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3rdman - Oct 10, 2001

		3rdman	Oct 10, 2001
		Don't know if its true, but we'll find out soon enough on Friday if it is. Quote from teamxbox forum: "According to Matt Cassamara, MS & Sega have a "big" announcement on day 1 regarding the future of both companies. This more or less, from the IGN insiders point of view means Sega will be strongly partnered with Microsoft, and we would be seeing exclusive games and series. Further more, the big announcement is expected to be so huge it makes people do backflips. (as quoted from XBox japan's main site) Skies of Arcadia (exclusive) Panzer Dragoon (exclusive) Shenmue (exclusive) And other big Sega franchises hitting only the XBox. No other details are out at this time, but the announcement would be more heavy hitting than the Capcom/Sony announcements, and certainly be breaking down the walls for hardcore Sega fans." If true, then great for me cause i'm picking up an Xbox on launch day. I just pray that Shenmue 2 continues to be released on the DC...

		Service Games	Oct 10, 2001
		I just might get an x-box if I can scrounge up 300 bux.

		Shinshiro	Oct 10, 2001
		ill just upgrade my PC and within 3 or so months of the Xbox coming out there will be near flawless emulators for it!!! as such is my prediction

		ExCyber	Oct 10, 2001
		I'd count on Microsoft introducing deliberate incompatibilities between PC and XBox; if done correctly these would probably be at least substantial enough to preclude an emulator for anything except an NForce-based mainboard coupled with a GeForce3-based video card, and maybe they could even render that incompatible through customization of the XBox's components...

		3rdman	Oct 10, 2001
		Shinshiro, there was a story written about a developer who, under anonymity, said it MIGHT be possible to emulate the Xbox. But, It would cost an arm and a leg in hardware. The two biggest problems were that the Xbox occupies ring 0 (whatever that means) which is normally occupied by a computers operating system and the fact that the Xbox is using CUSTOM designed chips by Nvidia. The other problem was that the Xbox disks were using a new form of encryption thats very difficult to bypass. All in all, the developer said it MAY be possible but VERY difficult. But why spend thousands on a coputer to emulate the Xbox when you can BUY one for 300? I don't get it... I'll try to dig up the whole article for you...It was a great read.

		Shinshiro	Oct 10, 2001
		the fact that im saying is you spend thousands of dollors on a PC anyways, and the Xbox dosent have much special hardware in it, its a P3 733 CPU, with a Geforce 3 (with minor enhancements for some effects which wouldnt be hard to emulate), the only trouble might be the sound card cuz its not a creative labs product or any other PC hardware that i know of (its basically the only original piece of hardware the Xbox has), otherwise all the Xbox has is directly ripped PC hardware (or close enough to it), so in theory if you have good enough PC hardware (ill be upgrading my PC in the next few months anyways and im looking for at least a 1ghz system with a geforce 3) it shouldnt be that hard and protection on a game means nothing to an emulator, if a Xbox game has copy protection on it why would an emulator demand to read it to see if its a copy?? im not saying im going to pirate Xbox games, im saying i would buy the Xbox games and run them on an emulator overall my point is since im upgrading my PC anyways an Xbox emulator would save me the addition cost of the Xbox system, not to mention the hassle of having yet another console in my room

		ExCyber	Oct 10, 2001
		The XBox APU architecture is reportedly going into NVidia's upcoming (supposed to be out Real Soon Now) mainboard chipset called NForce. As for XBox having "no special hardware", there's way more to a computer than the individual components would suggest. Mapping and support hardware (such as DMA controllers, caches, interrupt controllers, etc.) can make two otherwise similar systems completely unable to run each other's software. The XBox's memory map might be quite different from a standard PC's, and it probably has non-trivial hardware to control access to the shared RAM. If this hardware is programmable, it could be a complete bitch to emulate efficiently. 3rdman also said that the disc contents are encrypted. This is not something that an emulator can just ignore; you can't run software if you can't read it.

		3rdman	Oct 10, 2001
		Whew! It was a pain to find, but here it is. It's a great read for anybody interested in the Xbox... http://www.theinquirer.net/24080109.htm... From the article: He explains that the real reason it's not likely that emulation of X-Box games on the PC will succeed is because the X-Box uses a unified memory architecture: "That's impossible to emulate in software, because games on X-Box can be designed to load stuff once in to memory and use it directly without uploading it to the graphics card. The whole memory management code for a well-written native X-Box game is therefore completely different from a PC game. "It would be analogous to running your entire application out of VRAM. In fact, running the whole thing out of VRAM might work as a substitute on the PC, but the bus bandwidth would be greatly reduced - AGP 4X probably wouldn't cut it."

		Death	Oct 10, 2001
		3rdman thanx forr the site .. ive been looking for this infomation for a while now ..

		Fabrizo	Oct 10, 2001
		I don't know much about the rumors, but as far as the Panzer Dragoon franchise being xbox exclusive, I must add one thing: PLEASE, FOR ALL THAT IS HOLY AND GOOD, DON'T LET IT BE AN ONLINE GAME! And thats all I have to say.