Xenia: Xbox 360 Emulator (2022)
xenia.jp
xenia.jp
Xbox 360 as a whole is in a half dead state nowadays. It is partially supported by Xbox One/Series X/S and if you want to get specific non supported titles to play, it is generally via rapidly aging, not very well built hardware.
I have a series E 360 I bought last year dirt cheap as a way to get to a lot of titles no emulator currently supports.
So Xbox Live is still supported but the store it is stuck in a partially preserved 2015 state, advertising Xbox One and a few upcoming titles.
You can still buy a lot of titles at reasonable prices, but you also get situations were you can download the demo - offer to upgrade to the full version but it no longer exists in the store.
There is a large amount of video streaming apps offered but are so old they cannot connect to the servers. Internet explorer is on there but the TLS certificates are all expired, so unless the site comes over pure HTTP - nothing happens.
BUT the MS Video store, still works and with recent releases! It is kind of neat to see in action and they build the service with legacy support. While only a maximum of 1080p, the image quality is pretty good for what is being offered.
I do wonder how much longer these things will limp along for but I suspect it won't be much longer.
With the poor hardware quality on both Xbox and Ps3, emulation is quickly becoming the main way that any of these titles will be playable.
I have my own VMS install on SimH, which is free.
Take a look and let me know if there's something missing...
Number of games that are backward compatible out of the total released [0]:
Xbox : 63/996 (6.32%)
Xbox 360: 633/2154 (29.38%)
As you can see the numbers are very disappointing.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_backward-compatible_...
All of the original publishing contracts allowed Microsoft to sell Xbox/Xbox 360 games on those systems specifically, so Microsoft had to seek permission from each and every relevant third party publisher before making each title backwards compatible.
From what I understand original Xbox compatibility on the 360 was similar, with 462/996 games ultimately being compatible "officially" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Xbox_games_compatible_...). But with a jailbroken system compatibility is actually a fair bit better (https://consolemods.org/wiki/Xbox_360:Original_Xbox_Games_Co...).
Afaik there is no similar jailbreak for Xbox one/series, but if anyone ever does manage to get their internal emulator running with arbitrary titles I wouldn't be surprised if a lot more games work than their official numbers suggest.
It would also explain how they could reconcile the differences between the PPC floating point length and the x87 code on Xbox One/X/S for specific titles.
They aren't so much pure emulation as they are binary conversions with intermediate interpreter for API calls (GPU/APU/IO etc). Combine this with splitting the 6 threads across 6 cores instead of the original 3 cores and this is how they could get reasonable performance out of the Jaguar chip.
There would be a lot more to it than that but that is just my basic theory. Would also explain the slow roll out.
I think this is the same thing they would have done getting the original Xbox onto the 360. But just a theory.
When Xbox first came out MS wasn't too strict on the TRC of titles, this is why you saw some stuff that seemed to punch above their weight. Wreckless released in early 2002 was pushing the pixel shaders hard and in a way not really seen much elsewhere on the system. This isn't it looking at it's best but it give you a vague idea.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHyuFBMs78E
But I suspect that as the relations between Intel and Nvidia soured, MS realize they didn't have a great path toward backward compatibility ahead of them. By enforcing the TRC more and pushing things like XNA they could at least focus the games so that emulation via PPC wouldn't be such a huge task. So you had things like Halo 2 and Doom 3 get support long before a lot of earlier titles, if they ever got support.
https://walbourn.github.io/directxtk/
Years later they kind of sponsored Monogame, when they were recovering from XBox One mess,
https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2016/03/14/letter-chris-charla-i...
By the way, I think one of these episodes talks about the emulation, but I am not certain if it was on this podcast I heard about it.
It looks like a decade long game of trail and error.
I suppose you start at the basics, getting an interpreter purely for CPU code. So PPC to x86 code. Then onto more complex stuff like floating point VMX to x87. Once you have basic code processing, every time a line of code comes up that cannot be interpreted, you figure out what it does and then build the appropriate interpreter. Do this again and again and you would gain some basic function.
Basically just try running game code and keep plodding away like this until it works. Like giant bug hunt for 100,000 bugs. Very Tedious but necessary work. As for optimizing for performance, that is just black magic.
[0] https://github.com/abaire/nxdk_pgraph_tests
[1] though nxdk/freexdk/openxdk had to "compete" with the leaked XDK that a lot of homebrewers used so there was much less incentive to contribute to the open source one
My Ps3 only had save games for a WWE game and GTA 5 from 8 years ago. I figured if I could get 2 years out of these things that would be more than I could ask for. Storing these so the HDD's are stacked sideways can also help prevent head crashes. But that plan looks more like urban legend hyper mileing than anything that will make these last. Maybe it will buy a few months but then it puts more stain of the DVD/Bluray drives.
An SSD for the Ps3 will be the next step. The 360 because it is the E model actually has a reasonable solution. It has a 4GB internal storage that takes over if the HDD is removed. Then you can just store games on an external USB drive. It isn't amazing but it would work. I just worry about these things over heating because even the series E's would red ring with enough time.
The re-release is technically a different game, so it might require another music license, so it might not have the same soundtrack, it changes the feel of the game.
The old console has its time ticking.
Without emulators, that game experience won't be preserved, its simply at the whims of executives which don't really care enough about such small details for re-releases because the name of the game is usually enough to make some bucks.
Sad that the steam version has no none of the original.
For it to still be somewhat functional, 18 years later - is a testament that Microsoft somewhat cares(cared.)
Nintendo side, wiiu, 3ds, etc are all dead for their e-store, but the hardware is solid. Homebrew is alive, sure but offically, no. And they all have similar release dates.
But it's all malware nevertheless and with each new version you can expect it to become more aggressive (e.g.: Pluto).
It was not an x86 architecture, and would have required an emulator to run x86 Windows 7. I also never owned one.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360
Windows NT 4 had a POWER port. This was discontinued when Windows 2000 arrived. If Microsoft wanted to release another version for POWER, they could easily do so.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT
"Windows NT 3.51 added support for the PowerPC processor in 1995, specifically PReP-compliant systems such as the IBM ThinkPad Power Series laptops and Motorola PowerStack series; but despite meetings between Michael Spindler and Bill Gates, not on the Power Macintosh as the PReP compliant Power Macintosh project failed to ship."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(processor)
For the next generation of consoles, AMD's integration of ATI graphics onto a single die CPU/GPU/APU proved irresistible, and both Sony and Xbox switched to AMD x86 variants. The Nintendo Switch adopted the Nvidia Tegra ARM architecure.
IBM essentially had one generation of consoles. I don't know why they didn't fight harder for this market.
You are probably thinking of that.