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Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

at this point is there any reason to use xb360 hardware? emulation on modern hardware has gotta be substantially better

The Xbox 360/PS3 era of video game consoles is probably the hardest era to emulate. Subsequent generations of consoles are essentially the same hardware as regular computers, just with a custom OS (and known hardware profile, certainly a benefit over regular consumer PCs). But that era of video game consoles is the last gasp of the custom hardware design of earlier consoles, which is substantially harder to emulate because the hardware just doesn't look like what modern hardware looks like.

Furthermore, said era is also right after Denard scaling came to an end, which means that current hardware doesn't have that much better specs, at least in easy-to-use form, than the hardware of the time. If any game tried to take the hardware to its limits, it would be a real struggle to emulate it with regular computers.

so, the challenge is what’s interesting, or any specific title or application?

xbox 360 is pretty close to modern graphics hardware; in fact it debuted modern shader arch a bit before it became the PC standard.

That would have been DirectX 8, which predates XBox 360 by five years.

I think they're thinking of the original Xbox which had pixel shaders.

Even that is a bit of a strech, at it got released one year after DirectX 8 was made available, and was powered by GeForce 3 class hardware, which naturally came first on PC.

> The GeForce 3 was unveiled during the 2001 Macworld Conference & Expo/Tokyo 2001 in Makuhari Messe and powered realtime demos of Pixar's Junior Lamp and id Software's Doom 3. Apple would later announce launch rights for its new line of computers.

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_3_series

Naturally outside PC, there were other stuff predating programmable graphics, however if we stick to the PC, XBox follows PC, not the other way around, specially since the first one wasn't that great versus PlayStation 2 in market share, even if there were some great games like Halo and Fable.

PS3 was wacky, but the 360 wasn't that different from a PC at the time. There were some differences in rendering API, it had a few features not available on PC hardware. And the CPU cores were actually slower than an equivalent intel, but you had 6 of them, rare for the time. If your game was relatively portable and already used a API relatively close to D3D, it wasn't too hard to bring it up on the 360. I worked on a 360 game FWIW.

Which game?

It was an early xbox live arcade game. Not AAA.

Xbox 360 is also a PowerPC architecture, which on its own makes it quite a bit different from normal PC hardware, and even if that's a target that's more common to emulate there's still heavy performance losses in doing so.

It might have been easier to port to because of good OS design, but running games for it will still be inefficient compared to running on actual hardware.

360 emulation was already quite good a year ago, now there's even an experimental fork of xenon that does recompilation for even more performance.

Regardless of the D3D-like API-layer (which helped Microsoft compensate for the peculiarities of PowerPC), they're both PowerPC architectures.

You apparently don't know the Story how Sony spent big R&D-money with IBM to transition from MIPS to the custom PowerPC Cell Architecture, while IBM was already selling parts of this development to Microsoft for Xbox 360, and Microsoft ultimately beating Sony in market-launch with a chipset Sony partially financed...[0]

There's a nice book about it from two of the IBM Chip-Designers called "The Race for a New Game Machine" by David Shippy and Mickie Phipps

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2009/jan/01/sony...

Nintendo also used PowerPC for GameCube, Wii and Wii U.

The PS3 system design was radically different. We considering porting the same PC game we (relatively) easily ported to 360 to that platform, but rejected it because it would be months of work, at least. Didn't matter that it was a similar CPU (technically) to the 360.

Microsoft was helped by PS 3 being a pain to program, given the Cell architecture, a mistake that Sony didn't repeat, and hence why the 360 was the only XBox that had an upper hand against Sony.

The 360 had three hyperthreaded cores, not six.

It had 6 hardware threads, but yes pedantically there were three cores.

Xbox 360 and PS3 emulators are still borderline unusable on my new-ish PC. They're slow, glitchy, and/or hard to set up. Related to what the other commenter said, anyone who says these are good must have a lot of time to deal with it, whereas I just want the equivalent of sticking the disc into the console.

GameCube is the newest thing I've had a decent experience emulating, and even that isn't 100% unless it's Melee with the Slippi optimizations (n.b. did not try DS or Switch).

An Xbox Series S does a fine job of playing Xbox 360 games and doesn't cost much.

> There are 632 games that have been made backward compatible out of 2,155 that have been released for Xbox 360.

It's also going to struggle without a disk drive to play my physical collection.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_backward-compatible_ga...

If you want to emulate a current console, try emulating the switch. I haven't looked into it much, but apparently it works better on modern hardware than on the switch itself. Not surprising given the switch aging hardware and power limit.

The Switch is a mainstream-ish ARM system. IIRC it maps really well to Apple's M system.

But the supposedly working Switch emulators only have experimental Mac support at best. Also idk if the CPU arch is really the hard part in general... we never got an Xbox 360 emulator for PPC Mac ;)

I thought Ryujinx’ Mac support was great?

Maybe it was, idk cause that project shut down

yes, I guess running switch games on android is like running x86 windows games on x86 linux using wine.

Now that you mention it, I tried that once and gave up. The amount of confusion like this makes me not want to try again (Reddit post from 4mo ago): https://www.reddit.com/r/yuzu/comments/1gkdr5x/whats_the_mos...

Seems like these projects keep getting into legal trouble, shut down, then forked.

> Xbox 360 and PS3 emulators are still borderline unusable on my new-ish PC.

This is unfortunate as a decade ago Microsoft had an internal emulator for Xbox 360 that ran at near native speed.

I am curious if that emulator is what it used to play Xbox360 games on newer x64 based Xbox models, or if they are using a different code base.

Either way, technically it is possible for the experience to be good!

I wonder about that too. New console supports only a subset of 360 games somehow, and with different enhancements.

The 360 could also play original Xbox games without much exception, but it was noticeably slower than the original. Halo 2 on 360 has a shorter render distance.

> The 360 could also play original Xbox games without much exception

I remember there being a list of what it could play but I was never too sure how comprehensive it was. I know it couldn't emulate Midtown Madness 3.

Oh. So it can't emulate the game I probably played the most.

I think the 360 backwards compatibility is a mix of emulation and certain parts being disassembled & recompiled for x86 with some black magic.

edit: Here's an interview with platform lead Bill Stillwell that goes into a lot more detail https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2017-xbox-one-x-bac...

Oh sweet, thanks for the link. It sounds like it was harder getting things running on the XB1's tiny CPU vs running an emulator on monster dev machines, no surprise there! :-D

I believe there is actually a recent userland project that disassembles and recompiles 360 games for x86...

Hands down my favorite thing about my time at microsoft as an intern was just a random brown bag lunch with the engineers who did the powerPC emulator for xbox360 games on xbox one. It was an incredible talk and they went deep and were happy to answer questions.

Oh damn, I was probably there at the time, working in the building, and was completely unaware of the talk!

That would've been awesome!

By that time though my org had spun out of Xbox to become the Microsoft Band team, so we didn't get any of the cool invites anymore. :(

> Xbox 360 and PS3 emulators are still borderline unusable on my new-ish PC.

How did you manage to achieve that? What specs are we talking?

10th gen i5(? might be another gen I forget, will check at home), 16GB RAM, RTX 2060ti, Win10

Could you be a bit more specific regarding that CPU? That's a very wide range.

i5-9400f, and I was wrong about GPU, it's 1660ti

It's really surprising then that you had such a bad experience with PS3 emulation specifically at least, the i5 9400F was a go-to recommendation there for a very long time, basically ever since that processor's release (6 years ago).

It was in last August they bumped their system requirements to the i5 10400F. Nearly all of the games marked "Playable" in their compatibility list should be plug-and-play territory, with mint performance.

What were the games you tested with classified as? Did you try to seek help on their community space(s)?

I didn't try reaching out, I just wanted to play Shrek Forever After (for a very random reason) and gave up after 5 minutes of choppiness. Like I said, there's probably a fix, and I appreciate that there's community support, but I simply didn't have time. Especially because on the PS3 side, this was after waiting a while for RPCS3 to do its pre-run caching.

Given that game has been marked "Playable" years before your CPU has seen its initial release, and that there are no notes on its Wiki page, I'd expect it to run essentially perfectly out-of-the-box, short of some regression causing issues.

You should give it a retry sometime if you can / want to. That said, I should probably let you know that the community can be slightly hostile, and they will ask you do the legwork if it's not a misconfig but a suspected regression (they'll want you to bisect the build where the choppiness appeared). You'll also want to run the topic by the volunteers in the #help channel on their Discord before opening an issue ticket on GitHub, as their GitHub issue tickets are not for support, only for actual issue / feature request tracking.

Xbox 360 emulation is still really bad for most games, despite what some YouTubers would have you believe. But let's say in a few years it does become substantially better. There's still:

• Nostalgia

• Authenticity

• Compatibility

• Preservation

• Cost of entry

Even if 360 emulation does become practical, a 360 will still be cheaper than any gaming PC capable of playing those games.

Just this week a PC port of the 360 version of Sonic Unleashed was released that was accomplished via static recompilation techniques. It plays flawlessly and is really quite an impressive release. If this is possible now then emulation of these consoles might not be the only avenue to preserving their history.

Yes, but the graphics system for the game was completely reworked by people familiar with Sega's proprietary Hedgehog Engine. A straight recompile would have been unplayable.

Interesting, I didn’t know that. I suspect many casual observers don’t either. So you’re suggesting they did this work with proprietary info they’d gained through work with Sega and thus broke their NDA?

Not necessarily -- a lot of external hobbyist work has gone into reverse-engineering Sonic Generations, which has an official PC port and is based on the same engine as Unleashed.

Funnily enough, one of the most famous Generations mods is a project that ports over a bunch of levels from Unleashed. IIRC they changes the graphics pipeline to look and work more like the Unleashed one, too.

There's no meaningful technological difference between what that static recompilation tool can do for you vs. what hacking up Xenia can. I'd also hazard a guess that that port's GitHub repo will get DMCA'd eventually, and rightfully so.

I really don't know why people keep doing this to themselves and to the communities they claim to love. This is about as far from a clean-room reimplementation and porting effort as humanly possible. It's not a forward-thinking, sustainable preservation effort at all.

I also find it much less drama to sit down on the couch and fire up a console, than to have to:

- startup PC

- update PC

- figure out why bluetooth controller won't pair to PC

- finally get it working, and then have a game crash on you

Considering that the constant stream of system software and game updates became a thing exactly in the 7th console generation (x360 era), updates are a pretty funny thing to bring up in a comparison like this.

Yeah that’s fair, my consoles are mostly Nintendo or older systems

I went to fire up my old Xbox 360 to play dance central with my kids and of course it had developed RRoD while sitting on a shelf in my basement. It seems emulation is a no go for kinect games as well.

It’s also the worst era to play natively. Bad textures and horrible frames per second.

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