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Comment by hot_gril | Hacker News Reader

Xbox 360 and PS3 emulators are still borderline unusable on my new-ish PC. They're slow, glitchy, and/or hard to set up. Related to what the other commenter said, anyone who says these are good must have a lot of time to deal with it, whereas I just want the equivalent of sticking the disc into the console.

GameCube is the newest thing I've had a decent experience emulating, and even that isn't 100% unless it's Melee with the Slippi optimizations (n.b. did not try DS or Switch).

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> Xbox 360 and PS3 emulators are still borderline unusable on my new-ish PC.

This is unfortunate as a decade ago Microsoft had an internal emulator for Xbox 360 that ran at near native speed.

I am curious if that emulator is what it used to play Xbox360 games on newer x64 based Xbox models, or if they are using a different code base.

Either way, technically it is possible for the experience to be good!

I wonder about that too. New console supports only a subset of 360 games somehow, and with different enhancements.

The 360 could also play original Xbox games without much exception, but it was noticeably slower than the original. Halo 2 on 360 has a shorter render distance.

> The 360 could also play original Xbox games without much exception

I remember there being a list of what it could play but I was never too sure how comprehensive it was. I know it couldn't emulate Midtown Madness 3.

Oh. So it can't emulate the game I probably played the most.

I think the 360 backwards compatibility is a mix of emulation and certain parts being disassembled & recompiled for x86 with some black magic.

edit: Here's an interview with platform lead Bill Stillwell that goes into a lot more detail https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2017-xbox-one-x-bac...

Oh sweet, thanks for the link. It sounds like it was harder getting things running on the XB1's tiny CPU vs running an emulator on monster dev machines, no surprise there! :-D

I believe there is actually a recent userland project that disassembles and recompiles 360 games for x86...

Hands down my favorite thing about my time at microsoft as an intern was just a random brown bag lunch with the engineers who did the powerPC emulator for xbox360 games on xbox one. It was an incredible talk and they went deep and were happy to answer questions.

Oh damn, I was probably there at the time, working in the building, and was completely unaware of the talk!

That would've been awesome!

By that time though my org had spun out of Xbox to become the Microsoft Band team, so we didn't get any of the cool invites anymore. :(

If you want to emulate a current console, try emulating the switch. I haven't looked into it much, but apparently it works better on modern hardware than on the switch itself. Not surprising given the switch aging hardware and power limit.

The Switch is a mainstream-ish ARM system. IIRC it maps really well to Apple's M system.

But the supposedly working Switch emulators only have experimental Mac support at best. Also idk if the CPU arch is really the hard part in general... we never got an Xbox 360 emulator for PPC Mac ;)

I thought Ryujinx’ Mac support was great?

Maybe it was, idk cause that project shut down

yes, I guess running switch games on android is like running x86 windows games on x86 linux using wine.

Now that you mention it, I tried that once and gave up. The amount of confusion like this makes me not want to try again (Reddit post from 4mo ago): https://www.reddit.com/r/yuzu/comments/1gkdr5x/whats_the_mos...

Seems like these projects keep getting into legal trouble, shut down, then forked.

> Xbox 360 and PS3 emulators are still borderline unusable on my new-ish PC.

How did you manage to achieve that? What specs are we talking?

10th gen i5(? might be another gen I forget, will check at home), 16GB RAM, RTX 2060ti, Win10

Could you be a bit more specific regarding that CPU? That's a very wide range.

i5-9400f, and I was wrong about GPU, it's 1660ti

It's really surprising then that you had such a bad experience with PS3 emulation specifically at least, the i5 9400F was a go-to recommendation there for a very long time, basically ever since that processor's release (6 years ago).

It was in last August they bumped their system requirements to the i5 10400F. Nearly all of the games marked "Playable" in their compatibility list should be plug-and-play territory, with mint performance.

What were the games you tested with classified as? Did you try to seek help on their community space(s)?

I didn't try reaching out, I just wanted to play Shrek Forever After (for a very random reason) and gave up after 5 minutes of choppiness. Like I said, there's probably a fix, and I appreciate that there's community support, but I simply didn't have time. Especially because on the PS3 side, this was after waiting a while for RPCS3 to do its pre-run caching.

Given that game has been marked "Playable" years before your CPU has seen its initial release, and that there are no notes on its Wiki page, I'd expect it to run essentially perfectly out-of-the-box, short of some regression causing issues.

You should give it a retry sometime if you can / want to. That said, I should probably let you know that the community can be slightly hostile, and they will ask you do the legwork if it's not a misconfig but a suspected regression (they'll want you to bisect the build where the choppiness appeared). You'll also want to run the topic by the volunteers in the #help channel on their Discord before opening an issue ticket on GitHub, as their GitHub issue tickets are not for support, only for actual issue / feature request tracking.

An Xbox Series S does a fine job of playing Xbox 360 games and doesn't cost much.

> There are 632 games that have been made backward compatible out of 2,155 that have been released for Xbox 360.

It's also going to struggle without a disk drive to play my physical collection.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_backward-compatible_ga...

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