Yeah I'm curious about that as well. Since I'm getting a soft modded XBOX to tide me over while I wait for my preordered AVS to come in. (that and get the rest of the Sega games before they skyrocket in price, IF they do.)
Ofcourse those programs on the original Xbox are emulators. As you suspect it's the same thing this Polymega project will be doing. Developing emulators for all these systems would take a lot of effort. But since so many systems have good quality emulators that are open source you can port them instead of making your own. Any system that plays for example NES games is using a software emulator unless it contains an actual CPU and PPU. The AVS and NT Mini do contain clones of these when their FPGA is programmed. And they interface with the original cartridges directly. This contrasts with the Retron 5 that attempts to read and dump the contents of the cartridge that will then be loaded into its software emulator. The result is that the AVS and NT Mini can support any cartridge where as the Retron 5 and similar can only support cartridges containing known hardware. There is certainly the possibility to make a product like this and end up with a good result. It all depends on the quality overall.
