Xbox Emulator?

Just wondering if its possible. I don't want to work on sumthing tht won't work what so eva lol.

Xbox Technical specifications


* CPU: 32-bit 733 MHz Custom Intel Coppermine-based processor in a Micro-PGA2 package. 180 nm process.[13]
o SSE floating point SIMD. Four single-precision floating point numbers per clock cycle.
o MMX integer SIMD.
o 133 MHz 64-bit GTL+ front side bus to GPU.
o 32 KB L1 cache. 128 KB on-die L2 "Advanced Transfer Cache".
* Shared memory subsystem
o 64 MB DDR SDRAM at 200 MHz; 6.4 GB/s
o Supplied by Hynix or Samsung depending on manufacture date and location.
* GPU and system chipset: 233 MHz "NV2A" ASIC. Co-developed by Microsoft and NVIDIA.
o Geometry engine: 115 million vertices/second, 125 million particles/second (peak)
o 4 pixel pipelines with 2 texture units each
o 932 megapixels/second (233 MHz x 4 pipelines), 1,864 megatexels/second (932 MP x 2 texture units) (peak)
+ Peak triangle performance (32pixel divided from the hell filrate): 29,125,000 32-pixel triangles/sec raw or w. 2 textures and lit.
# 485,416 triangles per frame at 60fps
# 970,833 triangles per frame at 92fps
o 4 textures per pass, texture compression, full scene anti-aliasing (NV Quincunx, supersampling, multisampling)
o Bilinear, trilinear, and anisotropic texture filtering
o Similar to the GeForce 3 and GeForce 4 PC GPUs.

Wii Technical specifications



Processors:

* CPU: PowerPC-based "Broadway" processor, made with a 90 nm SOI CMOS process, reportedly† clocked at 729 MHz[78]
* GPU: ATI "Hollywood" GPU made with a 90 nm CMOS process,[79] reportedly† clocked at 243 MHz[78]

Memory:

* 88 MB main memory (24 MB "internal" 1T-SRAM integrated into graphics package, 64 MB "external" GDDR3 SDRAM)[80]
* 3 MB embedded GPU texture memory and framebuffer.

Storage:

* 512 MB built-in NAND flash memory
* Expanded storage via SD card memory (up to 2 GB)
* Nintendo GameCube Memory Card (required for GameCube game saves)

IBM's Wii "Broadway" CPU
IBM's Wii "Broadway" CPU
ATI's Wii "Hollywood" GPU
ATI's Wii "Hollywood" GPU

* Slot-loading disc drive compatible with 8 cm Nintendo GameCube Game Disc and 12 cm Wii Optical Disc
* Mask ROM by Macronix

wikipedia knows all

thanks for the help!

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Yeah, a lot of tech specs explain it all :P

Xbox emulation is not possible mainly because Wii is just a bit more powerful than Xbox, and in emulation process a lot of performance is lost, specially when dealing about so different architetures (Intel x86 X PPC, just for start).
Anyway, Xbox emulation is still very imature even on PCs, so unless a revolution on the scene happens, you won't playing Halo outside the console. :)

look for the ps2 emulation thread. there you'll find a lot of (weell written) reasons to explain, why a real-performance (is that a word?) emulation of the xbox on the wii is impossible

Even if it won't work perfectly, I'd like to see you try to get something working.

Honestly, if he's asking that question I don't think he's in a position to code an emulator. General rule of thumb is usually 10x the speed for good emulation to work. If you look at JenesisDS, which is an amazing Genesis emulator on the DS, you'll see that it requires a lot of highly optimized assembly code, and that's with possibly more than 10x the speed (depending on how you measure speed). In short, emulation is really tricky, and I don't think we'll see any of the last gen consoles being emulated on anything less than extremely fast gaming PCs for quite a while. For a comparison, FFX on a PS2 emulator ran slower on my computer than Crysis.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/24/2008 07:58AM by iofthestorm.

Actually, Xbox games use DirectX code. I don't think an emulator is possible on Wii.

Quote
Arikado
Actually, Xbox games use DirectX code. I don't think an emulator is possible on Wii.

I fail to see how this affects XBOX emulation?

DirectX is jsut a software and hardware standard. A well documented one.
That actually makes it a lot easier.

Even though the xbox's specs were slightly less than the wii's, the online was much better and the graphics still a little better and I cannot see the wii ever supporting the online experience xbox did.
Also why would you even need an xbox emulator for the pc, most of the games are still available and have been ported to the PC for purchase (most are about $15-20 now)

Why an Xbox emulator? For the sheer challenge of programming it of course! Plus, its just cool ;)

Quote
DrMario
the online was much better and the graphics still a little better and I cannot see the wii ever supporting the online experience xbox did.

Why? It's software based.

I know that the proper "emulation" is hard...
But let's pick a PS2 and a Wii, for example. Both of them uses PowerPC-based processors. And just for training the imagination, let's guess the video chips of both console use some common specification, a really small similarity, like some OpenGL-based architeture (I believe is cheaper to improve something than creating from zero...) . So you can almost consider they are really limited computers, with different operating systems.

With all of this said, is somekind of software solution, like a compatibility layer, at least close to possible? Like WINE at Linux? I mean, there is a lot of difference on hardware, of course, but maybe combining the two concepts...

Well, these are just some noobish thoughts.

Quote
DanielHueho
I know that the proper "emulation" is hard...
But let's pick a PS2 and a Wii, for example. Both of them uses PowerPC-based processors. And just for training the imagination, let's guess the video chips of both console use some common specification, a really small similarity, like some OpenGL-based architeture (I believe is cheaper to improve something than creating from zero...) . So you can almost consider they are really limited computers, with different operating systems.

With all of this said, is somekind of software solution, like a compatibility layer, at least close to possible? Like WINE at Linux? I mean, there is a lot of difference on hardware, of course, but maybe combining the two concepts...

Well, these are just some noobish thoughts.

The PS2 uses a MIPS R5900 actually. However, there is some difference between code that directly accesses the hardware (like games on consoles) and those which rely on the OS to handle all the hardware communication for it (thus making it possible to rewrite libraries and catch system calls). The CPU part of an emulator is only a part of the emulator; handling memory and sound and video are significant parts of emulation. So to answer your question, the equivalent to WINE in the console emulation world would be HLE as you can't really do much better than that (of course you can do HLE better or worse, but I don't think its possible to really improve upon the core idea).

Quote
DanielHueho
I know that the proper "emulation" is hard...
But let's pick a PS2 and a Wii, for example. Both of them uses PowerPC-based processors. And just for training the imagination, let's guess the video chips of both console use some common specification, a really small similarity, like some OpenGL-based architeture (I believe is cheaper to improve something than creating from zero...) . So you can almost consider they are really limited computers, with different operating systems.

With all of this said, is somekind of software solution, like a compatibility layer, at least close to possible? Like WINE at Linux? I mean, there is a lot of difference on hardware, of course, but maybe combining the two concepts...

Well, these are just some noobish thoughts.

If it were that easy than XBox emulation on PC would have been a piece of cake, since it's just a Celeron CPU with an nFore chipset and GeForce GPU. It's not that simple though, and PS2 doesn't use a PowerPC based processor anyway.

Emulation basically means a giant switch statement, interpreting the original code and translating it to something, in this case a wii, can understand. It has nothing to do with the hardware being the same, because the calls to that hardware are different on each. So if in the xbox game code is something like "DrawSprite(x,y,sprite);" it has to be read in your emulation program, and translated to the wii equivalent of that function. This process takes a lot of time per frame and its virtually impossible to do this from an xbox game to a wii. The process can however be greatly sped up by interpreting the opcodes (assembly stuff), but as iofthestrom said, if you have to ask if its possible, u cant do it, no offense ;)

take a look at www.chip8.com and search wikipedia a bit for chip8, superchip8 (schip8) and mega-chip8 if you really want to start working on an emulator.

oops, soory about the necro :(

Aerinas, your last two posts were completely pointless, incorrect, and vague to an extent making somewhat irrelevant.

Then again, the same could be said of this entire topic. Closed.