Xbox exec: Xbox 360 emulation planned for the Xbox One

[Misanthrope]

I always found that the Xbox 360's emulation provided a smoother and more enjoyable experience than playing on the Xbox itself did. It did have an insufficient catalogue of compatible titles, but I would maintain that it was still better than having absolutely no backwards compatibility at all.

 

You can maintain all you want it still doesn't makes up for the stupidity of switching platforms each generation. You might be too generous, I might be too cruel, but the fact remains that I wouldn't congratulate anybody for cleaning up the mess they created I'd still be pissed they created the mess to begin with.

 

 

 

The expectations of a console are becoming ever higher than before. They're expected to be as powerful as $5000 PCs in a form factor that's less than a tenth of the size whilst remaining whisper quiet and producing absolutely no heat for a retail price of less than $500 whilst remaining significantly easier to use for a typical consumer and being reliable enough to do all of this with a lifespan much longer than what is expected of a normal gaming PC.

 

Again the hype for consoles is higher than before. The bullshit PR and marketing deparments like to create those expectations themselves by misrepresenting preview materials or flatout lying like it was the case with Aliens: Colonial Marines. It's gotten so bad that most people expect preview material to be scripted, pre-rendered, doctored and done on a PC. So again, who the fuck cares about apologizing for consoles when they dug themselves into that hole?

Oh and by the way take a look at steam boxes and then tell me the form factor is 1/10th of the size: small form factor pcs are here and are quite powerfull, and around 3,500 or so cheaper than your other hyperbole. 

 

 

 

It's surprising that they come as close to accomplishing this as they do. I'm sure most rational people would agree that some drawbacks have to be expected, no? Their only two options for providing instantaneous backwards compatibility to the standard you want would have been to either incorporate the Xbox 360's hardware into the Xbox One alongside its own which significantly increases the cost, size, heat output, noise output and power requirements of the device - or to incorporate significantly stronger base components which would also have considerably affected the aforementioned aspects of the device.

 

No, the sane and reasonable choice would have been to invest in proper x86 processors for the 360 instead of switching to that bullshit power pc one, that was crap anyway or have you conveniently forgotten about the red ring of death? Again more and more problems Microsoft created for cutting corners, taking shortcuts, making stupid fucking decisions creating a dangerous and stupid hardware race to the bottom that's likely to bankrupt the entire videogame industry, and you expect me to be understanding of their difficulties offering backwards compatibility?

 

No sir, fuck them.

[Whiskers]

...

The facts of today shouldn't be used to criticise the actions of a decade ago.

2005 was the time of the Intel Pentium D series CPUs, and the Xbox was in development since 2003 which was the time of the Pentium 4, Athlon 64 and so on. The Pentium D series CPUs had only launched earlier that year so they're out of the equation... so that leaves the Pentium 4 series. Let's say we go insane... let's throw in an Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition CPU. Excellent. Except now we have a CPU that's dual-core instead of triple-core which 4 threads instead of 6 and up to ~11000 MIPS instead of up to ~19000. And we also have a CPU with significantly higher heat output and energy requirements as well as quite obviously an infinitely higher price tag of $999.

I don't see why that would have been an intelligent choice, personally.

[EChondo]

It would be interesting if they could do this, but I'm more interested in the current emulation the of 360 from the Xenia project.

 

I wonder, since the new consoles are using X86, if we are able to somehow copy that process and bring it to PC.

[Whiskers]

It would be interesting if they could do this, but I'm more interested in the current emulation the of 360 from the Xenia project.

 

I wonder, since the new consoles are using X86, if we are able to somehow copy that process and bring it to PC.

That's an interesting thought, actually.

I doubt it'd be quite that straight forward obviously, but you'd think it would be at least a great starting point to bring out a truly functional emulator on PC.

[EChondo]

That's an interesting thought, actually.

I doubt it'd be quite that straight forward obviously, but you'd think it would be at least a great starting point to bring out a truly functional emulator on PC.

Well yeah, but with all of the JTAG 360's out there, I bet someone is working on a Xbox One similar to that, and if Microsoft can emulate the 360 on the One, then we might be able to snag the code for it and play with it.

[Whiskers]

Well yeah, but with all of the JTAG 360's out there, I bet someone is working on a Xbox One similar to that, and if Microsoft can emulate the 360 on the One, then we might be able to snag the code for it and play with it.

Absolutely agreed.

[Mindtrickz]

Cant wait to see Sony's take on this

 

It's called Gaikai/Playstation Now.

 

[qwertywarrior]

i really really doubt this

 

emulating it requires a lot of CPU horse power which consoles dont have

[Rassilon]

That's crap: those "amateurs and hobbyists" usually accomplish a hell of a lot more than Microsoft considering they have to reverse engineer everything. That entire thing about Microsoft being "on another league" it's bullshit to me: They're not legendary coders, or even particularly great ones.

Yeah, they're goddamn legendary programmers in Microsoft.

As much as people like to believe that the underdog is somehow superior, it's not. Reverse engineering something only means that you know less than the person that actually made it.

What exactly have they done that Microsoft couldn't in a heartbeat?

[deathjester]

It will probably depend on "the cloud" nonsense.

 

Bingo.

 

 

we can always count on you to hate on microsoft

 

I don't know how they are going to do it, if it has been so difficult to do until know (unless they have some kind of inside information).

 

Um no. He is a realist. If Sony was doing the same thing (and they have already said it will be cloud based), we would say the same thing.

 

Xbox 360 = Power PC architecture. They would have to port every game over to x86 to emulate it (why would they waste their time). X360 also had more ESRAM type stuff. It had EDRAM.

Wii (not Wii U) = weaker Power PC architecture. I had to get my 4770k well past 4ghz to play Mario Galaxy perfect on Dolphin. AMD cpu's can't even run the darn game with sound right.  It is like 3 cores usage and those cores are going all out just to run the game flawlessly.

PS3 = Power PC like.

Wii U = 3 Wii Chips, which means maybe Haswell -E at 4.5 ghz could do it lol. 

 

All of these consoles are nightmares to emulate because of CPU architecture and CUSTOM GPU's. and not SEMI-custom GPU's (AMD 7000 series GCN 1.0) like seen in next gen.

 

We will see "next gen" emulators before them, minus old Wii on high clocked I5's and up.

http://news.dice.com/2013/12/09/the-quest-to-build-xbox-one-and-ps4-emulators/

 

Why they would never port all these games to x86. 1) too much work, and a nightmare to get working right across all games. 2) we are going to emulate "next gen", so why would they give PC's even more titles. 3) They can SELL games they port to x86, like Last of Us, which Sony is bringing to PS4. MS can do the same thing with EA and Mass Effect series, which is already x86 and which interns could do in a month and sell to both systems. Can MS make a deal with EA? Sure. EA is going to want a buttload of money though. They are already mad they kept Titanfall on XB1 only. They LOST money with that exclusive and apologized to Sony.

 

This is what the cloud is actually good for. Playing old resolution, crappy graphics, single player games and not shooters and streaming cutscenes, which is the REAL benefit I see of the cloud. Those HD's on consoles are small. Streaming cutscenes would help out console gamers A LOT. They can't even do that yet because they have to make a decision based on everyones internet. If they go all digital and try to emulate Steam with only themselves as competition, when we have 20 steams duking it out at www.cheapshark.com?

 

People are just going to say F this I am buying a computer. They should probably do that in the first place, but whatever. They will learn the hard way.

[WanderingFool]

One thing that will be really difficult for them is the CPU for sure. The Xbone has a really crappy CPU. They will have to somehow emulate 3 powerful cores using 8 low power cores. I have no idea how they will manage that (if they do at all).

I don't see an Xbox 360 emulator being possible on the Xbone, sadly. Hell, might even be easier to emulate a PS3 on a PS4.

Would be cool if they managed to pull it off though.

 

Actually, one of the first thing I said when the Xbone and PS4 was announced was "how come they don't just emulate the old consoles? The PS4 could easily emulate a PS1 and PS2. The Xbone should be able to emulate an Xbox Original as well" or something along those lines.

There is more to emulation than just the horse power to emulate a CPU.  In a true emulation you get issue where certain processors that talk to each other require timing or direct communication with each other...this in itself can make emulation very hard to accomplish (especially if the game exploits such things).  The worse thing is if they added in extra instruction sets that are different from normal.  I believe it is the PS2 that has a very famous one of square root.  The PS2 doesnt really support the NaN or INF numbers for floating point.  So sqrt(-1) instead of being not a number is actually on a PS2 a very large number.  An article about it (http://pcsx2.net/developer-blog/209-whats-clamping-why-do-we-need-it.html) So as it is discussed, you can't just do a full implementation in software as it is slow, yet if you rely on the x86 instructions you will occasionally get the wrong result (which is a very bad thing)

 

i really really doubt this

 

emulating it requires a lot of CPU horse power which consoles dont have

An alternative to this is not creation an emulation (although it is better to present it as an emulation because more people understand the word).  In theory they could do something similar to WINE.  Where instead of emulating what is going on, implement the methods that are actually being called.  This way you avoid emulating the PowerPC, and you get a giant boost in speed.  The only issue with this is if the game uses non-standard calls...which is why some game wouldn't work...although you could create patches which will reimplement the troubled section in an equivalent form.

 

Anyways my thoughts, on this whole topic.  It is nice to see MS implement it on xbox one, it would be better if afterwards they decide to release a version for the PC too...but no hopes here.  I doubt that Sony will implement the PS3 anytime soon (Even a PS2 would likely be hard)...especially since they have their streaming service starting soon.

[Whiskers]

Xbox 360 = Power PC architecture. They would have to port every game over to x86 to emulate it (why would they waste their time). X360 also had more ESRAM type stuff. It had EDRAM.

Wii (not Wii U) = weaker Power PC architecture. I had to get my 4770k well past 4ghz to play Mario Galaxy perfect on Dolphin. AMD cpu's can't even run the darn game with sound right.  It is like 3 cores usage and those cores are going all out just to run the game flawlessly.

PS3 = Power PC like.

Wii U = 3 Wii Chips, which means maybe Haswell -E at 4.5 ghz could do it lol. 

 

All of these consoles are nightmares to emulate because of CPU architecture and CUSTOM GPU's. and not SEMI-custom GPU's (AMD 7000 series GCN 1.0) like seen in next gen.

Emulation and porting are mutually exclusive from one another. To emulate games you need to emulate them, to port them you need to port them.

Your example of the Wii would be a good example. By all accounts, the Wii was only slightly more powerful than an original Xbox and in some ways less powerful graphically. Yet whilst your extremely powerful PC has to work very hard to emulate a Wii game, the Xbox 360 is capable of not only emulating an original Xbox title at a flawless framerate it even has enough headroom to upscale it and apply anti-aliasing.

And you're not entirely correct about the last part there by the way. Both the Xenos GPU for the 360 and the Reality Synthesizer for the PS3 were based upon pre-existing GPUs. They were never fully-custom.

[deathjester]

Emulation and porting are mutually exclusive from one another. To emulate games you need to emulate them, to port them you need to port them.

Your example of the Wii would be a good example. By all accounts, the Wii was only slightly more powerful than an original Xbox and in some ways less powerful graphically. Yet whilst your extremely powerful PC has to work very hard to emulate a Wii game, the Xbox 360 is capable of not only emulating an original Xbox title at a flawless framerate it even has enough headroom to upscale it and apply anti-aliasing.

And you're not entirely correct about the last part there by the way. Both the Xenos GPU for the 360 and the Reality Synthesizer for the PS3 were based upon pre-existing GPUs. They were never fully-custom.

 

Xbox 360 emulation was horrible. I had one. Sound was horrid and glitchy. I remember playing KOTOR 2 on mine (borrowed it from a friend to compare it to the PC version). Crashed constantly, audio popping that was horrible, framerate was horrendous. You also had more similar architecture, which is why it could emulate them.The only reason I had a x360 is a friend convinced me to buy one to play Halo with him. I never played the darn thing. 

 

These next gen are 1.6-1.7ghz NOTEBOOK AMD x86 chips. They aren't Bulldozer clock for clock. They are slower. They don't have a power pc chip in them for emulation (would have added to the cost). 

 

GPU's based on and a STANDARD like GCN 1.0 are different then fully custom GPU's. The XB1 is damn near running AMD Mantle, which just uses the DX shader library and the same series cards.

 

It is going to be cloud based. Sony was already playing around with this. They just realized they could make more money porting Last of Us to x86. 

 

The next gen console CPU's are a joke. They can't emulate power pc. It would require way too much work. MS has cloud hardware and built this stuff. It would be stupid for them to work on emulation, even if the hardware could do it. It would also be stupid to port it, and not just resell the game like Sony is doing with The Last of US. At least the cloud will be good for something.

[qwertywarrior]

 

An alternative to this is not creation an emulation (although it is better to present it as an emulation because more people understand the word).  In theory they could do something similar to WINE.  Where instead of emulating what is going on, implement the methods that are actually being called.  This way you avoid emulating the PowerPC, and you get a giant boost in speed.  The only issue with this is if the game uses non-standard calls...which is why some game wouldn't work...although you could create patches which will reimplement the troubled section in an equivalent form.

 

Anyways my thoughts, on this whole topic.  It is nice to see MS implement it on xbox one, it would be better if afterwards they decide to release a version for the PC too...but no hopes here.  I doubt that Sony will implement the PS3 anytime soon (Even a PS2 would likely be hard)...especially since they have their streaming service starting soon.

something like wine would be good if ur trying to make to make something work on a different OS but using the same architecture  emulation is a must

 

"The PowerPC-based architecture of those systems (xbox360/ps3) is difficult to emulate on x86-based computers. “You’ve got to build this really fast and efficient translation layer from the PowerPC chip to the x86, and every single memory access you have to do you have to flip it around,” Vanik said. “It’s a real challenge to make that fast.”"

 

i really doubt it will work on 8 tablet cores ar 1.6ghz

what i think is going to happen is tat they will just port over games

 

read this http://www.noxa.org/blog/2011/08/21/building-an-xbox-360-emulator-part-6-code-translation-techniques/

[qwertywarrior]

Xbox 360 emulation was horrible. I had one. Sound was horrid and glitchy. I remember playing KOTOR 2 on mine (borrowed it from a friend to compare it to the PC version). Crashed constantly, audio popping that was horrible, framerate was horrendous. You also had more similar architecture, which is why it could emulate them.The only reason I had a x360 is a friend convinced me to buy one to play Halo with him. I never played the darn thing. 

 

These next gen are 1.6-1.7ghz NOTEBOOK AMD x86 chips. They aren't Bulldozer clock for clock. They are slower. They don't have a power pc chip in them for emulation (would have added to the cost). 

 

GPU's based on and a STANDARD like GCN 1.0 are different then fully custom GPU's. The XB1 is damn near running AMD Mantle, which just uses the DX shader library and the same series cards.

KOTOR 2 is an xbox game not xbox 360 game no one bothered making a good xbox emulator because there wernt many good exclusive games to begin with

xbox one isnt using mantle i wish if people stopped saying that - xbox is using their own APIs based of directX - even the ps4 isnt using mantle

[ivhyn]

Piece of junk Xbox One will have a hard time emulating PPC games...

[deathjester]

KOTOR 2 is an xbox game not xbox 360 game no one bothered making a good xbox emulator because there wernt many good exclusive games to begin with

xbox one isnt using mantle i wish if people stopped saying that - xbox is using their own APIs based of directX - even the ps4 isnt using mantle

 

That is an awesome story. Only one problem with it. Xbox 360 played Xbox games...badly with emulation. It had native "backwards compatibility" due to the hardware being similar.  They might have had the original Xbox chip in there. Either that or the architecture was similar. To be honest? I don't care to know. It did it poorly. Sound was bad, framerate was bad, artifacts were bad, crashing was bad. Hell it was worse than Dolphin is now (which is why I am cracking up and everyone dissing PC emulators).

 

http://xbox.about.com/od/xbox360faqs/a/360bclist_2.htm

 

Kotor 2 was supposed to be one of the games that ran well. It ran horribly.

 

Mantle is a low level DirectX using AMD 7000 series GCN gpu's.  So is the XB1. PS4 is proprietary low level OpenGL shaders API. The hardware and shaders are what makes Mantle and DX on the Xbox very similar. Yeah there are differences. XB1 uses ESRAM with DDR3 for textures because MS was cheap and didn't want to go GDDR5 like Sony did. The bandwidth on the Xbox One sucks due to this. Mantle has to have Intel instructions in it. They are very similar though.PS4? That is more like what we will get with OpenGL going low level, which it already can. Kronos group (Nvidia, Intel, AMD) already laid out changes people could make now to the current OpenGL at GDC.

[qwertywarrior]

That is an awesome story. Only one problem with it. Xbox 360 played Xbox games...badly with emulation. It had native "backwards compatibility" due to the hardware being similar.  They might have had the original Xbox chip in there. Either that or the architecture was similar. To be honest? I don't care to know. It did it poorly. Sound was bad, framerate was bad, artifacts were bad, crashing was bad. Hell it was worse than Dolphin is now (which is why I am cracking up and everyone dissing PC emulators).

 

http://xbox.about.com/od/xbox360faqs/a/360bclist_2.htm

 

Kotor 2 was supposed to be one of the games that ran well. It ran horribly.

 

Mantle is a low level DirectX using AMD 7000 series GCN gpu's.  So is the XB1. PS4 is proprietary low level OpenGL shaders API. The hardware and shaders are what makes Mantle and DX on the Xbox very similar. Yeah there are differences. XB1 uses ESRAM with DDR3 for textures because MS was cheap and didn't want to go GDDR5 like Sony did. The bandwidth on the Xbox One sucks due to this. Mantle has to have Intel instructions in it. They are very similar though.PS4? That is more like what we will get with OpenGL going low level, which it already can. Kronos group (Nvidia, Intel, AMD) already laid out changes people could make now to the current OpenGL at GDC.

oh you wernt clear i thought u were saying u played xbox 360 games on pc

anyways xbox 360 emulated the xbox i bet it had a lot of issues because the 360 was ppc and the xbox was an x86 celeron cpu

unlike the early ps3 consoles the xbox 360 didnt have a small embedded last gen chip for compatibility

 

mantle is not a low level direct X its completely its own thing

its an API just like how openGL and Dirext X is an API

the only difference being that mantle is low level while OpenGL and DirectX is high level

 

xbox one doesnt use mantle API

[deathjester]

oh you wernt clear i thought u were saying u played xbox 360 games on pc

anyways xbox 360 emulated the xbox i bet it had a lot of issues because the 360 was ppc and the xbox was an x86 celeron cpu

unlike the early ps3 consoles the xbox 360 didnt have a small embedded last gen chip for compatibility

 

mantle is not a low level direct X its completely its own thing

its an API just like how openGL and Dirext X is an API

the only difference being that mantle is low level while OpenGL and DirectX is high level

 

xbox one doesnt use mantle API

 

Then you just proved my point. Different architecture = lots of headaches. We have told you how hard it is to emulate Power PC on x86. A lot of us use Dolphin emulator. It has 3 backends (Dx 9, 11, OpenGL). Bottom line is you need a TON of power to do it.

 

A 1.7 GHZ AMD mobile computer chip? Good luck with that. 5ghz AMD 8350's can't run games like Mario Galaxies. Dolphin doesn't even recommend AMD's at all for their emulator. The single core performance just can't do it when you are using 2-3 cores on the emulator.

 

They would have to completely redo the game to use more cores, and why would they still leave it Power PC if they are doing that? Just make it x86 and upgrade the darn game like Sony is doing with Last of US. Sell it again to make bank. Cloud is the only way this is happening. Since it is useless for everything else...you might as well use it for backwards compatibility. Now are they going to charge extra for that? Who knows. Console gamers get bent over. They should be used to it, if they do charge for it. Supposedly MS has giant clouds with all this processing power. What else are they going to use it for? It isn't like latency is here for modern games. We are like 5 years out from that and you still would be better off with a PC in front of you.

[LAwLz]

There is more to emulation than just the horse power to emulate a CPU.  In a true emulation you get issue where certain processors that talk to each other require timing or direct communication with each other...this in itself can make emulation very hard to accomplish (especially if the game exploits such things).  The worse thing is if they added in extra instruction sets that are different from normal.  I believe it is the PS2 that has a very famous one of square root.  The PS2 doesnt really support the NaN or INF numbers for floating point.  So sqrt(-1) instead of being not a number is actually on a PS2 a very large number.  An article about it (http://pcsx2.net/developer-blog/209-whats-clamping-why-do-we-need-it.html) So as it is discussed, you can't just do a full implementation in software as it is slow, yet if you rely on the x86 instructions you will occasionally get the wrong result (which is a very bad thing)

Yes that is another reason why they might not be able to do it.

I just don't see Xbox 360 emulation being possible on the Xbone.

 

Like the article says, they are just in the planning stage right now and if it turns out it's too hard to emulate they will scrap the project (which I am sure will happen, or they do some cloud bullshit).

I wonder how much it would have cost them to include the Xbox 360's chip in the Xbone. iSuppli estimated that the whole motherboard and everything on it cost about 200 USD for Microsoft, but that was back in 2006, and that included stuff like RAM. They could probably have gotten the price down to like 100 dollars or lower for all the stuff needed to run Xbox 360 games natively on the Xbone.

[qwertywarrior]

Then you just proved my point. Different architecture = lots of headaches. We have told you how hard it is to emulate Power PC on x86. A lot of us use Dolphin emulator. It has 3 backends (Dx 9, 11, OpenGL). Bottom line is you need a TON of power to do it.

 

A 1.7 GHZ AMD mobile computer chip? Good luck with that. 5ghz AMD 8350's can't run games like Mario Galaxies. Dolphin doesn't even recommend AMD's at all for their emulator. The single core performance just can't do it when you are using 2-3 cores on the emulator.

 

They would have to completely redo the game to use more cores, and why would they still leave it Power PC if they are doing that? Just make it x86 and upgrade the darn game like Sony is doing with Last of US. Sell it again to make bank. Cloud is the only way this is happening. Since it is useless for everything else...you might as well use it for backwards compatibility. Now are they going to charge extra for that? Who knows. Console gamers get bent over. They should be used to it, if they do charge for it. Supposedly MS has giant clouds with all this processing power. What else are they going to use it for? It isn't like latency is here for modern games. We are like 5 years out from that and you still would be better off with a PC in front of you.

if u scroll up i never said it was possible

i was just point out  something i misread from your earlier post (playing xbox games on xbox 360 i thought u meant 360 on PC)

and that mantle had nothing to do with DX or OpenGL or that it was used on consoles

[YellowDragon]

One thing that will be really difficult for them is the CPU for sure. The Xbone has a really crappy CPU. They will have to somehow emulate 3 powerful cores using 8 low power cores. I have no idea how they will manage that (if they do at all).

I don't see an Xbox 360 emulator being possible on the Xbone, sadly. Hell, might even be easier to emulate a PS3 on a PS4.

Would be cool if they managed to pull it off though.

 

Actually, one of the first thing I said when the Xbone and PS4 was announced was "how come they don't just emulate the old consoles? The PS4 could easily emulate a PS1 and PS2. The Xbone should be able to emulate an Xbox Original as well" or something along those lines.

The problem with emulating the older consoles is mainly the hardware set and the amount of custom components that goes into the creation of the consoles, for instance it would actually be pretty hard to emulate the xbox 360 on the xbox one as the xbox 360 was based on the power pc architecture and instruction set, which is fundamentally different from x 86, its like telling a computer okay read this line of text this way and then completely changing the format that the processor would expect, think of that on a very low level in terms of hardware access and you have your problem. The original xbox is a different story, the first xbox was based on a pentium III class chip on the x86 micro-architecture, however it is not as that simple as that, the original xbox used some convoluted audio and ram setup that makes it an absolute nightmare to emulate and this is why you don't really see a good emulator for the original xbox. These convoluted boxes of mismatch and "how the hell does this work" parts makes it a real hassle to emulate most of the modern consoles.

[LAwLz]

The problem with emulating the older consoles is mainly the hardware set and the amount of custom components that goes into the creation of the consoles, for instance it would actually be pretty hard to emulate the xbox 360 on the xbox one as the xbox 360 was based on the power pc architecture and instruction set, which is fundamentally different from x 86, its like telling a computer okay read this line of text this way and then completely changing the format that the processor would expect, think of that on a very low level in terms of hardware access and you have your problem. The original xbox is a different story, the first xbox was based on a pentium III class chip on the x86 micro-architecture, however it is not as that simple as that, the original xbox used some convoluted audio and ram setup that makes it an absolute nightmare to emulate and this is why you don't really see a good emulator for the original xbox. These convoluted boxes of mismatch and "how the hell does this work" parts makes it a real hassle to emulate most of the modern consoles.

Thanks captain obvious!

Your post doesn't really contradict anything in my post though, nor does it really add anything to my previous post either.

[StingBull]

Cant wait to see Sony's take on this

 

You already have. It's called Playstation Now.

[WanderingFool]

something like wine would be good if ur trying to make to make something work on a different OS but using the same architecture  emulation is a must

 

"The PowerPC-based architecture of those systems (xbox360/ps3) is difficult to emulate on x86-based computers. “You’ve got to build this really fast and efficient translation layer from the PowerPC chip to the x86, and every single memory access you have to do you have to flip it around,” Vanik said. “It’s a real challenge to make that fast.”"

 

i really doubt it will work on 8 tablet cores ar 1.6ghz

what i think is going to happen is tat they will just port over games

 

read this http://www.noxa.org/blog/2011/08/21/building-an-xbox-360-emulator-part-6-code-translation-techniques/

Sorry, I shouldn't be writing things on a few hours of sleep, so I would like to clarify my thoughts on this.  While a WINE approach wouldn't be perfect, given the differences between PowerPC and x86 there is still merit to what I said (which btw MS might have hidden a few extra instruction sets that might make it easier if they chose such a method).  There are likely many calls made that would be to internal API functionality, which is why things such as PS2 emulators need a bios (they emulate the bios) and those functions are called a lot and given that MS has the actual source code of the bios there wouldn't be much need to emulate that portion.  In terms of the game code, I was thinking more of a recompiler concept.  Considering that MS would have access to all their source code (of their published games) and having the source can make it a lot easier to implement a recompiler (especially when you have the original code for the compiler).  So what MS could do is start a program where the "emulation" is basically not an emulation but rather a recompiled version of 360.  While not all titles would get support, if MS opened up and allowed game devs to submit the code/release a compiler program that will create such a file, then they could build up quite a large library of games with a lot less effort.