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Yeah, old news. Still sad though.

- Alan

What's the word on Virtual Game Station, the Connectix PSX emulator for the PC? What about DC or X-Box emulators? I am primarily a PC guy, but now and then there are nice console games I'd like to try out.

They sold out to Sony. Virtual Game Station was bought and killed.

DC and Xbox emulation is likely a long way off. Though I think it's possible someone will figure out how to make Xbox discs work on a PC provided you have the right hardware in your PC to begin with.

--Dave

I was talking about this to a friend, and have read a few posts on slashdot on xbox emulation.

On the whole, i think it's going to be a long while, at least for the demanding games. It's not going to be easy to simulate the huge bandwidth, the unified memory and the custom graphics gpu on one of today's (even high end) pcs.

Maybe in about 5 years. /me shakes head.. but not until then.

Maybe some hackers will figure out how to turn the X-Box into cheap Windows XP workstation before then.

An Xbox emulator will be an easy hack. Xbox gaes run from x86 executables using Windows/Direct X api calls. A modern PC (Pentium 4/Athlon + GeForce 3/Radeon 8500) already has more combined video/system memory bandwidth than the Xbox has UMA bandwidth. Between a 64 MB videocard and 256 MB DDR/Rambus you aren't going to be running out of memory. A 1.2+ Ghz K7 or a 1.5+ GHz P4 has more than enough juice over a 733 Mhz celeron to run whatever interpeter you've got going. The hard part is memory management (making sure textures get from system RAM to VRAM when they're needed) and getting Win 2000/XP to give you the kind of access to the hardware you'll need. But I think an Xbox emulator would be more like writing a Glide-> D3D wrapper than a PSX/or whatever emulator. There's no need to convert Mips Risc calls to x86 in realtime.

Brad Grenz

I truly don't understand why it would be so hard to make an emulator for X-box games. Hell, a GF3 has a dedicated 64MB of RAM for just video, whereas the X-box has to share that memory for video, sound, AI, and the OS itself. I understand the the video chip in the X-box is better than the stand GF3, but how much better could it really be?

Somebody build an emulator quick, I need to play DOA3 and a decent football game on my PC.

It won't be hard. Interpreting bytecode for another processer is what slows most emulators down so much, and that won't be an issue here.

Are any of you guys developers?

Emulating the Xbox will not be an easy trick.

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Are any of you guys developers?

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Maybe not, but they sound like they know what they're talking about, so I'll believe them...

At least, until someone shows up who sounds more believeable and says otherwise...

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I thought breaking DVD encryption wasn't a weekend hack.

I also thought md5 wasn't a weekend hack.

Hmm.

I'd say that a fully-functional Xbox emulator will take awhile, but I wouldn't say it's too far off. After-all, even tho this is specialized equipment (some), you're basically working with a PC.

It's not like you're trying to hack a Sega-CD or anything, which has A) No documentation PERIOD, and B) Specialized equipment, and C) Dual processors, and D) NO DOCUMENTATION.

ANY documentation is better than NO documentation. Specialized or not, everything has a core, and since it was built from the core, then you can bet that some of the original documentation applies.

And I'd be willing to bet that somewhere, in Microsoft and Nvidia's infinite wisdom, they have the complete documentation/schematics/charts for the Xbox. It's just a matter of time before someone gets them.

The Xbox will be hacked. It's just a matter of time.

I tend to agree. I'm sure that, like you said, MS and Nvidia know exactly what it would take to make any Xbox game run on a nice, fast PC, and I'm sure that information will be obtained and shared in a matter of months. (Maybe not two or three of them, but six or eight, probably.)

It's not just a matter of documentation, you have to emulate a truckload of bandwidth that pcs *just do not have*. the cpu is easy, the nvidia chip harder (to start with, there is no documention available for the internals for *any* of the nvidia gpu's, and this gpu will not be released for pcs ever).

md5 (crypto, right?) is a brute force hack, and dvd was because someone made a mistake and left their private key hanging in the open, and the keys have way too short a keylength anyway.

decss is code that can fit on less than a page - that is not that hard. it's not even emulation, rather breaking encryption.

And it doesn't hurt that the specialized stuff in the Xbox is closely related to PC parts for which there is lots of information. It's an nForce based system where the GF2 MX graphics core has been replaced with a bumped up GF3 (with a 2nd vertex unit) and working with an Intel CPU instead of an AMD one. This isn't exotic stuff. I doubt people are writing assembly code for all these chips. Like I said, on an nForce based PC with a NV25 GPU (the latest part from nVidia due Q1 2002) and you've pretty much got all the hardware an Xbox has. Hell, the hard drive and DVD-ROM use a standard IDE interface and the controllers are USB. The hardest part is convincing the software it's running on an actual Xbox. If the Xbox OS is on the hard disk as a lot of people suspect it's going to be even that much easier to get the image (emulators usually need a bios image). I actually think Xbox emulators will probably end up being software you boot into off a CD or Zip disk or even off a hard drive.

Brad Grenz

"It's not just a matter of documentation, you have to emulate a truckload of bandwidth that pcs *just do not have*. the cpu is easy, the nvidia chip harder (to start with, there is no documention available for the internals for *any* of the nvidia gpu's, and this gpu will not be released for pcs ever)."

I think it would depend on what kind of PC you're talking about. Surely, no, a low-end or even middle-end PC wouldn't have the bandwidth.

However, a P4 with RDRAM or one of the new high-end SDRAM modules (512mb plus? or more) would give you all the ram you need.

A high-end P4, 1.7 or the likes, would certainly be enough from the cpu. Of course, maybe someone should kick Intel's ass so they finally wake up and realize their cache's have always been too small.

Get a Geforce 3 on your AGP slot and you've got the memory there.

Just about the only pipelines that would slow you down that I can think of are A) PCI bus, and B) the cpu cache.


"md5 (crypto, right?) is a brute force hack, and dvd was because someone made a mistake and left their private key hanging in the open, and the keys have way too short a keylength anyway.

decss is code that can fit on less than a page - that is not that hard. it's not even emulation, rather breaking encryption."

the only point i'm bringing by bringing up md5, dvd, the likes, is that i can be done.

a small mistake, a little bit of encryption, short keys, or hell, short code, and it can be done.

md5, like you said, is a brute force hack. and i would go about saying that unless A) have a deathwish, B) want to get caught, or C) CAN crack it because you're just that good.

like i said earlier, i don't think we're talking 5 years, maybe a year at most, i would hope sooner than that. =) but i'd dare to say we're not going to see any run-of-the-mill programmers make this thing.

Like you said, lack of documentation, a bit harder to crack the things cos they are specialized, etc. But on the other hand, it is basically a fat, rectangular PC that sits on it's side and has a green X on it's face.

I'd just say it's one of those things where half of us here are half right, the other half half right. And I'm sure none of us will nail hacking the Xbox right on the nose.

I'm just in waiting and ready to hand out the cigars to whoever does it. ;)

I only know two things:

1.) Somewhere, somebody is smart enough to emulate the Xbox on PC -- they're probably already doing it.

2.) That "somebody smart enough" isn't me.