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  • nathanddrews - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link

    When can we virtualize the 360 on Windows 10 PCs? Seems like a great alternative to an emulator...
  • basroil - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link

    Pretty sure Client Hyper-V in 8/10 doesn't support support real-time OS and definitely doesn't have vGPU support, and even if you didn't have that there's the issue of too many hardware variables since there's over three dozen graphics cards out there none of which are identical to the next.
  • Manch - Friday, November 13, 2015 - link

    You can stream the xbone to a PC so doesn't that give you want you want or do you want an actual virtual 360?
  • nathanddrews - Friday, November 13, 2015 - link

    A virtual 360. Yeah, I know it is wishful thinking. I guess I'll have to make due with Xenia...
  • Manch - Friday, November 13, 2015 - link

    According to the article the 360 is virtualized. I wonder if someone with enough ingenuity will be able to get ahold of it. Someone will try I would think.
  • nathanddrews - Friday, November 13, 2015 - link

    I'm sure someone will try, but without actually having a PC with an 8-core Jaguar APU, it would probably be just as difficult to virtualize it as it would be to emulate it using much more powerful CPU/GPU setups. At least that's my guess, with my limited understanding of emulation vs. virtualization.
  • eek2121 - Friday, November 13, 2015 - link

    The Xbox 360 didn't have 8 cores, nor did it have a Jaguar APU. It could also likely be easily emulated on any PC today. It just takes someone with internal workings of the 360 to write an emulator.
  • inighthawki - Friday, November 13, 2015 - link

    I believe his point is that the xbox one has very specific hardware that the 360 virtualization layer is probably heavily optimized for, and may even contain specialized code in drivers or hardware features that are not necessarily present on a home PC.
  • nathanddrews - Friday, November 13, 2015 - link

    What @inighthawki said. Microsoft didn't make a universal emulator to play 360 games on the Xbone, they optimized the 360 virtual machine specifically for the Xbone hardware. It's not going to work on a regular PC. I'm sure someone, someday will figure it out, but I'm not holding my breath. Xenia will be done before that happens.

    With the success of Steam, Origin, NVIDIA Zone, etc. that Microsoft doesn't dump more effort into bringing Xbox, 360, and Xbone games to the PC as a truly unified platform with Windows 10. Microsoft could claim to be "going back to their roots" that all the hipsters love today while bringing their walled garden (Xbox Live) to a much larger audience that Xbone is capable of on its own. I know that I would pay for Steam-like access to Xbox games on my PC.
  • ZeDestructor - Friday, November 13, 2015 - link

    What you actually need is a way to decrypt the software it runs.. Gonna take a while to get there...
  • ravyne - Friday, November 13, 2015 - link

    Possible, but not so easy. The 360 had 3 cores, each with two threads -- however, each thread had its own dedicated 128bit SIMD unit (Altivec in PowerPC parlance). These altivec units were also customized for the Xbox 360 -- they extended the register file from 32 to 128 entries, and added a dot-product instruction. x64 processors have SSE (128bit SIMD) and AVX (256bit SIMD), which have only 16 and 32 entry register files, and furthermore SSE is a two-operand format, which is inadaquate to express straight-line conversion of Altivec's 3-operand format, even if instruction set itself was parallel; AVX is 3-operand format though, but still lacks sufficient registers.

    On top of that, recall that the Xbox 360 PPC ran at 3.2Ghz, about twice the speed of the One's Jaguar, and that Jaguar's IPC -- while significantly better clock-for-clock -- will struggle to make up that gap. Best case you can map the 360's 6 threads onto 6 full jaguar cores, and if those 6 threads are nearly-balanced you're kinda close to similar performance numbers once you account for making use of AVX for its 3-operand format, but without being able to take advantage of its extra width naively -- now you're at about game-parity, excepting for the fact that you've left no room for emulator overhead. If you do some fancy SIMD transforms you can catch back up there, so that's good, but you can't do that with the straight-line scalar code, and you just kinda have to hope that the longest scalar thread on a 360 isn't longer than what a jaguar's increased IPC can keep up with after accounting for emulator overhead and running at about half the speed. If not, perfect emulation is impossible.

    On a PC with say a quad-core i7 at 3.2Ghz or so, you got clock-speed and IPC enough that scalar code is less of an issue, but now you're lacking SIMD resources to keep up -- you've got only 4 to go around for the 360's 6, of the same speed, you're still lacking total number of registers, and in fact the resources available (registers, execution units, bandwidth) per thread are cut down by 2/3rds. You have to jump through a lot more code transformation hoops just to get back to SIMD parity, and/or you need 6+ cores or need 50% more clockspeed from 4.
  • Morawka - Saturday, November 14, 2015 - link

    each i7 core counts as 2 threads.. 1 core thread, and one HT thread.. by that measure a i7 quad has 8 cores total.

    i7's IPC is ridiculously more than those PPC cores.. probably 10X. Keeping up is not a issue
  • Morawka - Saturday, November 14, 2015 - link

    the emulated games on the 360 are not just copies of the disc copy. When you insert a 360 game on the xbox one, it then downloads a optimized copy off of microsofts servers. The game disc is just there to make sure you own the game. Additionally the games on that list have been broken down and re-coded with less register entries to work on Jaguar cores.

    If we somehow got these newly coded game files, we could run on a emulator no problem.
  • Miller1331 - Tuesday, December 1, 2015 - link

    Fingers crossed
  • JoeMonco - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link

    Never.
  • reuthermonkey1 - Friday, November 13, 2015 - link

    MS is definitely going in the opposite direction - see: WMC gets pulled from Windows and is put into XBone.
  • Jacerie - Friday, November 13, 2015 - link

    It would make more sense for Microsoft to simply publish a XB1 app to the windows store to allow the use of XB1 games on a PC.
  • Sttm - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link

    If they can get Red Dead Redemption backwards compatible on Xbox One, they can get me to buy one.
  • zeeBomb - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link

    That backwards compatibility list though! I'll take it!

    (Backward compatibility is via download from the store, rite?)
  • BulkSlash - Saturday, November 14, 2015 - link

    Yeah, if you own a game digitally you can just download it to the Xbone or if you own the disc you just put it into the console and it will also download the game from the store (presumably because it's a specially altered version of the game). Naturally you need to have the disc in the machine to play the game even though it's using the copy on the hard drive.
  • V900 - Friday, November 13, 2015 - link

    So two years post release, with their console floundering in the market, Microsoft finally fixes backward compatibility... One of the things people have been requesting from the start, and one of several issues which could have made the PS4 a distant second, rather than the Xbone?

    Oh Microsoft! Your bumbling is endearing as always! Never change!
  • damianrobertjones - Friday, November 13, 2015 - link

    But... Now it has what you wanted!
  • tipoo - Friday, November 13, 2015 - link

    Maybe replicating Xenon PowerPC cores on a completely different core type isn't as trivial as you make it sound? Even Sony execs expressed surprise at it working.
  • nedge2k - Friday, November 13, 2015 - link

    If only they would allow 360 peripherals too. Plenty of people are stuck with expensive steering wheels/pedals etc. they could use on the 360 but not the One.
  • Wolfpup - Friday, November 13, 2015 - link

    I've been confused as to what happens when you stick a 360 disc in...like hopefully it just downloads the emulator and that's that, but I almost got the impression it downloads sort of a One version of the entire game? If so that's still better than nothing, but...

    Also wish they'd include Xbox 1 games. If nothing else, I want to retain access to Buffy, which only got released on 1. If the 360 can emulate a lot of 1 games just fine...the One is obviously much more powerful, AND is already x86 like 1 is!

    Well, regardless, Microsoft went from a ton of horrible ideas for the One two years ago, and has really impressively turned things around, actually giving us generally cool features like backwards compatibility and game streaming that make the system really attractive despite how much less powerful it is.

    (I hope the next system has full backwards compatibility, AND doesn't skimp out on hardware.)
  • OrphanageExplosion - Friday, November 13, 2015 - link

    It downloads a One optimised version of the game. The PowerPC executables and the OS itself are incorporated, recompiled in x86.
  • Jacerie - Friday, November 13, 2015 - link

    "and it’s been subtly chanted to make it easier to use I think."

    I believe you meant changed. Unless Microsoft is using sorcerers on their dev team now...
  • yhselp - Friday, November 13, 2015 - link

    Yes, but, pulling RT would take you straight down to your pins. There're other useful shortcuts as well.
  • Alexvrb - Friday, November 13, 2015 - link

    There's a lot to this update. You didn't mention the right trigger shortcut to pinned content. The UI is definitely more responsive. The side panel can be accessed anywhere by double tapping the xbox button, and in a game that can also be used to screenshot or record. Settings is easier to get to now. You mentioned most of the other stuff, but the Subscriptions tab is pretty convenient for downloading Games with Gold and EA access stuff, for example.
  • Laststop311 - Saturday, November 14, 2015 - link

    really doesn't matter the ps4 is the superior machine. Almost every game is being designed for the ps4 first and being ported to xbox one last. I'm a pc gamer but i would buy a ps4 if i was to buy a console and i just may if i get impatient to play the new ff7
  • Alexvrb - Saturday, November 14, 2015 - link

    I'm a PC gamer primarily but I own a lot of consoles too (mostly classics). Realistically most gamers won't notice the difference between the PS4 and XB1. Regardless of specifications, the final output of both is very similar. What's more important to me is the games and the overall experience... which is why I'll probably eventually get an XB1. For starters I enjoy Forza, and I have a decent selection of Xbox 360 games. As their backwards compatibility selection grows, it makes it more appealing. YMMV - I know a lot of people that prefer PS exclusives, it's just a matter of opinion.
  • Michael Bay - Sunday, November 15, 2015 - link

    PS4 literally has nothing right now, while X1 can at least boast Halo. You know they`re desperate if they have to trot out a goddamn corpse of FF7 to dangle it before the gullible.
  • Alexvrb - Sunday, November 15, 2015 - link

    They have a few interesting exclusives, not as many as the current and upcoming XB1 lineup. I'm definitely not counting FF7 among those, since it's already multiplatform. The PS4 FF7 port itself is also likely to be disappointing... last I heard it was basically a straight port of the ancient PC version (which itself was basically a higher res straight port of the PSX title) rather than a remastered version. Might as well buy it on Steam for a few bucks - don't even need a REAL PC... it will run on a toaster oven. Just be prepared for oldschool graphics.

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