Am I right in thinking that the PS4 and Xbox One (and later) consoles and should be easier to emulate by virtue of being based on a more standard x86 architecture?
> Am I right in thinking that the PS4 and Xbox One (and later) consoles and should be easier to emulate by virtue of being based on a more standard x86 architecture?
Easier to emulate to a working state, but potentially harder to emulate to good performance if a game uses any of the quirks of a modern console like the high bandwidth shared memory, fast storage, custom hardware, etc.
Sure, but we're still talking about customized SoCs, with some additional silicon in there for extra audio and video DSPs. Also I'd bet that even on modern architectures most console games (or their base libraries) still require precise timing on the side of memory access, CPU stalls, instruction cycles, available bandwidth, etc.
Once you start requiring per-cycle emulation of any of those components we lose any advantages from having any kind of paravirtualization elsewhere.
Perhaps, but not necessarily. The original Xbox was based on mostly off the shelf PC hardware of its early, Intel Celeron, standard motherboard architecture (mostly), Nvidia GPU, and regular IDE hdd. But it's only in the past few years we have begun to see working emulators.
I’ve always wondered whether that was because of technical challenges or just lack of interest. After all, nearly all games on Xbox were available either on PC or other consoles. I can remember a few exclusives like Blinx, Conker, Far Cry Instincts…
100% lack of interest. There's been like 5 people total in the og xbox emu scene in the last 10 years, one of them didn't even do any actual work besides getting mad in reddit comments (jayfoxrox) and another put all his effort into working on an hle/binary translation emulator which by definition cannot work with half the library of games as xbox api and dx api calls are inlined in those games.
Matt really saved the day when he started up xemu from xqemu. It was advancing by leaps and bounds there for a while but has slowed down once again over the last year. I'm hoping it picks up steam once again.
Because the Xbox "Coppermine" CPU has the same L2 cache size as a "Coppermine" Celeron (the main differentiator between Pentium and Celeron at the time), the Xbox CPU is sometimes called a Celeron instead of a Pentium III. The Xbox chip retains 8 way cache associativity of a "Coppermine" Pentium III instead of the 4 way that Celeron has, so it's not quite what you'd get with a PC Celeron chip. Ultimately this configuration is only used in the Xbox, so if Intel and Microsoft want to call it a Pentium III I guess that's what it is.
