how long until 360 emulated properly?

[Foxi4]

I am probably supposed to laugh here but if the PCI expansion stuff takes off (you can buy a cell chip in a PCI card form to stick on any old PC although it costs a pretty penny) and/or some of the dynamic recompilation/decompilation stuff takes off (I am not sure what languages are used but a nice C# and DRM locked (see things like dashlaunch adding a portion of unhashed memory) not to mention some people getting somewhere with C++ decompilation and C decompilation has been looking good for a while) along with a few more engine source releases (more than a few games use modded source, unreal, quake/doom/ID and suchlike engines) and/or extensive modding kits for the same we might see some way of playing a game- see some of the projects to punch the doom engine into shape for running games that did not have source releases but owed a passing nod to such games. If however you want something like the 8,16 and 32bit era consoles (consider we are still exploring ultra accurate emulators there) the that would elicit the *laughs* response.

If you are pointing this at me, I thought I clearly stated that building a rig of sufficient processing power is possible, but not for the average consumer, and it won't be possible for the average consumer for quite some time, regardless whether or not decompilation will take off. Some things are really down to hardware, and even if you optimize the code as much as humanly possible, an x86/x64 will still choke during Cell emulation and Cell PCI-E cards will STILL be expensive in a few year's time.

 

[FAST6191]

@Foxi4 it was not meant to directed at any one.

Anyhow I was asked to expand on it

PCI cards- the rules of thumb regarding how much faster/more powerful a machine needs to be to do emulation of another relate to the differences in system layout and if you can bolt on some custom hardware like a nice PCI card with the requisite/similar chips onboard (or maybe a beefy future FPGA) to narrow the gap it could get easier- I then mentioned the cell processor on a PCI card as an example. Frankly though I do not imagine it is not going to be nice to code for and I hate to think what kind of latency and bandwidth issues you will run into (arguably such things are some of the reasons CUDA and co have not set the world on fire).

Recompilation/decompilation (dynamic and otherwise)- three concepts here 1) the irreversibility of computation is lessening via the application of some techniques (most of which have been seen for years in emulation- ever had a game that does not work properly where something like bsnes does work...) http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall06/cos576/papers/bennett73.html has some on the concept but if you look at some of the stuff coming out of the decompilation and anti virus world it gets good.
2) Looking at the marketplace there is a lot of code in C# (well .NET) which is a language with extensive libraries to do most things. To this end if you can get it to hook into a PC version you then only have to do a little bit of work. Likewise the early N64 emulators (and current ones/ones made for lower powered systems) did a similar thing with plain C to attempt to get it to work on a PC.
3) The 360 memory is encrypted meaning some of the more exotic techniques are unavailable for use by developers which should help make the job of the reverse engineer a bit easier.

Engines- coding an engine is a right pain but buying one in that already does shooting, vehicles and such and maybe poking it around a bit is somewhat easier. Such practices have been going on for years and years and occasionally the older games get really nice dev tools released or even the entire source ( http://www.iddevnet.com/doom3/ and http://www.3drealms.com/downloads.html being two examples) allowing people to take the engines and rework them to support the assets of other games that use the same engine or a tweak thereof. Should say the unreal3 engine get a source release or enough of an SDK to infer lots about how it works then it could be used to do some stuff on console exclusives. Granted there probably is a feeling that unlike the likes of doom and duke3d the modern engines are too complicated but if I had to place money on what technique the first "emulated" 360 game will use it would be heavily weighted towards this.

As a nice example of a combination of the two above see the likes of WINE, 3dfx emulation and such.

 

[Zalda]

well guess it's off to buy a cheap 360 in a few years thehn..... tnx all

 

[muckers]

Given that an awful lot of the major 360 releases get released on the PC, you might as well just play them on PC. You'll need a hell of a lot less powerful set up to play them than you'd need to emulate 360 games properly.

 

[Satangel]

okay so i'll probably get disappointed but if you see the state the ps2 emulation currently is in, it gives me hope. ps2 was released in 2000, and pcsx2 started shortly after that, and about 6 years later, it was possible to run just about all games (ff x for example) at 60FPS on a decent pc. now after 10 years (aprox.) in development any game can be emulated, perfectly, faster than 60fps, upscaled, whatever

so the 360 is now over 6 years old, how long until it gets emulated properly? i haven't heard of any 360 emulators, so that isn't promising..... by this time in the ps2 emulation (and probably NGC too), some games could be emulated perfectly already.

so how long before i can give RDR a try :yay360:

He only wants to play RDR, which sadly isn't on the PC. I don't think Rockstar will release it on PC, ever. What a shame.....

 

[Zalda]

i know, what a shame, Rockstar should just release the game already on the pc, wtf are they thinking

 

[Satangel]

So, if I was to buy a new gaming PC now, I wouldn't have to invest in a really top-notch CPU because in the next 5 years (the time the PC will get used, not much longer), no other platform will be emulated properly?
Basically the only platforms I can see getting emulated from now on are the 3DS and the PSP, all the other platforms aren't possible yet.
If I buy a decent CPU like an i7, I'm set for everything emulated for the next 5 years.

 

[DinohScene]

No you wont be.

Just get a 360 and hack it.
Far cheaper then a new PC.
Besides XBLive isn't even emulated for the Original Xbox.
You're stuck with XLink Kai IF it even gets emulated.

Besides Jasper and Kronos consoles don't RRoD, they can be found in pretty much any 360 made in the last half year of 2009 and in 2010.
Trinity boards have DVD drives that can be hacked. (Trinity is the 360 Slim)

You can RGH it. (equivalent of a jTAG) or DVD hack it (requires DVD's to load games)
RGH = No XBLive.
DVD = XBlive.

edit:
PSP is already in stages of good emulation.
3DS will be a different story but my best guess is that it requires the same as Dolphin.

 

[Satangel]

No you wont be.

Just get a 360 and hack it.
Far cheaper then a new PC.
Besides XBLive isn't even emulated for the Original Xbox.
You're stuck with XLink Kai IF it even gets emulated.

Besides Jasper and Kronos consoles don't RRoD, they can be found in pretty much any 360 made in the last half year of 2009 and in 2010.
Trinity boards have DVD drives that can be hacked. (Trinity is the 360 Slim)

You can RGH it. (equivalent of a jTAG) or DVD hack it (requires DVD's to load games)
RGH = No XBLive.
DVD = XBlive.

edit:
PSP is already in stages of good emulation.
3DS will be a different story but my best guess is that it requires the same as Dolphin.

Thanks. 3DS won't be as hard as Dolphin I think, but it's not really a problem, my PC will just laugh at it :yaypc:
Will keep this in mind when I build a new PC, CPU doesn't have to be top-notch because all the possible consoles have been emulated already.

 

[DinohScene]

I think that a quad or hexacore would be more then enough to emulate a 3DS.
3DS has a dualcore ARM CPU iirc.

Just get a PC that meets the requirements for running Dolphin in 1080p and you'll be set for the next couple of years.

 

[Majorami]

"They" "used" to say that "emulation" requires a computer/system thats 7x more powerful than the platform they're trying to emulate.

Its hard to argue with seeing that to play PS2 games near-perfectly with all the bells and whistles and such, you need a computer thats worth close to or at $1000. I've seen recordings of FF12 on i7 Quad processor machines that have FF12's backgrounds suddenly dissapearing and reappearing. So its not like its been perfected to 99-100% yet.

That said, I can't really imagine how much money would have to go into a PC that does 360 emulation perfectly...

All I know is by the time we know that answer.... the 360 itself will be in the $100-$150 range, $75 used. Even now, and even in the next 5, yes 5, years, its more practical to just buy a 360, and hack it.

For me, I can either spend $750-$1000 on a new laptop that can run PS2 games near-perfect, or spend less than $120 to hack a PS2 and run perfect games.