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2degrees
crackrdbycracku: OK, this is not my area of expertise and I am just asking a question of people who seem to know better.
Does the range of specs that come under the umbrella of 'PC' have a bearing here?
When you buy an x-box you know the processor speed, memory etc. More to the point the game developer knows.
When you buy a PC they come in all shapes and sizes so to speak, all the way from 'underpowered' laptops to custom re-built desktop gaming rigs.
Wouldn't this make it several orders of magnitude harder to develop a game and get it to market in short order?
As I said, this is a question. Put forth by someone not talking about their area.
Thanks
Yes and no. It's by no means trivial, but by the time this is released you'll be emulating something like a 6 year old CPU with modern hardware. Some of it can abstract away almost completely - if you access the video hardware, say, by only using DirectX, then nothing needs to be emulated as your PC will already have those APIs available natively in it's own DirectX implementation. Also on 6 years newer hardware. Likewise for the kernel calls - you just reimplement any Xbox-OS-specific kernel calls directly in x86 code. MS obviously have the original source code so it's relatively simple to port it to x86-64.
Translation from PPC binary machine code to x86-64 for the game itself isn't easy, but it has already been done, and shown to offer quite reasonable performance even when translated by a contemporary CPU, let alone one that's many years more advanced.
It's also pretty straightforward compared to deciding which bits of the low level hardware to actually emulate, because there will always be *some* developer who decides he wants to bend the metal with his bare hands. That would be the Hard Bit. But again since they have access to the hardware specs it should be possible.
I'd wager there will be some games that don't work. But the ones that stick mostly to the 'right' way of doing things should run well, if not better than on a real Xbox.
