Xbox 360 Emulation Just Made a Huge Advancement!

NonSportsGirl · Mar 25, 2015

Xbox 360 Emulation Just Made a Huge Advancement! | eTeknix.

Yes the one game that runs still looks like hell but this is a massive leap toward emulating the Xbox 360.

If this one guy can make steps like this then I wonder if Microsoft could actually get an official Xbox 360 emulator working.

Maybe not on the One but it would be a massive boost to Xbox for Windows if they could open up the entire 360 back catalogue to PC gamers.

:)

dlCHIEF58 · Mar 25, 2015

Kingdom Under Fire: Heroes Emulator and a Pirates of the Caribbean Emulator for Xbox 360

When they did emulation on the 360 for the original Xbox games, it was not possible to make an emulator that would work effectively with all titles. So they took popular games with similar programming and did them in batches. Some games used specific programming
tricks which made emulation difficult and others didn't sell well enough for Microsoft to devote time in order to make those work under emulation. Microsoft finally stopped producing more emulation packs for the older games as it was not worth it in terms
of their return on investment. This is why fewer than half of the Xbox library is playable on the 360.

Obsessive Power · Mar 25, 2015

No Xbox One for me unless it plays 360 games.

Despite what you may think, getting older games to run on new hardware via emulation isn't as easy as you would think. The Xbox 360 and the Xbox One have totally different architecture. The Xbox 360's CPU is a RISC based PPC (Power-PC) processor from IBM,
the Xbox One's CPU is a CISC based X86/64 chip from AMD. In simple terms, these two systems do not speak the same language.

Even though the Xbox 360 is eight years old, It would take a huge amount processing resources for the Xbox One to emulate the Xbox 360. In fact, I can tell you now, even the most up to date gaming PC's, with the latest Corei7 processors and graphics cards couldn't
emulate the Xbox 360. At least not at a playable level.

Just go on YouTube and take a look at PS2 emulation on a PC. The PS2 dates back to 2000, but to get PS2 games running on a PC you need a quad core processor, plenty of RAM and a modern graphics card. And that's just to run games for a machine the was released
over a decade ago!

Pure software emulation of the Xbox 360 on the Xbox One just isn't possible, period.

Argontheos · Mar 25, 2015

It's odd that indie-party progress has been made so soon after Microsoft announced they were looking at PowerPC emulation on x86.

Me thinks Microsoft are probably further along than the dude behind Xenia, maybe something leaked and he picked up on it. Didn't Savage say last year he wanted to see 360 emulation on the One and PC?

Argontheos

It's odd that indie-party progress has been made so soon after Microsoft announced they were looking at PowerPC emulation on x86.

Me thinks Microsoft are probably further along than the dude behind Xenia, maybe something leaked and he picked up on it. Didn't Savage say last year he wanted to see 360 emulation on the One and PC?

robnyack

If MS announced an xbox 360 emulator for the xb1.......that would be HUGE. As in game changer.

It would spur some major sales.

Obsessive Power

Software emulation of the 360 in the plu and play style a commercial product requires in real time is impossible on even highest level enthusiast PCs. RISC to CISC is hugely intensive. Existing BC titles have been recompiled using special tools
for Xbox One.

Not Impossible just very demanding and hugely complex. After all, I've used RPCS3 which is a PlayStation 3 emulator on my PC running a number of games at 60 fps full speed, and the PS3 Cell is an even more complex CISC PPC based processor than the 360's
PPC CPU.

There is an Xbox 360 emulator for the PC called Xenia (which I've also tried), but it's no where near as developed as RPCS3. The Series X will have a much more powerful processor this time round, which could potentially make Software emulation of the 360
a possibility, albeit highly unlikely still.

Obsessive Power

"Why not use the emulator to run the code that was created for the original systems.... but run it through the hardware on the X|S series. I personally feel let down on this. I run emulators on my Dell laptop that will play EVERY game I own, but the X|S series Xbox can't run AS ADVERTISED".

Hi,

Strictly speaking it's not emulation, not on the Xbox One and Series X|S anyway.

Only the Xbox 360 had a proper software emulator to run the original Xbox games that the BC team tested and configured to play correctly (or mostly correctly) on the 360 console. This type of software emulation could be compared to the same type emulation you're doing on your laptop.

Obviously, it's one thing to emulate a limited system such as a 90's 16-bit console or arcade board and entirely something else when it comes to more complex hardware such as an original Xbox or Xbox 360. Have you tried PS2 emulation on PC? It's not the same as running a Sega Genesis/Mega Drive title via emulation.

When Microsoft decided to create a BC program for running Xbox 360 games on the Xbox One, they needed to take a different approach as pure software emulation just wasn't going to cut it. Generally, for software emulation, you need a system several times more powerful than the target system you're trying to emulate. The Xbox One, while on a technical level being more advanced than the 360, wasn't a great system to emulate the 360 in software. The Xbox One's 8 core Jaguar APU is low powered, more like a laptop CPU/GPU compared to its PC counterparts.

As the Xbox One was effectively too underpowered for software emulation, the BC team approach was to take each game and reverse engineer it from its native 32-bit PowerPC application to a Xbox One 64-bit X86/64 application. This approach made getting older 360 games to Xbox One more complex, but it did give the benefit of actually making the games playable on the system. Software emulation couldn't do that. In fact, only the Xbox 360 OS is emulated in software.

All the games they made BC (with no help from developers either), needed to be run from start to finish to test performance and stability. No mean feat.

Yes, there are now more powerful consoles available. But since Microsoft didn't use a software emulation solution on the Xbox One, to create one now would be a massive undertaking. Yes, it could be done, but at what cost? It's not like you can create a software emulator and all games will just work perfectly on it.

The Series X|S play the vast majority of Xbox One games because architecturally they're the same. No emulation required.

Shaggy2000

[quote user="XxSTIZZxX"]

Why not make an emulator app for xbone so it can play xbox360 games,arcade games, and indie.

[/quote]

They tried that for the backwards compatability on the 360 so you could play original Xbox games, huge amounts of work for very little reward. Plus it's not just one app, they had to create multiple emulators for different games.

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Basically if you want to play 360 games keep your 360.

Xbox 360 Emulation Just Made a Huge Advancement!