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A comment on Hacking the Xbox 360 Hypervisor Part 2: The Bad Update Exploit. Parent comment

Re:Hacking the Xbox 360 Hypervisor Part 2: The Bad Update Ex... by jcranmer on Monday March 03, 2025 @04:14PM (#43246821)
The Xbox 360/PS3 era of video game consoles is probably the hardest era to emulate. Subsequent generations of consoles are essentially the same hardware as regular computers, just with a custom OS (and known hardware profile, certainly a benefit over regular consumer PCs). But that era of video game consoles is the last gasp of the custom hardware design of earlier consoles, which is substantially harder to emulate because the hardware just doesn't look like what modern hardware looks like.

Furthermore, said era is also right after Denard scaling came to an end, which means that current hardware doesn't have that much better specs, at least in easy-to-use form, than the hardware of the time. If any game tried to take the hardware to its limits, it would be a real struggle to emulate it with regular computers.

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Re:Hacking the Xbox 360 Hypervisor Part 2: The Bad Update Ex... by yieldcrv on Monday March 03, 2025 @05:14PM (#43247501)
so, the challenge is what’s interesting, or any specific title or application?
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Re:Hacking the Xbox 360 Hypervisor Part 2: The Bad Update Ex... by tedunangst on Monday March 03, 2025 @06:33PM (#43248159)
xbox 360 is pretty close to modern graphics hardware; in fact it debuted modern shader arch a bit before it became the PC standard.
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Re:Hacking the Xbox 360 Hypervisor Part 2: The Bad Update Ex... by pjmlp on Tuesday March 04, 2025 @12:28PM (#43257628)
That would have been DirectX 8, which predates XBox 360 by five years.
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Re:Hacking the Xbox 360 Hypervisor Part 2: The Bad Update Ex... by goosedragons on Tuesday March 04, 2025 @05:35PM (#43260528)
I think they're thinking of the original Xbox which had pixel shaders.
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Re:Hacking the Xbox 360 Hypervisor Part 2: The Bad Update Ex... by pjmlp on Wednesday March 05, 2025 @02:53AM (#43263979)
Even that is a bit of a strech, at it got released one year after DirectX 8 was made available, and was powered by GeForce 3 class hardware, which naturally came first on PC.

> The GeForce 3 was unveiled during the 2001 Macworld Conference & Expo/Tokyo 2001 in Makuhari Messe and powered realtime demos of Pixar's Junior Lamp and id Software's Doom 3. Apple would later announce launch rights for its new line of computers.

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_3_series

Naturally outside PC, there were other stuff predating programmable graphics, however if we stick to the PC, XBox follows PC, not the other way around, specially since the first one wasn't that great versus PlayStation 2 in market share, even if there were some great games like Halo and Fable.

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Re:Hacking the Xbox 360 Hypervisor Part 2: The Bad Update Ex... by trashface on Monday March 03, 2025 @08:27PM (#43249055)
PS3 was wacky, but the 360 wasn't that different from a PC at the time. There were some differences in rendering API, it had a few features not available on PC hardware. And the CPU cores were actually slower than an equivalent intel, but you had 6 of them, rare for the time. If your game was relatively portable and already used a API relatively close to D3D, it wasn't too hard to bring it up on the 360. I worked on a 360 game FWIW.
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Re:Hacking the Xbox 360 Hypervisor Part 2: The Bad Update Ex... by jamesfinlayson on Tuesday March 04, 2025 @01:48AM (#43251147)
Which game?
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Re:Hacking the Xbox 360 Hypervisor Part 2: The Bad Update Ex... by trashface on Tuesday March 04, 2025 @12:21PM (#43257531)
It was an early xbox live arcade game. Not AAA.
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Re:Hacking the Xbox 360 Hypervisor Part 2: The Bad Update Ex... by rekoil on Tuesday March 04, 2025 @03:07AM (#43251739)
Xbox 360 is also a PowerPC architecture, which on its own makes it quite a bit different from normal PC hardware, and even if that's a target that's more common to emulate there's still heavy performance losses in doing so.

It might have been easier to port to because of good OS design, but running games for it will still be inefficient compared to running on actual hardware.

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Re:Hacking the Xbox 360 Hypervisor Part 2: The Bad Update Ex... by iforgotpassword on Tuesday March 04, 2025 @05:26AM (#43252812)
360 emulation was already quite good a year ago, now there's even an experimental fork of xenon that does recompilation for even more performance.
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Re:Hacking the Xbox 360 Hypervisor Part 2: The Bad Update Ex... by rickdeckard on Tuesday March 04, 2025 @03:49AM (#43252096)
Regardless of the D3D-like API-layer (which helped Microsoft compensate for the peculiarities of PowerPC), they're both PowerPC architectures.

You apparently don't know the Story how Sony spent big R&D-money with IBM to transition from MIPS to the custom PowerPC Cell Architecture, while IBM was already selling parts of this development to Microsoft for Xbox 360, and Microsoft ultimately beating Sony in market-launch with a chipset Sony partially financed...[0]

There's a nice book about it from two of the IBM Chip-Designers called "The Race for a New Game Machine" by David Shippy and Mickie Phipps

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2009/jan/01/sony...

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Re:Hacking the Xbox 360 Hypervisor Part 2: The Bad Update Ex... by PaulHoule on Tuesday March 04, 2025 @10:56AM (#43256340)
Nintendo also used PowerPC for GameCube, Wii and Wii U.
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Re:Hacking the Xbox 360 Hypervisor Part 2: The Bad Update Ex... by trashface on Tuesday March 04, 2025 @12:28PM (#43257629)
The PS3 system design was radically different. We considering porting the same PC game we (relatively) easily ported to 360 to that platform, but rejected it because it would be months of work, at least. Didn't matter that it was a similar CPU (technically) to the 360.
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Re:Hacking the Xbox 360 Hypervisor Part 2: The Bad Update Ex... by pjmlp on Tuesday March 04, 2025 @12:30PM (#43257641)
Microsoft was helped by PS 3 being a pain to program, given the Cell architecture, a mistake that Sony didn't repeat, and hence why the 360 was the only XBox that had an upper hand against Sony.
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Re:Hacking the Xbox 360 Hypervisor Part 2: The Bad Update Ex... by maximilianburke on Tuesday March 04, 2025 @10:39AM (#43256070)
The 360 had three hyperthreaded cores, not six.
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Re:Hacking the Xbox 360 Hypervisor Part 2: The Bad Update Ex... by trashface on Tuesday March 04, 2025 @12:20PM (#43257521)
It had 6 hardware threads, but yes pedantically there were three cores.
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