Xemu: Original Xbox Emulator

I had talked to a dev who worked on one of the Fable games and he mentioned that he was only alloted x amount of the total memory available on the 360 which surprised me, since I was primarily a PC gamer I didnt think about how little memory the console had.

Fun reminder that we got to the moon on significantly less memory.

When the original Xbox was released (2001), its specs were comparable to a low-end PC of the time, but with a somewhat better GPU.

They could've implemented their own virtual memory and paged it to disk. Very easy to do. That's what we had to do to load 64mb ROMs when creating an n64 emulator for Xbox.

> recognizing some of the things that Xbox has going for it right now with Xbox GamePass and cloud gaming

Or they don't recognize them as inherently good things. Game pass has potentially cannibalized "real" game sales on the platform and primed its userbase to "just wait for it to come to gamepass"; with the gamepass honeymoon developer deals drying up, this has had dire implications for third party support going forward. Xcloud has been a mixed bag - you can find countless reports of it lagging behind PS cloud streaming and various PC cloud gaming vendors in performance (latency) and image quality (though I personally haven't seen much difference between most of them).

For a lot of us, the current generation Xbox platform has been doing everything just as bad or even worse than it was with the Xbox One - they've stopped iterating on backwards compatibility, they've pushed Gamepass above all, and they've spent unbelievable amounts of money on M&A instead of building up their own existing studios and releasing more new original exclusive games. The quality of some of their major trumpeted releases has also been incredibly suspect, despite repeated claims of high quality from their internal tastemakers before release.

The dumb social media console war stuff has unfortunately gotten in the way of some important self-review and introspection that the Xbox team should be doing. As a longtime Xbox fan, it has been tremendously disappointing to see.

It's funny that you should note that they are doing positive things in a transitional era, only to finish off by noting that you are playing decades-old games on their hardware.

While I am a fan of GamePass, and I own two XBox One consoles, I have no desire to own a Series console or the forthcoming refresh. Everything I want to play I can play on the One or via Cloud; but more importantly: the difficulty of discovering compelling experiences in this era of XBox is too damn high.

There are too many straight-up _bad_ indie games swamping GamePass, and too many B and AAA quality games that are phoning it in.

The Xbox team have just had terrible leadership choices.

The One was a miss from the beginning , trying to be more than a gaming console and falling short on all fronts. The name didn’t help either.

Then they picked an even worse name for the Series X and and Series S. while implementing a necessity for parity. confusing the market and holding back devs.

The 360 was effectively a flash in the pan IMHO, helped by a significant misstep on Sony’s part with the PS3 design, and Nintendo moving to create their own market with the Wii that effectively made it a companion console rather than a competing one.

Any game developer could have told them early on that Kinect was next-to-useless, despite the technology being interesting.

Even operating simple menus was problematic. You could point, but had no buttons to click. It was never going to work beyond a few niche cases (dance games and simple minigames).

I’m sad for kids who don’t get to experience high-quality couch multiplayer.

Also making an account for every little stupid thing. No you don’t need account systems. At least make them opt-in.

It's not that people are not recognizing the good things about it. There's this underlying theory that we had one chance at a digital game library. The PS3 and Xbox 360 were way too early for people to get attached to their digital purchases; after all, few large titles released digitally day and date with their disc versions. So people bought a few indie titles digitally, but they still had a big disc library.

But the PS4 generation was the digital generation. The majority of sales were digital then (probably not dollars-wise, but certainly units-wise). So the theory goes that people have this large lock-in with PS4, which leads to them directly going to the PS5 without looking at the distinguished competition's offerings.

I'm not sure I agree.

Wow, cant believe they added halo 2. Man. that's sick.

If I remember right, most of the "operating system" was linked statically into the game images (AFAIK at least the DirectX libs, not sure about any low level "firmware" stuff). I'm pretty sure there was no concept of "hardware drivers" though.

Per the documentation you have to provide dumps of the original Xbox bootroms, and it can optionally use a HDD image taken from a real Xbox, but the latter isn't required because they provide a basic cleanroom reimplementation of the dashboard you can use instead.

https://xemu.app/docs/required-files/

The CPU in the Xbox was literally an off-the-shelf Intel processor (some crazy people even soldered in faster CPUs that were never meant for the Xbox) but as I understand it the GPU is weird, and that's where most of the difficulty with emulation comes from. It's a unique mashup of GeForce 2 and GeForce 3 IP that was never used anywhere else, so the existing efforts to reverse engineer GF2 and GF3 for Linux drivers were of limited use.

If I am not wrong this is a LLE (low level emulator) rather than a hle so it should emulate the hardware rather than the kernel. So you need the dump of the microsoft's xbox kernel for it to work

I think most people familiar with the original Xbox hw (like people working on xemu :)) take offense when you say it's just a PC. It's PC hardware, but nothing much is shared with the "IBM PC" architecture-wise. Even the software side is very different. It's not running a customized version of Windows, but the Windows kernel. One stripped down to 256kb, including the boot up animation and sound. That design for example required that a lot of things get linked into a game's executable, like network drivers and the entire TCP/IP stack.

If it were that easy, we'd have had a wine pendant for Xbox binaries 20 years ago. Cxbx is pretty much the wine approach to Xbox emulation and it's far from perfect.

There are two major original Xbox emulators - cxbx/cxbx-reloaded, which originally tried to do both LLE and HLE but these days does exclusively high-level emulation like you are describing, and xemu (this one), which does mostly low-level emulation.

So no, in this case Xemu runs the original Xbox kernel. This is why it's more compatible and generally much more robust than cxbx in terms of game support.

There are a lot of challenges with doing HLE for Xbox. While there is a kernel, its HAL is very low-level. Games are statically linked against the entire stack of DLLs that you'd usually find in Windows (the Xbox SDK), and depending on when they were released, can have one of about a gazillion versions of the Xbox SDK in them. So doing HLE is a matter of finding and hooking an enormous number of SDK functions, but also keeping up with the plethora of minor changes which were made constantly through the life of the console. Emulating the kernel doesn't get you very far, because it still provides low-level interfaces to (for example) manipulating GPU state, so you end up having to implement the GPU hardware in LLE anyway.

This is a myth that is incorrect. The original Xbox's BIOS bares little to no resemblance to Windows 2000 (its closest contemporary) and runs from a 1MB flash chip at most. Games run Bare Metal on the system

The Xbox hardware was also quite advanced for its release date (2001). Many PCs at the time still had 100MHz FSB but the Xbox ran at 133MHz. The Xbox also had DDR RAM, not much of it (64MB), but DDR wouldn't be commonplace until the Pentium 4 and Athlon XP platforms a couple years later. Most PCs were still running regular single-channel SDRAM.

I've built a near-period correct PC with a later and faster CPU (Tualatin at 1.0GHz vs Xbox's Coppermine at 700MHz), more RAM (512MB), faster GPU (GF4 Ti4400), but it still can't achieve the raw memory and GPU bandwidth the Xbox had.

Out of all the og Xbox games, Kung Fu Chaos provided the most fun and laughs with friends. It honestly still holds up gameplay wise. I still play it sometimes. The minigames were the best.

It had loads of good games! Ninja Gaiden, Otogi 1 & 2, Far Cry Instincts, Crimson Skies, Panzer Dragoon Orta, Metal Wolf Chaos, Project Gotham Racing, Jade Empire, Fable, Outrun 2006, Splinter Cell, Burnout, Chronicles of Riddick, Conker, Psychonauts, Unreal Championship 2, Oddworld, Forza, etc.

Metal Arms, what a blast from the past!

To me, Jet Set Radio Future was worth buying the entire console back in the day. Halo was just a nice bonus.