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MasterGoon
04-14-2001, 09:55 AM
How hard will it be to build an X-Box emulator for PC since X-Box almost is a PC?

Armacham
04-14-2001, 11:28 AM
The main reason it would be hard to make an XBox emulator is because the XBox takes a PC and trims the fat, making it just for gaming. Computers always have extra programs running in the background, plus the massive windows kernal. XBox only has Win2000 kernal that runs on about 5 KB of ram, and there are no background programs. In simpler terms a computer will have to be really freakin' powerful, and there has to be a way to get past the copy-protection pn the DVD's.

Aaron
04-26-2001, 11:06 PM
i agree.. but WOW 5k of ram... jebus i wish my comp ran with that.. lol i wonder if xbox is gonna be able to be hooked to a pc for linkup capabilities?

Armacham
04-28-2001, 08:03 PM
My mistake... I just read that The Win2000 Kernel runs straight off rom, and its actually 5 Megs. Still very good. My Win98 takes about 25 megs of my physical ram and a butt load of my swap file, just to start the damn thing.

Aaron
04-28-2001, 08:41 PM
oh.. thats not too bad i guess.. but will their be a windows type operating system, or will it be like dreamcast and just use it as a shell almost?

Armacham
04-28-2001, 08:43 PM
well, since it's completely on ROM it will take NO ram. No one knows.. but it will probably boot up like the dreamcast.

Aaron
04-29-2001, 10:52 AM
hmm.. that kinda sucks.. it would be awesome to have a windows style operating system in it.. but as you stated they are going for the "this isnt a scaled down pc" motif so i could see why it doesnt have one.

Necrophilic
06-01-2001, 06:23 AM
I dont see what the big deal is about emulating the Xbox!
I am a computer engineering student and I have a great idea for it.
Creat a PCI card of sorts with some ram on it and a battery backup. A ram drive. Dont need much maybe a 8-16mb SDRAM like the rom on the Xbox. Creat an installer that finds your hardware and drivers and loads in that minimum like the Xbox Win2k. I know I know copyrights and what not. But in theory its a very sound idea and I would pay even a $100 to have my system dual boot to Xbox and my normal windows and probably so would most other people.

I cant imagion going back to looking it my TV to play games. Even the best SVHS TVs only give you 800x600 resolution even though the Xbox will be puming in a lot more then that you will go blind trying to play.

I REALY HATE CONSOLS!!! But I love the games they have. Anyway if anyone thinks there is a problem with the idea tell me about it and I'll try to give you more info.

Hehe this sounds like a cool senior project. Maybe I will run with it.

embattle
06-01-2001, 09:41 AM
Necrophilic use a HDTV then :p

Xbox is only console that support's it, upto 720p/1080i

I think also a 3rd party maybe making a lead to monitor but dont quote me on that.

Necrophilic
06-01-2001, 10:31 AM
I found this Toshiba thats a 40inch and gives 1080x1280
http://www.consumer-direct.com/detail.cfm?vpartno=TOSH40H80&weight=180.0&afl=CMJ&AID=1487700&PID=695030
and its around $1800

But for the same price I found a Sony 24inch monitor thats wide screen for the same price
http://www.sonystyle.com/vaio/displays/gdm_fw900.htm
2304 x 1440 resolution at .23-.27

Thanks its something to think about

Aaron
06-01-2001, 02:31 PM
what you suggest is all fine and well, but the xbox has a highly specialized graphics card, along with a custom sound chipset. I doubt anything we have or WILL have will be able to emulate it for a LONG LONG time.

jnex26
06-04-2001, 07:02 AM
The XBox will be the easiest Machine to Emulate Although at the moment the PC Don't realy have the required amount of power except for possibley very High END PC's and as the Xbox's unified memory architecture is faster than SDRAM and a PC emulator would have to look towards RDRAM for a emulator to work. The graphics chip is nothing to worry about as Nvidia are going to release the NV25 chip to PC card manufacturers which will be just as powerfull as a XBox chip but it will have a dedicated memory bandwidth.

AMD - Not even a top end AMD would have enough speed as they are still all SDRAM although 133Mhz the Memory architecture would not be fast enough a Intel P4 using RDRAM would be the best a probably the only option.

As for a PC board overriding the ROM BIOS to attempt to DUAL boot the PC into a XBOX mode is rediculous that would be overcomplicating things the best emulators are simple.

any PC with DIRECTX 8 already has the XBOX on their machine a small program would be required to sort out the diffrences between the two diffrent kernals and sort out the hardware config

Sound Would be No Problem just strip the channels into 32 8 stream sections using internal mixing (software) to combine the chanels into 32 seperate streams and push that output though the sound chip however some sound chips now support upto 128 channels .

Armacham - What Machine do you use and what windows config I personally had to go above 200 Meg before windows stopped eating the memorey on bootup however I have only a very small swap file

Necrophilic - The Copyright would be a real Issue as you would have to backwards engineer Win2000 and Direct X 8 then encode them onto a EEPROM (SDRAM WOULD RUN THE BACKUP DOWN IN HOURS) (EEPROM - ELECTIRICAL ERASABLE PROGRAMABLE READ ONLY MEMORY) or flash RAM If you're a computer engineer you should know this and Microsoft would have you for backwards engineering the Kernal and Direct X 8 the only enluator you can legaly sell is a HLE (High Level Emulator) which would be pointless as you already have all the microcodes in place a HLC is for when you don't want to use the copyrighted microcode (the microcode is diffrent from the kernal and DIRECTX 8)

Aaron
06-04-2001, 01:50 PM
BUT it is gonna use DX9...

jnex26
06-05-2001, 01:05 AM
Last I'd heard on that issue was it was running on a modified version of directx8

Where did you read it !!

SSJKulilin
06-07-2001, 12:19 AM
it's not 9, it's a special version of 8, that supports stuff like volumetric lighting and whatnot

thedrisc
06-07-2001, 07:46 AM
jenx36 nvidia is came out with a new mother board that has there xbox sound chip built on the board. it is called tthe nforce


"NVIDIA's nForce is, as the company repeatedly told us at the launch, a grounds up design of an integrated chipset, rather than "graphics bolted here, and audio bolted there", which could have been a reference to any number of competing products. Yes, it is a new architecture for the PC, in some ways, and it owes much to Xbox, delivering all the multimedia capabilities you would need for a PC, while tightly coupling the Northbridge and Southbridge functions."

"The Multimedia Communications Processor (MCP) is the connected to the IGP using a HyperTransport interface (8-bit wide, 400 MHz, differential), and houses the impressively featured Audio Processing Unit (APU - the audio from the Xbox including Dolby Digital 5.1 encoding), which comprises a sound unit several times as powerful as a Creative Live card. It also comes with a complete suite of networking and communications interfaces, including 10/100Base-T Ethernet and home phone-line networking (HomePNA 2.0). "