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I agree. Some games (GTA) are losing the original music due expires music licenses and it totally changes the character and feel of the game. Thank good for people archiving these games.

Sonic 3 (and related Sonic 3 & Knuckes) can’t come out as a re-release because Michael Jackson contributed to the soundtrack, but was uncredited.

It has been re-released in Sonic Origins although they did change the soundtrack.

Are you saying that already purchased games have code that stop playing included music tracks after a certain date?

Game versions are locked to a specific console, on a generation with some faulty hardware. The trend nowadays is to re-release games for newer generation.

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.

I started playing Chrono Trigger during the pandemic and found multiple versions of it. The SNES version is still what I found most people recommend. The score/soundtrack apparently got worse as new versions were being rolled out to different platforms.

No, they have publishers that release updates which just make games worse.

The 360 version of GTA San Andreas was originally a backwards-compatible download of the game as it existed on OG XBOX, but some years later it was “””updated””” to a console port of the smartphone port of the game, losing many music tracks in the process. Everyone lost their saved progress too since the new mobile version wouldn’t read the old saves.

Oh yeah, you fire up Vice City - the first track in the games should be Michael Jackson... nope, gone!

If I remember correctly it was Mr. Mister - Broken Wings used in the intro sequence?

Same goes for GTA4.

Sad that the steam version has no none of the original.

I think crazy taxi might be the same

I heard once that Xbox one supports 360 games by using emulation. Is this true?

Former Microsoft employee here who occasionally had reason to work with the emulation team. It’s truly a thing of wonder and I hope they do a public talk on it someday. There are so many crazy tricks they’ve done that deserve recognition.

If I was to wager a guess... they are using a form of static recompilation. This is why they need to have the binary downloaded to function.

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.

To add to this another little theory I have about the original Xbox compatibility.

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.

XNA died when the people behind it left, thus the C++ side won once again, and DirectXTK was born as replacement.

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.

https://theretrohour.com/?s=xbox

Yes.

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_...

It's worth noting that those numbers are partially because of licensing, not just technical constraints.

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.

I don't understand why contracts don't include provisions that allow Microsoft or other console manufacturers to emulate or have the game run on future consoles. Surely it'd be in the publishers interest to keep the game alive?

publishers want to resell the games at full price. your copy from 2002 still working conflicts with that motive. hell, they don’t even want to sell it to you these days. they’d much prefer you rent.

I work at Microsoft but have no inside knowledge. Presumably that wasn’t a consideration at the time? I suspect it is today, since games released for Xbox One can also be purchased on Series S/X…

What happens when you weight it for sales numbers? Personally I've only ever had one 360 game not be compatible with my xbone.

Yep, it's an emulator codenamed fission:

https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Fission

the real question i wonder is how do they even know what to write in code for building an emulator? are they ex employees that know the internals of xbox. how can you build an emulator for something you dont have access to (i assume all the software is proprietary)

Homebrew is important so you can slowly build up a battery of tests and compare to real hardware. In fact that's arguably more important than any insider knowledge because insiders have a remarkably incorrect view of the systems they build compared to people who spend years looking at it as a hobby. Insiders are ultimately very driven by the deadlines and pressures of shipping commercial systems and their knowledge only has to be good enough against all the other competing concerns.

I will preface this with - I have never done 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.

Judging from what i see people do on a couple of OG Xbox Discord rooms, i'd guess the biggest contributor would be reverse engineering the existing software (games, etc) using tools like Ghidra (and whatever was common for reverse engineering before it). After that you build a bunch of tests that you can try to run on the original hardware and compare with the emulator (e.g. this[0] repository contains a bunch of tests written against the open source nxdk SDK for the original Xbox - note that the effort goes back to very early 2000s and it is only in recent years that you could call it usable for more than basic things[1] - and the author often contributes tests to specific issues with the Xemu emulator[2] comparing it with the real Xbox).

[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

[2] https://xemu.app/

Moving parts (other than RRoD) are the major reason for failure. HDs are among the worst offenders. The PS3 has a full SATA compatible drive slot and easy data transfer instructions. Designed to be owner accessible. Mine has a SSD now. Not so much on the 360 part, and my Jasper’s (hw rev) hard drive is not sounding great. There are utils for emulating the insane drive ID and custom boot block but why am I required to jump through such hoops.

Oh yeah, when I picked up my 360 and Ps3 recently, just judging by the time frames of the models and how little save games were on it - they didn't have a hard life.

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.

While I agree, I also am happy to hear this. For example, the Xbox 360 was released in November, 2005.

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.

Then there is the problem that the emulated games can't connect to their servers or verify their DRM so they run in demo mode. Every Extra Extend Extreme is one example, frustrating as I own this one.

What's the best bet for getting an X360 emulator that works with little hassle on Linux? I've not had the best of luck in this space.

I bought MX vs ATC Alive game was 40 Euro and you had to buy DLC to get extras. It was trst back then. But right not, I have half of the game...

My company pays an obscene amount of money for Charon VAX on Windows.

I have my own VMS install on SimH, which is free.

https://www.stromasys.com/solution/charon-vax/

Well, there is a difference between a commercial product and a free product. I have a page on my website: https://stanq.com/open-source where I cover the differences.

Take a look and let me know if there's something missing...