[HN Gopher] Xemu: Original Xbox Emulator
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Xemu: Original Xbox Emulator
Author : InitEnabler
Score : 136 points
Date : 2024-04-07 17:18 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (xemu.app)
(TXT) w3m dump (xemu.app)
| bdcravens wrote:
| The original Xbox was essentially a PC of the time running a
| heavily customized version of Windows. Does this emulate that
| kernel without using any Microsoft code?
| flohofwoe wrote:
| If I remember right, most of the "operating system" was linked
| statically into the game images (AFAIK at least the DirectX
| libs, not sure about any low level "firmware" stuff). I'm
| pretty sure there was no concept of "hardware drivers" though.
| skinatro wrote:
| The original xbox actually had a real os based on the windows
| 2000[1] unlike it's competitors like the PSX
|
| [1]-https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/21/21265995/xbox-source-
| code...
| dagmx wrote:
| The original XBox didn't compete against the PSX. It was
| one generation later competing with the PS2, DreamCast and
| GameCube
| Narishma wrote:
| The Dreamcast was discontinued just as the Xbox was
| preparing to launch, so they didn't really compete.
| jsheard wrote:
| Per the documentation you have to provide dumps of the original
| Xbox bootroms, and it can _optionally_ use a HDD image taken
| from a real Xbox, but the latter isn 't required because they
| provide a basic cleanroom reimplementation of the dashboard you
| can use instead.
|
| https://xemu.app/docs/required-files/
|
| The CPU in the Xbox was literally an off-the-shelf Intel
| processor (some crazy people even soldered in faster CPUs that
| were never meant for the Xbox) but as I understand it the GPU
| is weird, and that's where most of the difficulty with
| emulation comes from. It's a unique mashup of GeForce 2 and
| GeForce 3 IP that was never used anywhere else, so the existing
| efforts to reverse engineer GF2 and GF3 for Linux drivers were
| of limited use.
| skinatro wrote:
| If I am not wrong this is a LLE (low level emulator) rather
| than a hle so it should emulate the hardware rather than the
| kernel. So you need the dump of the microsoft's xbox kernel for
| it to work
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| I think most people familiar with the original Xbox hw (like
| people working on xemu :)) take offense when you say it's just
| a PC. It's PC hardware, but nothing much is shared with the
| "IBM PC" architecture-wise. Even the software side is very
| different. It's not running a customized version of Windows,
| but the Windows _kernel_. One stripped down to 256kb, including
| the boot up animation and sound. That design for example
| required that a lot of things get linked into a game 's
| executable, like network drivers and the entire TCP/IP stack.
|
| If it were that easy, we'd have had a wine pendant for Xbox
| binaries 20 years ago. Cxbx is pretty much the wine approach to
| Xbox emulation and it's far from perfect.
| anthk wrote:
| Linux would ran on that with ease. And, yes, Wine ran, but
| just Win32 PE binaries, not XBE ones.
|
| OFC it was an "IBM PC". Some people could run ReactOS on it.
| bri3d wrote:
| There are two major original Xbox emulators - cxbx/cxbx-
| reloaded, which originally tried to do both LLE and HLE but
| these days does exclusively high-level emulation like you are
| describing, and xemu (this one), which does mostly low-level
| emulation.
|
| So no, in this case Xemu runs the original Xbox kernel. This is
| why it's more compatible and generally much more robust than
| cxbx in terms of game support.
|
| There are a lot of challenges with doing HLE for Xbox. While
| there is a kernel, its HAL is very low-level. Games are
| statically linked against the entire stack of DLLs that you'd
| usually find in Windows (the Xbox SDK), and depending on when
| they were released, can have one of about a gazillion versions
| of the Xbox SDK in them. So doing HLE is a matter of finding
| and hooking an enormous number of SDK functions, but also
| keeping up with the plethora of minor changes which were made
| constantly through the life of the console. Emulating the
| kernel doesn't get you very far, because it still provides low-
| level interfaces to (for example) manipulating GPU state, so
| you end up having to implement the GPU hardware in LLE anyway.
| IntelMiner wrote:
| This is a myth that is incorrect. The original Xbox's BIOS
| bares little to no resemblance to Windows 2000 (its closest
| contemporary) and runs from a 1MB flash chip at most. Games run
| Bare Metal on the system
| accrual wrote:
| The Xbox hardware was also quite advanced for its release date
| (2001). Many PCs at the time still had 100MHz FSB but the Xbox
| ran at 133MHz. The Xbox also had DDR RAM, not much of it
| (64MB), but DDR wouldn't be commonplace until the Pentium 4 and
| Athlon XP platforms a couple years later. Most PCs were still
| running regular single-channel SDRAM.
|
| I've built a near-period correct PC with a later and faster CPU
| (Tualatin at 1.0GHz vs Xbox's Coppermine at 700MHz), more RAM
| (512MB), faster GPU (GF4 Ti4400), but it still can't achieve
| the raw memory and GPU bandwidth the Xbox had.
| jsheard wrote:
| The fun thing about the RAM was that although the retail
| units only had 64MB, they shared the motherboard design with
| the devkits which had 128MB, and if you sourced a second set
| of RAM chips you could fully populate the board and build a
| 128MB retail unit. That was useful for some homebrew, and
| also made it possible to play games built for the Sega
| Chihiro arcade platform, which used the Xbox architecture but
| had the full 128MB of RAM installed and allowed games to use
| all of it.
|
| If you were brave enough to replace a BGA chip you could
| upgrade the CPU as well, the stock one was an off-the-shelf
| 733mhz Pentium which happened to have a 1.4ghz counterpart,
| and surprisingly swapping the CPU out for the faster one
| mostly just worked. The faster chips were electrically
| compatible, but Intel only packaged those as socketed desktop
| parts, so people designed these wacky interposer boards to
| re-route the pins to the correct places on the Xboxes BGA
| footprint.
|
| https://i.imgur.com/nvJdKfM.jpeg
| jwells89 wrote:
| I love hackery like this that pushes hardware capabilities
| to their limits. It's kinda like extreme overclocking,
| except somehow both more crazy and usually more likely to
| have an end result that's practical for day to day usage.
| sshagent wrote:
| kung fu chaos time! Such a great game, a little insensitive
| perhaps...glorious sofa multipleyer game though I kept that disk
| hoping they'd backwards compat it for many years
| blakes wrote:
| Out of all the og Xbox games, Kung Fu Chaos provided the most
| fun and laughs with friends. It honestly still holds up
| gameplay wise. I still play it sometimes. The minigames were
| the best.
| rolandog wrote:
| Fuzion Frenzy as well!
| darknavi wrote:
| Playing the Fuzion Frenzy demo on the XB Magazine discs and
| the Halo demo menu were a ton of fun too.
|
| Wish more game demos existed today.
| accrual wrote:
| Fun fact - Morrowind for the Xbox occasionally rebooted the whole
| console when running low on memory. A splash screen would remain
| displayed, so the user would have no idea this was happening. The
| Xbox only had 64MB of DDR1 RAM.
|
| https://hackaday.com/2021/04/14/morrowind-rebooted-the-origi...
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I had talked to a dev who worked on one of the Fable games and
| he mentioned that he was only alloted x amount of the total
| memory available on the 360 which surprised me, since I was
| primarily a PC gamer I didnt think about how little memory the
| console had.
|
| Fun reminder that we got to the moon on significantly less
| memory.
| userbinator wrote:
| When the original Xbox was released (2001), its specs were
| comparable to a low-end PC of the time, but with a somewhat
| better GPU.
| rbut wrote:
| They could've implemented their own virtual memory and paged it
| to disk. Very easy to do. That's what we had to do to load 64mb
| ROMs when creating an n64 emulator for Xbox.
| darknavi wrote:
| Sure, but deadlines. And game hacks are fun!
| costanzaDynasty wrote:
| I hate the fact that Xbox One killed Xbox's momentum so much that
| people are dismissing or not recognizing some of the things that
| Xbox has going for it right now with Xbox GamePass and cloud
| gaming. This is a transitional generation, but Xbox is positioned
| a lot better than most people seem to understand if they only
| travel in the areas where console wars is the religion of the day
| again.
|
| I've been replaying Halo 1 & 2 again and just remembering the
| infancy of console online gaming and how fun it was as compared
| today were its either absolute silence or mute worthy trash.
| anonymousab wrote:
| > recognizing some of the things that Xbox has going for it
| right now with Xbox GamePass and cloud gaming
|
| Or they don't recognize them as inherently good things. Game
| pass has potentially cannibalized "real" game sales on the
| platform and primed its userbase to "just wait for it to come
| to gamepass"; with the gamepass honeymoon developer deals
| drying up, this has had dire implications for third party
| support going forward. Xcloud has been a mixed bag - you can
| find countless reports of it lagging behind PS cloud streaming
| and various PC cloud gaming vendors in performance (latency)
| and image quality (though I personally haven't seen much
| difference between most of them).
|
| For a lot of us, the current generation Xbox platform has been
| doing everything just as bad or even _worse_ than it was with
| the Xbox One - they 've stopped iterating on backwards
| compatibility, they've pushed Gamepass above all, and they've
| spent unbelievable amounts of money on M&A instead of building
| up their own existing studios and releasing more new original
| exclusive games. The quality of some of their major trumpeted
| releases has also been incredibly suspect, despite repeated
| claims of high quality from their internal tastemakers before
| release.
|
| The dumb social media console war stuff has unfortunately
| gotten in the way of some important self-review and
| introspection that the Xbox team should be doing. As a longtime
| Xbox fan, it has been tremendously disappointing to see.
| dleslie wrote:
| It's funny that you should note that they are doing positive
| things in a transitional era, only to finish off by noting that
| you are playing decades-old games on their hardware.
|
| While I am a fan of GamePass, and I own two XBox One consoles,
| I have no desire to own a Series console or the forthcoming
| refresh. Everything I want to play I can play on the One or via
| Cloud; but more importantly: the difficulty of discovering
| compelling experiences in this era of XBox is too damn high.
|
| There are too many straight-up _bad_ indie games swamping
| GamePass, and too many B and AAA quality games that are phoning
| it in.
| dagmx wrote:
| The Xbox team have just had terrible leadership choices.
|
| The One was a miss from the beginning , trying to be more than
| a gaming console and falling short on all fronts. The name
| didn't help either.
|
| Then they picked an even worse name for the Series X and and
| Series S. while implementing a necessity for parity. confusing
| the market and holding back devs.
|
| The 360 was effectively a flash in the pan IMHO, helped by a
| significant misstep on Sony's part with the PS3 design, and
| Nintendo moving to create their own market with the Wii that
| effectively made it a companion console rather than a competing
| one.
| jwells89 wrote:
| With the One they also made the mistake of trying to
| permanently tie discs to consoles in an attempt to destroy
| the used game market for the console, which got leaked pretty
| early on and led to Microsoft and the Xbox brand taking a
| massive reputation hit, even though they quickly backtracked.
| For that generation, a lot of people who would've otherwise
| bought Xboxes instead bought PS4s out of principle.
| CBarkleyU wrote:
| That E3 was crazy. Anyone remember the video that Sony
| posted on "how to share games with friends" while the Xbox
| debacle on locked discs and always online was in full
| force? (it was literally a guy giving a game disc to
| another guy)
|
| This is why I am still against the MS acquisitions. Imagine
| that whole debacle happening but you're still forced to buy
| an anti consumer console, because God forbid you like to
| play CoD, Fallout, Starfield...
| Lammy wrote:
| Now Sony just lock the entire disc drive behind online
| activation instead:
|
| https://www.playstation.com/en-
| us/support/hardware/ps5-disc-... "Internet connection
| required to pair disc drive and PS5 console upon set up."
|
| Cue defenders "but it's only once and then it works
| offline!!" like that will make a difference in the far
| future once the activation system is dead and gone.
| hermitdev wrote:
| And others of us are old enough to remember the Sony
| rootkit DRM on their CDs and refuse to go anywhere near
| Sony products.
| rasz wrote:
| And to top it all off I heard MS just put Surface people in
| charge of designing the next one, to copy Switch success I
| guess?.
| bluescrn wrote:
| Any game developer could have told them early on that Kinect
| was next-to-useless, despite the technology being interesting.
|
| Even operating simple menus was problematic. You could point,
| but had no buttons to click. It was never going to work beyond
| a few niche cases (dance games and simple minigames).
| musicale wrote:
| > It was never going to work beyond a few niche cases (dance
| games and simple minigames).
|
| It really is superior for dance games.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| I'm sad for kids who don't get to experience high-quality couch
| multiplayer.
|
| Also making an account for every little stupid thing. No you
| don't need account systems. At least make them opt-in.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| With the Master Chief Collection on PC, I'd only use this to play
| Metal Arms and Mercenaries.
|
| The first Xbox had a pretty lukewarm backlog.
| sirwhinesalot wrote:
| It had loads of good games! Ninja Gaiden, Otogi 1 & 2, Far Cry
| Instincts, Crimson Skies, Panzer Dragoon Orta, Metal Wolf
| Chaos, Project Gotham Racing, Jade Empire, Fable, Outrun 2006,
| Splinter Cell, Burnout, Chronicles of Riddick, Conker,
| Psychonauts, Unreal Championship 2, Oddworld, Forza, etc.
| clircle wrote:
| For me, it was the timed exclusivity of MGS2 substance
| darknavi wrote:
| Metal Arms, what a blast from the past!
| christkv wrote:
| I've been replaying the thing using xemu and it works very well.
| skibz wrote:
| This emulator has brought me hours of fun. A huge thank you to
| the developers.
|
| I also strongly recommend checking whether Insignia supports the
| games you're playing on Xemu. If it does, grab a retail dashboard
| hard disk image and try it out!
|
| I think Insignia even recently added support for Halo 2, which is
| pretty huge.
|
| https://insignia.live
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