Xbox 360 Emulators

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Caustic Aspirin

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Feb 8, 2013
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I did some searching into Emulators for the Xbox 360 (getting a bit tired of being forced to play my favorite games on hardware less powerful than the integrated graphics in a non-gaming laptop), and inspired by a friend of mine who was playing Super Smash Bros Brawl on his PC at 60 FPS, 1080p. I found a few sites that seemed to be sorta legit, in that at least they actually give me downloads instead of redirecting me to survey sites. There are also some youtube videos (with decent ratings) showing working emulators (at least of GTA V), but then again those aren't exactly difficult to fake.

Link 1
Link 2

However, upon some searching as to the legitimacy of Xbox 360 emulators, I find plenty of threads of people saying that Hardware hasn't reached the point of being able to emulate the hardware.

Doing some searching though, and the closest thing I could find to an equivalent GPU for benchmarks is a 7900/7800 GTX, to which my 660 ti appears to be more than 15 times as powerful. And with a gaming laptop being able to emulate Wii hardware, it doesn't seem like we're too far off from a desktop gaming PC being able to handle last gen's tech specs, barring any programming/architecture differences that need to be worked through.

I'm obviously missing a part of the picture here, could somebody fill me in on what's really up?
 
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k1114
You still see a lot of people/issues even on ps2/xbox/wii/even older consoles' emus. Emulating the games isn't illegal, that resides in the possession of the roms which is on the end user. You can't even have the rom on your pc, it's illegal period other than residing on the original disc. The main hurdle for the devs is time, lots of time, to troubleshoot emulating without getting any income from it unless they get popular enough to get some donators which isn't usually possible without it working in the first place. They are essentially reverse engineering it and then programming it to run on different hardware that's not even the same architecture so doesn't have the same available instruction sets.

They still have to use the...
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chrisso

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I guess the reason you cant find emulators for an xbox 360 is that nobody has bothered. You can still find the machines for £25 so nobody cares?
You can get a sit down coffee table esq machine tht will play every arcade game, but the xbox just doesnt really inspire that level of need.
 
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manofchalk

manofchalk

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May 11, 2012
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^ More than a few have bothered

I think that modern hardware is powerful enough to emulate an Xbox360, at the very least it couldn't hurt to try it out.
The architectural and programming differences are why its called an emulator, its emulating a different hardware set so the program/OS will work.

What you are missing is the murky legality of emulating consoles. There are a couple of hoops you have to jump through.
1. You will need a copy of the X360 ROM (basically its Operating System) to have the emulator run. If you have an Xbox 360 you can extract it from it in some fashion (dont know how personally), but if you dont then the only option is too pirate it, obviously illegal.
2. The only games you are allowed to play are ones that are sourced from backups of a physical game disc that you own. Again, if you download a .ISO online its piracy.
 
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k1114

k1114

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May 2, 2010
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You still see a lot of people/issues even on ps2/xbox/wii/even older consoles' emus. Emulating the games isn't illegal, that resides in the possession of the roms which is on the end user. You can't even have the rom on your pc, it's illegal period other than residing on the original disc. The main hurdle for the devs is time, lots of time, to troubleshoot emulating without getting any income from it unless they get popular enough to get some donators which isn't usually possible without it working in the first place. They are essentially reverse engineering it and then programming it to run on different hardware that's not even the same architecture so doesn't have the same available instruction sets.

They still have to use the original iso so can't modify the game which would be easier. All they can do is modify how the emu handles it which is very limiting. It's also not just worrying about a game running on an os with specific hardware, it's a game running on as os inside of another os with differing hardware. Yes current hardware is much more powerful compared to past consoles but you still run into optimization issues from inefficiencies from emulating and get low fps.
 
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chrisso

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13 years ago I had a disk from Name 32 with 1500
arcade hits on it; from Gallaxians to pole position,Tank battle, defender,
missile command, gorf, space invaders..
It ran on any W95 or 98 pc no problem. It cost nowt.
I fished about and pulled missile comand up for my dad last yr, it took 3 minutes.
 
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C

Caustic Aspirin

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So what I got from the answers are that it's possible with the right hardware. So are these links legit, and is there a way to find out without messing up my computer and all? (like running a Virtual Machine to test it out before downloading it normally?)

I also found this link, which seems to come with the bios and has at least some decent comments seemingly.
 
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manofchalk

manofchalk

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May 11, 2012
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I have no doubt those links are legit, but that doesn't change how shady these types of sites appear. As you can understand, this is all homebrew stuff, no company is going to create an emulator because they are going to be poking two of the biggest giants in tech just asking to get sued.

You could test it out in a VM before you get started, though I wouldnt think it would be that bad.
 
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