferent games. Some were timed properly and some were not resulting in games that became unplayable on the new processor. The souped up Xbox had an option to half it's speed, but since this still did not result in the 733Mhz of the actual processor, there were still timing issues.

As for the topic on hand. I agree with ELFenix that you have a lot more layers to deal with with the PC to run an emulator. As for the Xbox OS booting up on a regular PC...very unlikely. The motherboard, graphics "card", etc. are not off the shelf items (although they are very close to the nForce MB and Geforce4 cards. I'm sure the Xbox OS is fined tuned for that hardware and only contains drivers for that exact hardware. You would have to hope that starndard Win32 drivers for your hardware would work with the Xbox OS. I would imagine that MS would put some things in there to make the process as difficult as possible.

He was talking about tweaking the software to compensate for having faster hardware. I hadn't heard of the timing results like you're talking about but I guess I'll have to read up on that.

 

[PricklyPete]

Originally posted by: RagingBITCH

Originally posted by: PricklyPete

Originally posted by: RagingBITCH

Originally posted by: BornStar18
I've always wondered if game creaters bothered to put throttling in their code. Since all of the games are only supposed to run on the xbox, it's possible running the game on a faster processor would make the gameplay speed up.

No AFAIK - the souped up 1.4ghz XBox's don't.

It's not the hardware...it's the software that BornStar is talking about. I read a review of the souped up Xboxs and it looks like they had mixed results with diffferent games. Some were timed properly and some were not resulting in games that became unplayable on the new processor. The souped up Xbox had an option to half it's speed, but since this still did not result in the 733Mhz of the actual processor, there were still timing issues.

As for the topic on hand. I agree with ELFenix that you have a lot more layers to deal with with the PC to run an emulator. As for the Xbox OS booting up on a regular PC...very unlikely. The motherboard, graphics "card", etc. are not off the shelf items (although they are very close to the nForce MB and Geforce4 cards. I'm sure the Xbox OS is fined tuned for that hardware and only contains drivers for that exact hardware. You would have to hope that starndard Win32 drivers for your hardware would work with the Xbox OS. I would imagine that MS would put some things in there to make the process as difficult as possible.

He was talking about tweaking the software to compensate for having faster hardware. I hadn't heard of the timing results like you're talking about but I guess I'll have to read up on that.

I think we both mean the same thing. Games that are written with a timer that is directly related to the system clock will only work on a machien with that same clock. It is normal practice with PC games to write more sophisticated timers that do not relate directly to the CPU clock, but in the console industry it is normal practice to forgo this and just use the system clock since the game will alwasy be played on that console. Xbox games are kind of unique in that they are pretty much PC games optimized for the system. Because of this a lot of the developers have put the necessary code to properly handle PC timing issues since many of the games end up on the PC anyway.

 

[Skyclad1uhm1]

Someone should write a HOWTO on Google, apparently the interface is still far too hard to comprehend for people here.

 

[BornStar]

Originally posted by: PricklyPete

Originally posted by: RagingBITCH

Originally posted by: PricklyPete

Originally posted by: RagingBITCH

Originally posted by: BornStar18
I've always wondered if game creaters bothered to put throttling in their code. Since all of the games are only supposed to run on the xbox, it's possible running the game on a faster processor would make the gameplay speed up.

No AFAIK - the souped up 1.4ghz XBox's don't.

It's not the hardware...it's the software that BornStar is talking about. I read a review of the souped up Xboxs and it looks like they had mixed results with diffferent games. Some were timed properly and some were not resulting in games that became unplayable on the new processor. The souped up Xbox had an option to half it's speed, but since this still did not result in the 733Mhz of the actual processor, there were still timing issues.

As for the topic on hand. I agree with ELFenix that you have a lot more layers to deal with with the PC to run an emulator. As for the Xbox OS booting up on a regular PC...very unlikely. The motherboard, graphics "card", etc. are not off the shelf items (although they are very close to the nForce MB and Geforce4 cards. I'm sure the Xbox OS is fined tuned for that hardware and only contains drivers for that exact hardware. You would have to hope that starndard Win32 drivers for your hardware would work with the Xbox OS. I would imagine that MS would put some things in there to make the process as difficult as possible.

He was talking about tweaking the software to compensate for having faster hardware. I hadn't heard of the timing results like you're talking about but I guess I'll have to read up on that.

I think we both mean the same thing. Games that are written with a timer that is directly related to the system clock will only work on a machien with that same clock. It is normal practice with PC games to write more sophisticated timers that do not relate directly to the CPU clock, but in the console industry it is normal practice to forgo this and just use the system clock since the game will alwasy be played on that console. Xbox games are kind of unique in that they are pretty much PC games optimized for the system. Because of this a lot of the developers have put the necessary code to properly handle PC timing issues since many of the games end up on the PC anyway.

My comment was related to the fact that I've played some DOS games that didn't take clock speed into account on my newer systems. The old code was written for extremely slow processors so the speed of the system was what determined the speed of the gameplay. If you played it on a 486, the gameplay would be fine but if you played on a A64, you would hit the wall before you knew the game even started. I suppose it's possible that game creaters just went ahead and placed the clock throttling code in there (especially if they wanted the games to run on xbox2) but it's possible that some didn't as well and those games would most likely be unplayable.

 

[PricklyPete]

Originally posted by: BornStar18

Originally posted by: PricklyPete

Originally posted by: RagingBITCH

Originally posted by: PricklyPete

Originally posted by: RagingBITCH

Originally posted by: BornStar18
I've always wondered if game creaters bothered to put throttling in their code. Since all of the games are only supposed to run on the xbox, it's possible running the game on a faster processor would make the gameplay speed up.

No AFAIK - the souped up 1.4ghz XBox's don't.

It's not the hardware...it's the software that BornStar is talking about. I read a review of the souped up Xboxs and it looks like they had mixed results with diffferent games. Some were timed properly and some were not resulting in games that became unplayable on the new processor. The souped up Xbox had an option to half it's speed, but since this still did not result in the 733Mhz of the actual processor, there were still timing issues.

As for the topic on hand. I agree with ELFenix that you have a lot more layers to deal with with the PC to run an emulator. As for the Xbox OS booting up on a regular PC...very unlikely. The motherboard, graphics "card", etc. are not off the shelf items (although they are very close to the nForce MB and Geforce4 cards. I'm sure the Xbox OS is fined tuned for that hardware and only contains drivers for that exact hardware. You would have to hope that starndard Win32 drivers for your hardware would work with the Xbox OS. I would imagine that MS would put some things in there to make the process as difficult as possible.

He was talking about tweaking the software to compensate for having faster hardware. I hadn't heard of the timing results like you're talking about but I guess I'll have to read up on that.

I think we both mean the same thing. Games that are written with a timer that is directly related to the system clock will only work on a machien with that same clock. It is normal practice with PC games to write more sophisticated timers that do not relate directly to the CPU clock, but in the console industry it is normal practice to forgo this and just use the system clock since the game will alwasy be played on that console. Xbox games are kind of unique in that they are pretty much PC games optimized for the system. Because of this a lot of the developers have put the necessary code to properly handle PC timing issues since many of the games end up on the PC anyway.

My comment was related to the fact that I've played some DOS games that didn't take clock speed into account on my newer systems. The old code was written for extremely slow processors so the speed of the system was what determined the speed of the gameplay. If you played it on a 486, the gameplay would be fine but if you played on a A64, you would hit the wall before you knew the game even started. I suppose it's possible that game creaters just went ahead and placed the clock throttling code in there (especially if they wanted the games to run on xbox2) but it's possible that some didn't as well and those games would most likely be unplayable.

Yeah, we're talking about the same thing here. Older DOS games had their timers based on the CPU's clock and the same problem happened. There are some Xbox games that seem to have independent timers and some that do not from what I read in the review of the overclocked Xbox. So some games run as they should and some run too fast.