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Comment by lawl | Hacker News Reader

I'm starting to think leaking the code for an old console could be a pretty cost-effective way to get an emulator.

I'm pretty sure I've heard of companies using open source emulators for backwards compatibility with old consoles/selling 'classic games' before.

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The 20KB stripped down Windows kernel that shipped on the XBox isn't hard to emulate...emulators such as CXBX do this for many functions by calling the respective windows function on the host. Low-level emulators (XQemu) take the opposite approach by emulating well understood hardware (hdd, cdrom, usb) and then running a binary dump of the xbox firmware (which contains the kernel, it's not on disk) directly.

To my understanding the hardest problem in XBox emulation is the GPU, and unfortunately this doesn't help with that.

> I'm pretty sure I've heard of companies using open source emulators for backwards compatibility with old consoles/selling 'classic games' before.

I know at least Sony uses PCSX ReArmed for their "PlayStation Classic".

You may be thinking of Nintendo. They packaged up a Super Mario ROM from the internet and sold it on their classic games store.

https://youtu.be/zR1uEwjx7VI

I believe they wrote their own emulator though.

Sony "PS Classic" is also an arm board running ePSXe.

That proof is utter nonsense.

Sure Nintendo might have just downloaded the rom, but they may have:

1) just concatenated the prg and chr roms and added an iNES header so they could validate in third party emulators. (Likely extra helpful for games where they were developing anti-epilepsy patches, since third party emulators have some really nice debugging tools.)

2) Used a third party cart dumper that adds the iNES header, because it was faster and easier than setting up a 3.5 inch floppy drive to try read the original rom from the archive. (And much faster than retyping in hex dump printout from the archive).

3) hired one of the iNES developers to develop their emulator, who kept using the file-format they were familiar with.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22756156

great detective work there!

Microsoft already has a pretty sophisticated Xbox emulator, deployed to both Xbox360 and XboxOne.

It's a shame that they whitelisted such a small selection of titles (on 360).

I think that's more of a licensing things really. Some of those old games had really wierd diels especially for music rights.

I never understood why music publishers care so much about licensing for old games. Are they worried people are going to put on GTA3 to avoid buying a couple songs? It makes more sense to me that playing old games would encourage those song sales.

Before your comment I thought the more likely reason that Microsoft qualifies games is to reduce the amount of development and support effort needed for their emulator. Even Halo 1 struggled to get some good framerates, IIRC.

That’s the reason why some games keep going in and out of Steam. Especially console ports such as Alan Wake.

At least it’s easy to patch out if you have a homebrew-enabled 360.

I'm curious to know how well unsupported titles work.

Boom: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1uU9j4X-WK01UZuZzv6Fu...

Amazing, thanks! Seems like a rock solid emulator.

Is it actually an emulator or something more akin to WINE?

Considering Xbox360 used a PowerPC CPU, some emulation had to be done.

Not sure about the Xbox One - it might be just a different aspect on the hypervisor.

a bunch of nintendo console code leaked earlier this month as well, including the code for the gamecube.

any big emulator project that wants to maintain legitimacy is going to stay far away from these leaks. they'll send out messages on mailing lists warning developers NOT to look at the code and NOT to go fixing bugs based on the leaked code.

an emulator is legal as long as it's a clean-room implementation. if an emulator suddenly gets way better after a leak, it's going to draw some legal attention.

almost makes you wonder if it's a honeypot...

> an emulator is legal as long as it's a clean-room implementation

And this is why it is often done on completely legitimate open source projects, and many projects don't shy away from doing so. Wine, ReactOS, and many more regularly do so completely legally.

(of course there was that thing in '06... https://www.linux.com/news/reactos-suspends-development-sour...)

that reactOS kerfuffle is just one of many, many examples of how a tainted clean-room design can completely derail an open-source project, and most stories have a nastier ending than that one.

the dolphin emulator team (gamecube/wii emulator) made a statement on the nintendo leaks:

https://twitter.com/Dolphin_Emu/status/1257051968045899776

I don't think it is a honey pot, but you do make a valid point around the grey legal area to even read the code. The linux directx module that microsoft pushed earlier this week might not even get code reviewed because of the risk of reading patented interfaces that could taint the developers future work: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Microsof...

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