The first Xbox emulator was born back in 2004, it was called Xeon. True, the developers could not go far, and since then little has changed. For a while, it even seemed that a large number of emulators would turn into quality, and soon the very project would appear, the developers of which would announce that they had created a working emulator for the Xbox, but alas. As before, all programs that claim to emulate a popular gaming platform remain in their infancy or inoperative state.
What is the matter? The architecture of the set-top box is not much more complicated than the architecture of the average PC; moreover, for so many years computers have taken a big leap forward in performance. So with the emulation of a hopelessly outdated console that runs under the modified Vin2K, and uses a slightly computer-optimized hardware of the 2001 model as a filling, there should be no problems. There were even opinions that making this a lot easier than, for example, emulating Ps2. But, apparently, someone at Microsoft "clicked" on all the creators who developed their Xbox emulator. And each project, as soon as it became known to the general public, very quickly ceased to exist, never having time to take shape in something worthwhile.
So, let's see what managed to get out of the pen of developers?
CxWx - this Xbox emulator, before its development stopped completely, managed to achieve, perhaps, the most outstanding results. With it, you can run three games: Turk, Futurama and Crushing races.
Using it is quite simple. If you want to run the game, you need to get a copy of the disk image, (torrents to help you), put it in a folder on your hard drive and open it using the Xiso program, then you will need to find the .xbe file there
By launching it, you start the game.
The next on the list is the Xbox Xeon emulator, all he can do is run the Halo NTSC game. True, the quality of the gameplay suffers greatly, the picture in the emulated Halo moves too sluggishly, but there's nothing to be done.
Another emulator is called Dxbx, at first the development of this software (in fact, the port from C ++ to Delphi of the CxBx source code) was quite cheerful, since the guys used the source code of a competing project. They were about to catch up and overtake CxBx, but stumbled halfway. First, the main developer left the project, then the second one left, and everything calmed down, they did not even have time to finish the Xbox joystick emulator . And without him, talking about launching games is simply stupid.
Everything is clear with the Xbox, you say, but did I read that an Xbox 360 emulator is being developed?
Indeed, more than five years have passed since the release of the second Microsoft console, it may seem to someone that during this time the technology has gone so far that it will actually create an emulator for this console.
In fact, this is not the case, to say the least. If you look closely at the technical specifications of the Xbox2 hardware, you can easily see that emulating it will not be easy. Practice shows that for normal emulation, the computer on which the emulator is running should be several (preferably 4-5) times more powerful than the console that we emulate. But the Xbox 360 has 3 cores, each of which works in two streams, and they work at 3.2 ghz frequencies. Thus, in order to simply compare in power with this processor, we need a computer that has 6 cores of 1.6 ghz each, and for emulating such cores there must be at least 18-24.
The video card of the console is also not easy, it has a capacity of 500 million polygons / second, for normal operation emulated games should run on a video card with a capacity of about 1.5-2 billion polygons per second.
Perhaps by 2016, when computer technology will take another big step forward, PCs will appear in the homes of users who can handle such tasks.