Few Questions

[halomasta]

1. Does this run on Vista 64-Bit or will it in the future?
2. At a rough estimate...very rough...super rough...when do you think this can play a commercial game all the way through? (If the answer is a decade I'll accept it )
3. Do you have any interest in emulating the Sega CHIHIRO arcade board since it is the same hardware?
4. Are you currently the only active xbox emulator?
5. Why are you doing this near-impossible task?

[patrickvl]

Originally Posted by halomasta

1. Does this run on Vista 64-Bit or will it in the future?

If the FS-patching I talked about earlier becomes a reality, then yes.
Otherwise, no - both Cxbx and Dxbx work around the differences between the FS-layout of Xbox and win32 in such a way, that it just won't work on Vista 64 (or we don't know how to get this to work otherwise).

2. At a rough estimate...very rough...super rough...when do you think this can play a commercial game all the way through? (If the answer is a decade I'll accept it )

It all depends on how much time is spend on it - if shadow_tj and me stay the only two regular change-submitters, we'll probably be working on it for about ten to sixteen months before the first game starts to work. Note, that's a very rough estimate, we might get lucky and get some results in about half a year, but we could as well need up to three years. No-one really knows anything for sure at this point in time.

3. Do you have any interest in emulating the Sega CHIHIRO arcade board since it is the same hardware?

To be blunt : No. The thing is, we're not really emulating any hardware (yet). We're 'emulating' an xbox by fooling the game executable - we let it believe it's running on an actual xbox, while in reality it's just a regular win32 box.
We do this by implementing the Xbox kernel ourselves (although luckily most of the functions can be passed on, almost unchanged, to the hosts' win32 kernel), and by patching library functions that wouldn't work otherwise.

So, any other console with about the same specs but a totally different OS, is really out of the question.

4. Are you currently the only active xbox emulator?

Nope, blueshogun96 is working privately on a LLE Xbox emulator, called Xenoborg. Search these forums for more info about this.

There's also the one-man XProject, although that's been silent for more than a few months now.

And some people, like Zomby, are still patching the Cxbx sources, to make it run more games. However, these changes are not yet public I'm afraid.

Last, but not least, Microsoft made ax xbox emulator for the xbox 360, although very little is known about the inner workings of that. We do know they are doing almost pure LLE emulation, in the same regard as Xenoborg is.

I can't let Xeon go unmentioned either, although some people think that it's a patched Cxbx... I really don't know, and I really don't want to start that discussion all over again - I just felt it should at least be mentioned to make this list complete.

Those are the projects I know of. Others may exist without going public yet.

5. Why are you doing this near-impossible task?

It's fun! We can learn a lot from a project like this, and we like the change of subject from my day-jobs (for both of us, that's also Delphi development, but on a whole other terrain). Plus, it's a nice showcase for what you can accomplish with the Delphi language.

Don't hesitate to ask for more detail, normally we're very open in our communication. Just don't ask too much of our time, or we won't be able to code a single line anymore!

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Last edited by patrickvl; August 17th, 2008 at 19:38. Reason: Fixed typos & mention of Xeon added

[halomasta]

Thanks that cleared everything up and good luck ^_^