Sorry for one more noob question. I'm really a newbie for the xbox 360, although I've done some game mod to Resident Evil 5, I still don't quite figured the xbox 360 CPU out. As I want to seriously study the assembly of the Xbox 360, I found out there's just too many doc about the PowerPC familly, so please anyone tell me about what pdf/book you prefer when it comes to xbox 360 CPU? Many thanks.
First, it depends a lot of what you want to do. Dev? Then don't worry about assembly yet, and learn the compiler intrinsics instead. Hacking/Modding? Okay. What you need is normal PowerPC assembly. IBM has pretty cool assembly walkthroughs. They are not Xbox360 specific (of course), but the ISA is the same. Also grab a disassembler, and read code. That's probably the best way to learn assembly, as you have some "known good" code. As a reference, there is the power.org ISA reference, but it's pretty hardcore to read. If you want to do lowlevel hacking, get the Cell documentation, as the PPU is very similar to the Xbox360 cpu cores. They documents some MSRs, but not everything here applies.
Got it. I will go to IBM site immediately. Yes, I want to do some modding for now, maybe some hacking in the future. Thank you, tmbinc. It is an hornor to have a expert like you to guide me.
I still find it funny that Sony essentially subsidized the Xenon CPU. I also find it interesting that despite the similarities between the Cell and the Xenon, developers still claim the PS3 is harder to code for. My be its the RSX versus Xenos GPU, or the OS/Hypervisor. I dunno, I'm just speculating.
