Meh, I think I said something like this could be done in another thread. Anyways in other news it seems that Microsoft has made an agreement with Nvidia to emulate some of their calls.
Well if the programmers haven't been naughty it's going to be D3D calls mostly, and the odd shader incompatibility. Distributing X86 emulation over 3 cores doesn't sound easy, though.
Well... with each core being 3200mhz (right?) and the Xbox CPU at 733mhz, that only leaves 3200/733 = 4-5 host cycles per emulated cycle , as a very crude measure. Taking into account that X86 opcodes are pretty complex, that sounds like a pretty tall order. I'm sure they'll use a more intelligent method based on dynamic recompilation, but nonetheless.
They can't use the other two cores to help with some... function of emulation? meaning, one does the core, the other two do some calculations, and they alternate and stuff? I don't understand lots about hardware, though, I might be saying something brute... but it'd sound logical to do something like that, right?
Didn't Microsoft say they wanted to support the best Xbox games out of the box, so those would be games like Halo 2 and Ninja Gaiden, etc. Is it just me or won't those have been the naughty ones that tried to talk to the metal and what not to achieve the level of graphics that they did? So it would seem that they were aiming for the hard stuff first and the easier just DirectX calling stuff will just flow from that, though that is of course a gross oversimplification of the whole mess.
ok.. so if you don't own the "popular games" and don't own a internet connection and wont to play your old xbox games on your shiny new xbox360... you're screwed?
To me, it seems like the easy way to do this is to just have a compiler and library that takes the code for the XBOX game and recompiles it to run on the 360. This new 360 executable file would then be able to replace the XBOX executable file on the game disk and would pull all the non-executable data directly from your copy of halo or whatever it might be.
You would have to write a new compiler that would accept every header, class, and custom assembly call that was ever made on the xbox, then cross compile it to a Tri-Core PowerPC with a new GFX instruction set. Quite a tall order without every source file for every xbox game ever. It would have to be done through straight brute force emulation. Think along the lines of an xbox virtual machine running on a mac.
