TheGreenButton - Windows Media Center Forums

LuckyDay wrote:You're right that they are a different architecture, in that one GPU is contained within an APU, but the XBox One GPU is essentially a Radeon 8000. From a programming standpoint the GPU is accessed and used the same way, via DirectX.

Still - it would have to identify itself (to the system) as the appropriate GPU/match all checks/features/APIs/etc the original GPU has to. The modified Direct X both consoles run aren't like desktop/Windows Direct X - where it's written to be GPU independent/support multiple model/brand GPUs - and with backwards/forwards compatibility for GPUs. They're each written for one specific GPU model and feature set/etc. That's the whole point of the locked down ecosystem of consoles vs PCs. You only target one HW setup.

LuckyDay wrote:The Xbox 360 uses a PowerPC CPU

And a tri-core one at that - an order of magnitude more difficult than trying to emulate a single core PPC processor.

Still - it would have to identify itself (to the system) as the appropriate GPU. The modified Direct X both consoles run aren't like desktop/Windows direct X - where it's writtent to be GPU independent. They're written for one specific GPU.

Yup. The actual programming to get it to run isn't a tough task, but there is something that will need to be changed that isn't really in the realm of true emulation.

Here's the blurb, I did misunderstand it somewhat upon first read:

The Register wrote: The Xbox One has an AMD Radeon-class GPU, as does the 360, so supporting graphics code written for the 360 on the One shouldn't be a huge problem for Microsoft....Game developers do not need to change any code for their 360 titles to run on the One

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/06/15 ... atibility/

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

If what they say is actually happening, and they can do it at 100% speed and compatibility, they are doing something that thousands of people before them for dozens of systems have failed to do with hardware that is so closely matched (and relative to emulation, the One and 360 are close).

*edit* remembering back to the original XBox and the 360 did play those games, although pretty poorly. I don't remember exactly what the specs on the original Xbox were and how closely matched those systems are.

The more exciting thing here is that if they can emulate 360 perfectly on the Xbox One hardware, as soon as someone gets their hands on how they're doing it, it's going to open the floodgates for PC emulation of the 360.

LuckyDay wrote:It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

If what they say is actually happening, and they can do it at 100% speed and compatibility, they are doing something that thousands of people before them for dozens of systems have failed to do with hardware that is so closely matched (and relative to emulation, the One and 360 are close).

The more exciting thing here is that if they can emulate 360 perfectly on the Xbox One hardware, as soon as someone gets their hands on how they're doing it, it's going to open the floodgates for PC emulation of the 360.

Yeah, like I said, I have the feeling they're using the term emulation loosely and just to convey an idea of what they're doing rather than an actual technical term/implementation. If they did actually make a full-on emulator - then like I said earlier - they honestly deserve heaps and heaps of praise for pulling it off on the XB1 HW.

LuckyDay wrote:if they can emulate 360 perfectly on the Xbox One hardware

Let's not get crazy here, one possible miracle at a time

I'm sure they can emulate the 360 on the Xbox one fine. Remember the 360's CPU is what ? 8-10 years old now ? I am sure they can emulate it on just 1 core of the Xbox one's 8 cores. There might be some games that a tricky but, I am sure they will still work (I know you wont see every game from the 360 play on the Xbox one).

That was always the trick with consoles, use a weaker CPU but, USE heavy GPUS and audio systems to make up for it (the SNES was a key one in this aspect). The GPU and the sound in the Xbox one is, like I said 8-10 years newer, again, not even breaking a sweat...

In the tech world, I would even give someone I hate a computer that slow from that age. Think about it.

Even though I know from a tech hardware standpoint, if the software is done right (And this is Microsoft we are talking about, spare no expense to get it right), there is no question why it would not run and run flawlessly.

DavidinCT wrote:I'm sure they can emulate the 360 on the Xbox one fine. Remember the 360's CPU is what ? 8-10 years old now ? I am sure they can emulate it on just 1 core of the Xbox one's 8 cores.

..............................................................................no. Emulation is demanding. And I'm not even talking full/proper/error free 1:1 emulation - that's absurdly demanding. Even faulty/error prone emulation is just demanding. You are underestimating how powerful the 360 was, and overestimating how powerful the XB1 is. To do any type of passable emulation - you typically need HW that is orders of magnitude more powerful than the HW to be emulated. Which the XB1 is not to the 360. Which is why full HW emulation of the 360 is being cast in so much doubt by people in this thread who are familiar with these things. And is why I said, if true, and it is actull full HW emulation (not even error free - cause I don't see how it could be possible on the XB1 HW - that I will go on record as saying is actually literally impossible IMO) Microsoft pulled off nothing short of a software coding miracle in writing what might be the most efficient HW emulator known. Like I said - I think much more likely something else is going on - and they're just playing fast and loose with the term 'emulation'.

So, in this video - they give a demo of it (the 'emulation'). It's still unclear if its running actual HW emulation - or something like a modified 360 OS tailored to the XB1 HW. Again, I'm leaning towards the latter.

https://youtu.be/DEDyS0Gd5RU?t=99

However, you can see the 'Media' tab is missing from the 360 pop up menu. That's where 'System Video Player', 'System Music Player', 'Picture Viewer' and 'Windows Media Center' options would show up. So, aside from that also indicating it's just a modified version of the OS to run on the XB1 HW, and not actual/full HW emulation (maybe some though, but not complete emulation) - it kinda puts the dash on any WMC extender functionality coming out of this I would think. There's also no 'Xbox Home' option in the profile tab, so no 360 Dashboard. It's simply replaced with a 'Leave Game' option, which I'm safely assuming just dumps you back to the XB1 OS. 'Games & Apps' is missing a bunch of options save for 'Achievements' and 'Rewards'. Also, everything is removed in the 'Settings' tab; aside from 'Profile' and 'Preferences'.

DavidinCT wrote:I'm sure they can emulate the 360 on the Xbox one fine. Remember the 360's CPU is what ? 8-10 years old now ? I am sure they can emulate it on just 1 core of the Xbox one's 8 cores. There might be some games that a tricky but, I am sure they will still work (I know you wont see every game from the 360 play on the Xbox one).

That was always the trick with consoles, use a weaker CPU but, USE heavy GPUS and audio systems to make up for it (the SNES was a key one in this aspect). The GPU and the sound in the Xbox one is, like I said 8-10 years newer, again, not even breaking a sweat...

In the tech world, I would even give someone I hate a computer that slow from that age. Think about it.

Even though I know from a tech hardware standpoint, if the software is done right (And this is Microsoft we are talking about, spare no expense to get it right), there is no question why it would not run and run flawlessly.

I'm not buying it. I think they're doing this remotely, via a VM or something similar. I see no way they are actually emulating the hardware locally.

We'll see when it lands in our hands though. I suspect if you disable your internet access, bye bye feature.

I'm sure they can emulate the 360 on the Xbox one fine. Remember the 360's CPU is what ? 8-10 years old now ? I am sure they can emulate it on just 1 core of the Xbox one's 8 cores.

No. Not a chance in a hell, you're completely misunderstanding how this works.

Good grief people...
Here's a good blurb on the differences between Emulation & Virtualization.

http://www.computerworld.com/article/25 ... tion-.html

TheOsburnFamil wrote:Good grief people...
Here's a good blurb on the differences between Emulation & Virtualization.

http://www.computerworld.com/article/25 ... tion-.html

Who are you responding to?

It's very relevant to what Microsoft is claiming they are doing when they say they are "Emulating" the 360, we aren't misunderstanding the difference.

The High Council Elders have had a meeting and propose that from now on member Ed, shall be known as: Emulation Ed.
This has been a public service announcement.

So, cloud based, RDP 360 gaming somehow...?

I've also heard claims it's running a modified 360 OS in a form of hyper-v (or just straight up hyper-v) for the XB1. I would believe that over HW emulation in a heartbeat.

Straight from the horse's mouth.
http://www.engadget.com/2015/06/18/xbox ... _truncated

Quote from the article: "What they did was they created a software-based 360 emulation within the Xbox One architecture. So, when you put your disc in the drive, we're actually loading up an emulator, and then we put up a little portion of the Xbox 360 dashboard and you use that dashboard to launch into your game."

That actually doesn't really tell us much of anything other than the OS is the only thing they've actually "emulated".

For several good reasons, this is probably the best we're going to get from anyone at MS. So, for now we have to take this for what it is worth. If I were to toss my speculation into the ring - I'd say they might be leveraging some Hyper-V type technologies to pull this off. Not likely, but possible.
To answer a previous question brought up here... The Original XB was based on an Intel P3 733MHz proc, but I dont' recall the exact RAM amount. So, the 360 with its triple-core proc (running at around 2GHz or so) was emulating a single-core P3. I played a handful of emulated XB games on the 360, and I personally feel they all played very well. I only recall one minor visual glitch that was corrected by re-loading my last save point.
I really hope that whatever magic they have found in their code translates to a cleaner/better XBOne UI. In my humble opinion, the XBOne UI is sluggish and buggy. Not at all what I would expect from a product that has been in consumer hands for 18 months.

If anyone has had a chance to try Xbox One's Xbox 360 backwards compatibility you'll notice it looks like its booting a 360 inside the X1. I know its not really emulating the game but its been "reworked" or something to run on the X1. Couldn't they just do the same thing they're doing for 360 games with the WMC program? There doesnt seem to be any game development required, just as long as MS gets the "Ok" from the publisher they can make the game work on X1.

I know they aren't real in to WMC anymore but I'm really hoping this is something they've looked at doing.

[Moderator note: topic merged; search before posting]

Yea, it's not emulated, it's a VM. I tried one of the FREE games that I got as being a Xbox live member (none of the disc games I own are on the list), over all it works fine, performance is there, 5.1 audio is there, and you can bring up the Xbox 360 menu with limited options. You can also do Xbox one tasks like capturing a clip (Xbox record that) and other things.

Would love for them to do this for Media Center but, would rather have them add on a plugin on the Xbox one (a dream or fantasy at this point) to think of codec support and CPU support on the Xbox one, those high bitrate Blu-ray rips would play back flawlessly on an extender... Sigh, just a dream because it will never happen at this point...

CXK wrote:If anyone has had a chance to try Xbox One's Xbox 360 backwards compatibility you'll notice it looks like its booting a 360 inside the X1. I know its not really emulating the game but its been "reworked" or something to run on the X1. Couldn't they just do the same thing they're doing for 360 games with the WMC program? There doesnt seem to be any game development required, just as long as MS gets the "Ok" from the publisher they can make the game work on X1.

I know they aren't real in to WMC anymore but I'm really hoping this is something they've looked at doing.

[Moderator note: topic merged; search before posting]

They could do a lot of things with WMC, but they won't.

WMC development and features are dead. We will never see another mention of it by Microsoft.

It looks like it's not strictly emulating the game. It seems to me that the game code is also being changed/updated. Microsoft is doing something to the games. Tell Microsoft what games you want 'emulated', and Microsoft will update them. So, maybe emulated OS and recompiled games to work on the new hardware. It seems convoluted, possibly a misuse of the term 'emulated'.

If we were looking at a real emulator, then the ability of the emulator to run a game would depend on how resource intensive the game is (and what particular resources/features are supported by the emulator), not on how many people request that game be emulated.

UCBearcat wrote:Straight from the horse's mouth.
http://www.engadget.com/2015/06/18/xbox ... _truncated

Quote from the article: "What they did was they created a software-based 360 emulation within the Xbox One architecture. So, when you put your disc in the drive, we're actually loading up an emulator, and then we put up a little portion of the Xbox 360 dashboard and you use that dashboard to launch into your game."

Also from that article:

Will every Xbox 360 game eventually be available via backward compatibility?

It's up to gamers to tell us what they want. We do all the work, but there is a little bit of work and part of that involves talking with the publisher and making sure that this is consistent with their goals for the game as well. So, as gamers ask us, we will deliver.