▲ 125 points
back
64 comments
I'm not a religious person but folks that produce emulators are doing gods work.
Xbox 360 as a whole is in a half dead state nowadays. It is partially supported by Xbox One/Series X/S and if you want to get specific non supported titles to play, it is generally via rapidly aging, not very well built hardware.
I have a series E 360 I bought last year dirt cheap as a way to get to a lot of titles no emulator currently supports.
So Xbox Live is still supported but the store it is stuck in a partially preserved 2015 state, advertising Xbox One and a few upcoming titles.
You can still buy a lot of titles at reasonable prices, but you also get situations were you can download the demo - offer to upgrade to the full version but it no longer exists in the store.
There is a large amount of video streaming apps offered but are so old they cannot connect to the servers. Internet explorer is on there but the TLS certificates are all expired, so unless the site comes over pure HTTP - nothing happens.
BUT the MS Video store, still works and with recent releases! It is kind of neat to see in action and they build the service with legacy support. While only a maximum of 1080p, the image quality is pretty good for what is being offered.
I do wonder how much longer these things will limp along for but I suspect it won't be much longer.
With the poor hardware quality on both Xbox and Ps3, emulation is quickly becoming the main way that any of these titles will be playable.
I agree. Some games (GTA) are losing the original music due expires music licenses and it totally changes the character and feel of the game. Thank good for people archiving these games.
Sonic 3 (and related Sonic 3 & Knuckes) can’t come out as a re-release because Michael Jackson contributed to the soundtrack, but was uncredited.
It has been re-released in Sonic Origins although they did change the soundtrack.
Are you saying that already purchased games have code that stop playing included music tracks after a certain date?
Game versions are locked to a specific console, on a generation with some faulty hardware. The trend nowadays is to re-release games for newer generation.
The re-release is technically a different game, so it might require another music license, so it might not have the same soundtrack, it changes the feel of the game.
The old console has its time ticking.
Without emulators, that game experience won't be preserved, its simply at the whims of executives which don't really care enough about such small details for re-releases because the name of the game is usually enough to make some bucks.
No, they have publishers that release updates which just make games worse.
The 360 version of GTA San Andreas was originally a backwards-compatible download of the game as it existed on OG XBOX, but some years later it was “””updated””” to a console port of the smartphone port of the game, losing many music tracks in the process. Everyone lost their saved progress too since the new mobile version wouldn’t read the old saves.
Oh yeah, you fire up Vice City - the first track in the games should be Michael Jackson... nope, gone!
If I remember correctly it was Mr. Mister - Broken Wings used in the intro sequence?
Same goes for GTA4.
Sad that the steam version has no none of the original.
I think crazy taxi might be the same
I heard once that Xbox one supports 360 games by using emulation. Is this true?
Former Microsoft employee here who occasionally had reason to work with the emulation team. It’s truly a thing of wonder and I hope they do a public talk on it someday. There are so many crazy tricks they’ve done that deserve recognition.
Yes.
Number of games that are backward compatible out of the total released [0]:
Xbox : 63/996 (6.32%)
Xbox 360: 633/2154 (29.38%)
As you can see the numbers are very disappointing.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_backward-compatible_...
Yep, it's an emulator codenamed fission:
the real question i wonder is how do they even know what to write in code for building an emulator? are they ex employees that know the internals of xbox. how can you build an emulator for something you dont have access to (i assume all the software is proprietary)
Homebrew is important so you can slowly build up a battery of tests and compare to real hardware. In fact that's arguably more important than any insider knowledge because insiders have a remarkably incorrect view of the systems they build compared to people who spend years looking at it as a hobby. Insiders are ultimately very driven by the deadlines and pressures of shipping commercial systems and their knowledge only has to be good enough against all the other competing concerns.
I will preface this with - I have never done it.
It looks like a decade long game of trail and error.
I suppose you start at the basics, getting an interpreter purely for CPU code. So PPC to x86 code. Then onto more complex stuff like floating point VMX to x87. Once you have basic code processing, every time a line of code comes up that cannot be interpreted, you figure out what it does and then build the appropriate interpreter. Do this again and again and you would gain some basic function.
Basically just try running game code and keep plodding away like this until it works. Like giant bug hunt for 100,000 bugs. Very Tedious but necessary work. As for optimizing for performance, that is just black magic.
Judging from what i see people do on a couple of OG Xbox Discord rooms, i'd guess the biggest contributor would be reverse engineering the existing software (games, etc) using tools like Ghidra (and whatever was common for reverse engineering before it). After that you build a bunch of tests that you can try to run on the original hardware and compare with the emulator (e.g. this[0] repository contains a bunch of tests written against the open source nxdk SDK for the original Xbox - note that the effort goes back to very early 2000s and it is only in recent years that you could call it usable for more than basic things[1] - and the author often contributes tests to specific issues with the Xemu emulator[2] comparing it with the real Xbox).
[0] https://github.com/abaire/nxdk_pgraph_tests
[1] though nxdk/freexdk/openxdk had to "compete" with the leaked XDK that a lot of homebrewers used so there was much less incentive to contribute to the open source one
Moving parts (other than RRoD) are the major reason for failure. HDs are among the worst offenders. The PS3 has a full SATA compatible drive slot and easy data transfer instructions. Designed to be owner accessible. Mine has a SSD now. Not so much on the 360 part, and my Jasper’s (hw rev) hard drive is not sounding great. There are utils for emulating the insane drive ID and custom boot block but why am I required to jump through such hoops.
Oh yeah, when I picked up my 360 and Ps3 recently, just judging by the time frames of the models and how little save games were on it - they didn't have a hard life.
My Ps3 only had save games for a WWE game and GTA 5 from 8 years ago. I figured if I could get 2 years out of these things that would be more than I could ask for. Storing these so the HDD's are stacked sideways can also help prevent head crashes. But that plan looks more like urban legend hyper mileing than anything that will make these last. Maybe it will buy a few months but then it puts more stain of the DVD/Bluray drives.
An SSD for the Ps3 will be the next step. The 360 because it is the E model actually has a reasonable solution. It has a 4GB internal storage that takes over if the HDD is removed. Then you can just store games on an external USB drive. It isn't amazing but it would work. I just worry about these things over heating because even the series E's would red ring with enough time.
While I agree, I also am happy to hear this. For example, the Xbox 360 was released in November, 2005.
For it to still be somewhat functional, 18 years later - is a testament that Microsoft somewhat cares(cared.)
Nintendo side, wiiu, 3ds, etc are all dead for their e-store, but the hardware is solid. Homebrew is alive, sure but offically, no. And they all have similar release dates.
Then there is the problem that the emulated games can't connect to their servers or verify their DRM so they run in demo mode. Every Extra Extend Extreme is one example, frustrating as I own this one.
What's the best bet for getting an X360 emulator that works with little hassle on Linux? I've not had the best of luck in this space.
I bought MX vs ATC Alive game was 40 Euro and you had to buy DLC to get extras. It was trst back then. But right not, I have half of the game...
My company pays an obscene amount of money for Charon VAX on Windows.
I have my own VMS install on SimH, which is free.
Well, there is a difference between a commercial product and a free product. I have a page on my website: https://stanq.com/open-source where I cover the differences.
Take a look and let me know if there's something missing...
Xenia is really great! Fwiw - this[0] is the more popular fork - stable, greater compatibility with games etc
If anyone has gotten the leaked XBLA version of Goldeneye 64 to run on Xenia on Ubuntu please share what you did to get it to work! I want to play it so bad and nothing I tried has worked. I asked on Reddit and they deleted the post for asking about a leaked game.
I have run it on Windows without requiring any special configuration/workarounds etc. Part of the issue may be your hardware specs - for example, I could never get it to run on an AMD GPU, but it ran fine on Nvidia GPUs for me. This may no longer be the case, but was the case for me around the time the leak came out.
It works fine for me using Wine on EndeavorOS. All I had to do was edit xenia.config.toml, specifically replace "any" with "vulkan" for the gpu option. It also works natively but I haven't tried a native build yet.
ooh okay great thank you! I will check that out.
It just works for me on the Steam Deck too
Xenia is certainly an impressive piece of software. I do wish they'd implement some creature comforts, like a settings GUI and an emulation speed display.
I thought there was already an Xbox 360 emulator called Windows 7
The Xbox 360 ran on a triple-core PowerPC.
It was not an x86 architecture, and would have required an emulator to run x86 Windows 7. I also never owned one.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360
Windows NT 4 had a POWER port. This was discontinued when Windows 2000 arrived. If Microsoft wanted to release another version for POWER, they could easily do so.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT
"Windows NT 3.51 added support for the PowerPC processor in 1995, specifically PReP-compliant systems such as the IBM ThinkPad Power Series laptops and Motorola PowerStack series; but despite meetings between Michael Spindler and Bill Gates, not on the Power Macintosh as the PReP compliant Power Macintosh project failed to ship."
The best way to get information online is to say the wrong thing. Kudos for enlightening me on this topic!
Compatibility is pretty poor. No support for Forza 2-4, Gears of War 2 or 3, Lost Odyssey or Blue Dragon. And controller support is broken on Oblivion and many other titles requiring another app to fix.
Forza 3 and 4 are on windows. 1 and 2 aren’t
Original Xbox had a tool released which could convert an Xbox binary to a Windows PE file and run it. Original Xbox was x86 running at 800mhz with a windows kernel IIRC.
You are probably thinking of that.
In a bizarre plot twist, there is an actual project which tries to recompile Xbox 360 XEXes to run on x86 Windows: https://github.com/rexdex/recompiler
Minor edit. It was 733Mhz with a Celeron/Pentium III with its cache halved
Was that an official tool? I thought one of the Xbox emulators worked that way.
Windows 7 is malware, bloatware, and everything wrong with software.
Ok, but please don't fulminate or post unsubstantive comments on HN.
Windows 7 is the last usable one. You probably meant 10 and/or 11.
The thing wrong with SW is postured elitism over other software from clueless users like you who just like to spread FUD.