Why no xbox emulator

Why has there been on xbox (original) emulator, I was thinking about this and wasn't sure, I know there are two out there that are pretty bad, but the xbox has been out for years, and I don't see how today's computers couldn't emulate, 700mhz and 64MB of shared ram...

 

PS2 emulators (the PS2 has specs of roughly half of the xbox) are only now starting to be playable on laptop CPU's. The emulation process loses a lot of efficiency and requires a lot of overhead. Good luck though!

 

emulation is highly inefficient. console CPUs are ridiculously fast, and the CPUs in PCs aren't fast enough yet to handle the processing work along with the big overhead needed because of the emulation process.

 

I've seen downloads for xbox emulators, actually. Try googling it.

Just out of curiosity, how fast are the console cpus?

 

128bit 300mhz RISC CPU active on a PS2. (RISC = reduced instruction set something something)

Emulation is just inefficient and also PS2's dont need to run an OS like Windows. Its more dedicated to the game.

 

http://www.caustik.com/cxbx/index.htm

just buy a xbox ,there cheap nowadays,add a bigger hard drive, add XBMC to it.done.

 

Just get an Xbox 1. I got mine for $99 slightly used. I slapped a 320 GB hard drive on it and it's the perfect media player thanks to XBMC (Xbox Media Center).

@ whizzo

When were console CPUs ridiculously fast?

Besides, you can't just measure the clock frequency and say how fast it is. Not all processors are the same. My laptop's CPU, despite being clocked lower, can make short work of a 3.0 Ghz Pentium 4 thanks to a shorter pipeline.

 

Console CPU's are actually slow, they are just stripped down to the bare instructions needed to process games. Giving them more performance by processing instructions quicker in less cycles.

Desktop CPU's have a whole lot more of capable instructions like EM64T, SSE, SSSE3

 

the fact that a ps2 isn't running a full fledged desktop OS does give it slightly higher performance than it would have otherwise. thats great for the ps2 itself, but it doesn't matter for emulators.

the overhead of the OS doesn't even matter compared to the overhead of emulating the ps2's cpu. the "running an OS" effect is orders of magnitude less of an impeding factor than the emulation itself.

 

I run Grand Turismo 3 or 4 on my desktop emulated from PS2 very well.

 

I heard the difficulty with the PS2 emulation was emulating 128bit instruction sets into 32bits. I haven't followed recent develloppements of PCSX2 but I heard the 64 bits version was a lot better.

There still aren't any PSP emulator...and NDS emulators are just starting to be running commercial games. And most 3D games run very poorly.

 

I am really looking forward to a PSP emulator.
Its too bad that NDS emulators still aren't running at full speed.

 

But everyone has a NDS and flashcarts are common things now so they may not see the need to concentrate a lot on it. But it's still strange that there are no psp emulators at all after 4 years.

 

Well the PSP isn't an extremely popular system (though it is in asia). Emulation is always highly inefficient, but I think there already is an xbox emulator. Supposedly, it really only plays halo at acceptable frame rates.

 

I say just buy the consoles themselves. A PS2 costs less than a $100 now and used Xboxes can be had for less than $100 too. Emulating these consoles require a powerful CPU. The money you'll spend on a CPU required to emulate them at full speed will cost much, much more than the console itself.

Regarding the DS and PSP thing, well, it's popular because for many people, the games are "free". It's so easy to get NDS ROMs and PSP games from your preferred torrents. I have to admit I do it since it's A LOT more convenient than bringing around cartridges and UMDs. Then again, I don't play PSP games. I just play PS1 and GBA games on my PSP because frankly, the games made for the PSP suck. Screw the nice graphics. Most of them are boring. Besides the games, the PSP is an awesome movie player.

 

Emulators are fun and all, but sometimes you've gotta miss holding the actual controller in your hands. (I miss my dead SNES T-T)

Side note: I have an NDS and 2 PSPs for one main reason: Japanese Games. Monster Hunter Portable 2nd G & Fate/Tiger Colosseum Upper are the only main games I play on my PSP. Left my NDS back home, so haven't tested out Doki Doki Majou Shinpan 2 yet~

 

is emulators even legal o.o? i mean its pretty much getting the system for free xD.

 

yes. but any software is not legal. you need to own all of the software. that includes bios files, if the emulator needs them to run.

in the case of the pcsx2, it DOES require the ps2 bios to run. the only legal way to do it is to extract the bios from a ps2 you own. this is possible to do with some effort. you must also own the games you want to play on the emulator.

 

Only if you own an actual copy of the system and game. Other than that... let's just stop there.

 

I have a dualshock-like logitech controller

 

adaptors are you friend

 

PS2 emulator runs around 30-35 games just fine, but there are still alot of random slowdowns and graphical glitches. Which makes racing, fighting and shooting games rather impossible to play.
Of course it is possible to add AA, AF and other special effects to make the games look nice but this makes even very-high-end computers lag or randomly freeze.

Xbox emulators arent popular because it barely had any exclusive games, so alot of the projects never got into public testing because of the little intrest in them.

PSP is in fact popular world-wide (over 40m consoles sold..) but it's emulator projects are still in alpha stage and don't run any commercial games at the moment.

DS emulators run some of the games with full speed. Everything else (PSX, N64, DC emulators are stable and run all the games lag-free, heck there's even PSX and N64 emulator on PSP what can run most of the games)

 

What about PS3 emulators?

 

Well..if you need a high end computer emulate PS2 (299Mhz CPU, 32MB ram and really weak gpu) then you'll need around 60-core PC with xx-generation videocard to emulate PS3 .. I guess.

As of moment there are only speculations over PS3 emulator.

 

You'll need to wait for a quantum computer.

 

Or Little Big Planet for PC

 

Bah. I say they should make GPGPU optimizations for emulators so the GPUs will do the work instead. Then again, they'll have to rewrite everything. Today's GPUs will make short work of those things.

And a PS3 emulator? Sheesh. The console is still new. Get one yourself. It's only less than $400 and it'll last you at least half a decade. Xbox, PS2, Gamecube = all less than $100. Xbox 360? $199 for the Arcade version. Wii? $250. Even if you buy all of those, they'll cost you MUCH LESS than an Intel Core i7 + Radeon HD 4870 x2/Geforce GTX 295 rig. At least you won't have a hassle with playing games. Just pop n' play. You can return the game if it doesn't work, which I doubt it would.

Regarding the PSP and DS development. I can speculate that any development on the PSP and DS will be on the consoles themselves rather than the emulation of it. They are handheld consoles after all with the PSP being particularly much more useful thanks to relatively powerful hardware.

Also, about the AA and AF on the games on the PS2 emulator. Good luck with that. The games still do run at their native PS2 resolution (I believe PS2 games run at 640x480 or 5xx x 4xx or something similar to that). No amount of upscaling will help it. The textures they'll use will be horridly be low-res and no amount of filtering will make it look magically as high-res as Crysis textures.

About the legal thing. I have the consoles themselves for all the emulators I use. However, I don't have all the games for all the ROMs and ISOs I use. I do for the DS and GBA, but for the PSP, nah. Screw them. Their games suck anyway. Crappy rationale, I know. But I never really went beyond a day of playing the PSP ISOs I download. For the PS1 ISOs, I still have my games rotting with my old fat and grey PS1 from more than a decade ago. Gran Turismo 2 on my PSP. Yeah... Polyphony Digital for delaying GT4 Mobile for the PSP. That's basically the only reason I bought my PSP back then because I though they'll be releasing it that year. T'was 2006...

 

Its not so much that PCs don't have the power, cuz they do. It really just comes down to extremely poor programming on the developers side. The XBOX 360 uses three stripped down custom IBM cores, comparable to a triple core Smithfield Pentium EE. Its GPU maxes at 240Gflops, putting it on par with a 8800M GTS.
So compared to an instruction-set rich environment of modern quad cores, Nehalem especially, and the beastly 1788.48Gflops of the nVidia GTX 295, and more than eight times the memory available to be used by the application, there is obviously plenty of hardware resources available to be utilized, even with a full featured OS running. Poor programming is all it comes down to.

 

Someone evidently hasn't bothered to read all the rest of the posts.

What people are saying is that these parts are often specially designed for the console and not some desktop part. The CPUs have greatly reduced logic sets and don't have the problem of running an OS. They may be 128 bit, 7 core, etc etc.

 

I don't know if you've done any emulation programming before emike09, but there is much more to it than blaming it on shoddy coding. Do you realize it takes an entire specialized API (DirectX or OpenGL) to get games running on modern PCs? When you attempt to take consoles, which have extremely specialized hardware, and port them into modern PC hardware, there is no API you can use to get it all done. If you try to program it all into DirectX, you are essentially recoding the entire game, defeating the point of an emulator.

The PC has a ridiculous job, it has to simulate the hardware of a console, and then it must simulate a game playing on that console. Seriously, go take a programming 101 or 111 course, consider the depth that your CPU has to go to emulate so many layers down, we're talking O(n^2) at least, if you try to optimize the code for your virtualized hardware, you end up introducing incompatibility and breaking a crapload of games.

High performance emulators can really only come from a few sources:
1. Super geniuses who spend their time writing emulators.
2. Corporations, preferably the ones who built the hardware being emulated.

And the GPGPU plan? Nada. Effective GPGPU programing requires programmers an order of magnitude more skilled and intelligent than your average x86 programmer. People think GPGPU is the future, but until we get a dumbed down API out to the programming masses (DX11 or OpenCL or whatever), you aren't going to see jack. Even then, progress will be slow. People just aren't smart enough, kids aren't going into the sciences and mathematics anymore. You can't just expect progress when those making the progress continue to dwindle after each generation!!

*despair*

 

Thanks for that post, and to the people saying buy a console, I have one, but I would much rather have it on my laptop and such. Much easier to bring a 17" laptop than a xbox and TV

 

I would just like to point out that the Xbox uses what is basicly a PIII-based celeron as the CPU and a Geforce 3 derived GPU. That's PC hardware. It also shows what that same hardware can do, if code gets optimized for it.

Also, emulation of that hardware should be easier, since you can probably virtualize it. This is all in theory and coming from an amateur, though, so take it with a grain of salt.

 

@ theneighborkid

Most of the games for the Xbox 1 are ported to or from the PC anyway. You can enjoy better graphics on the PC version. Besides, a 17" laptop's heavy too. =/ The games you'll want to out look for are on the PS2 since majority of PS2 games aren't available on any other platform. Go check the PCSX2 website. It seem they've completed a releasable PCSX2, a v1.0 of the emulator. The newer Core 2 Duos shouldn't have a problem emulating many of the PS2 games.

 

The reason porting from an XBox or XBox 360 to a Windows PC is because they are actually utilizing DirectX, meaning there is very little conversion needed to get it "working" on the PC compared to something running through the Cell API.

 

Well, in US of A that is probably the case. Try telling that to any half-decent asian country. Dunno about Europe.

Not only are math and science going down the drain, reading skills too seem to be affected.

*despair*

 

The PS3 is actually running DX9.0C like the X360.

 

the ps3 runs open gl. dx is microsoft tech, and only microsoft can use it.

not even mac's (which use standard pc graphics cards with dx capability) have access to dx. they use open gl exclusively to do anything 3d in the OS or the applications.

someone mentioned the xbox was basically using pc hardware, and that might improve emulation or something. partially true. it doesn't help if you are still emulating the cpu and gpu. still a huge task despite the similarity in the platform. however, there was some effort to basically wrap xbox games in a compatibility layer to run natively in windows. i think they had some success, but not enough. google or wiki for more info

 

I'm with you on this one. This may seem a quite unfair, biased and generalized, but many of the Americans (and sometimes Europeans, mostly those from NL/The Netherlands) I play with online seem to be bitter and cold after they find out I'm from Asia. Then they tell me to "go learn English, stupid" when I'm evidently capable of it. Hell, they don't even know when to use "there", "they're", and "their". English may not be my first language and I may not have that distinguishable American or British twang when speaking it, but I know when to use "there", "they're", and "their".