Hacker News Reader

Comment by astura | Hacker News Reader

And there's great legal uses for emulation:

https://hyperkin.com/Retron5/ (it was pointed out to me they violate open source licenses, so forget this one.)

every game system's "virtual store"

wrapping old games around an emulator to make them (seamlessly) compatible with current computers. Allows the publisher to continue to sell decades old games with vert minimal effort.

I don't know how much rereleases of games use emulation vs rewrites, but I assume at least some use emulation.

I believe I heard that the xbox360 contains an Xbox emulator for backwards compatibility. If it wasn't the Xbox360 it was some other console.

Then there's the failed bleem! commercial emulator.

View on HN

Funnily enough the Retron5 is illegal. Not because it emulates games, but because the emulators it uses are stolen from open source projects that forbid commercial use.

https://www.libretro.com/index.php/appeal-to-game-journalist...

Wow, I didn't know that. I don't know much about the product other than it's pretty mainstream so I assumed they played by the rules.

Aren’t open source licenses that forbid commercial use kind of rare? All of the big name ones I can think of have no such provisions.

It's more common in the emulation scene. The two emulators that Retron5 infringes on have licenses roughly based on MIT/BSD, but with no-commercial-use clauses added.

https://github.com/snes9xgit/snes9x/blob/master/docs/snes9x-...

https://github.com/ekeeke/Genesis-Plus-GX/blob/master/LICENS...

> Aren’t open source licenses that forbid commercial use kind of rare?

In fact, they're so rare, they don't exist. The OSI Open Source Definition forbids discrimination against fields of endeavour, which means a licence with a non-commercial-use clause is not an open source licence.

This really bugs me about Genesis Plus GX. It's a great emulator, but I believe FOSS emulation is the best way to ensure preservation of a gaming platform and Genesis Plus GX technically doesn't fit the bill. So, I'm keeping my eyes out for other Genesis emulators to use. BlastEm looks promising (GPLv3.)

> I believe I heard that the xbox360 contains an Xbox emulator for backwards compatibility. If it wasn't the Xbox360 it was some other console.

The Xbox One uses emulation to play a (growing) subset of original Xbox and Xbox 360 games.

The original Xbox was x86 and the XB360 is 3-Core PowerPC - but the Xbone is x64. I’m curious how they were able to emulate PowerPC with acceptable levels of performance (my guess is high-level emulation by reimplementing the XB360’s APIs) - I’m also curious if the Xbone’s original Xbox emulation is just CPU virtualisation - or actual emulation.

> I believe I heard that the xbox360 contains an Xbox emulator for backwards compatibility. If it wasn't the Xbox360 it was some other console.

Yep, the external HDD for the Xbox 360 has the "secret sauce" / binary blobs that allows this to work and emulates certain Xbox games.

Similarly, the Xbox One also has the backwards compatibility library to emulate 360 games, but doesn't require an extra accessory. Each game download contains its own wrapper of the 360 emulator.

> the external HDD for the Xbox 360 has the "secret sauce" / binary blobs that allows this to work and emulates certain Xbox games

IIRC, that's _partly_ because it requires Microsoft to pay a licensing fee to Nvidia for the original Xbox GPU, so baked that cost into the cost of the hard drive rather than the console itself.

The original Xbox always had a hard drive and games expected it. The 360 had no-drive models.

I assume that’s why the drive was required.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com