Is it possible to build an XBox360? I mean, some console that you could build to play XBox/XBox360 games on? If microsoft has so many red ring of death problems, it can't be that high quality of hardware right? It would be a pretty cool hobby project. [Edited by - 3DModelerMan on July 27, 2009 8:56:00 PM]

Yes, it is possible to build an XBox 360.
No, you can not build an XBox 360.

You would need a number of critical things you don't have, like their security chips, the special IBM processors WITH the e-fuses etc, their private keys for the encryption, and so on. Not to mention you'd need to be able to manufacture a multilayer motherboard to the correct spec with a GPU that doesn't exist elsewhere.

Quote: Original post by Promit
You would need a number of critical things you don't have, like their security chips, the special IBM processors WITH the e-fuses etc, their private keys for the encryption, and so on. Not to mention you'd need to be able to manufacture a multilayer motherboard to the correct spec with a GPU that doesn't exist elsewhere.

Well, aside from the encryption key, you don't necessarily need any of that stuff. With the ability to read the disc data and with a proper understanding of the instruction set, it'd be trivial to use any sufficiently powerful PC as an XBox 360 emulator, which is possibly what the threadstarter may have had in mind with "some console that you could build to play XBox/XBox360 games on."

An emulator is certainly the more feasible project, in any case. (Probably a fairly profitable one, at that. That old "Bleem!" seems to have opened a commercial path for such products.....) :dunno:


I doubt the XBox has any self-destructing chips, so the private decrypting key is probably trivial to retrieve from the hardware for anyone that does that kind of electrical hackery. So, the only real work would involve reverse engineering the instruction set, which of course would be a substantial amount of effort... but definitely not in the realm of impossibility for the threadstarter or anyone else who is willing to take up a bit of programming and wiring...

Out of curiosity has anyone tried creating a emulator using .net reflection emit. I don't know much about creating virtual machines but it seems like it would make it ridiculously easy to very efficient emulate hardware.

Quote:
Out of curiosity has anyone tried creating a emulator using .net reflection emit. I don't know much about creating virtual machines but it seems like it would make it ridiculously easy to very efficient emulate hardware.

Reflection.Emit is for generating CIL; it's basically useless here. It's also pretty slow, relatively speaking. Almost certainly too slow at this point to be useful in the creation of an efficient emulator for a system as powerful as the 360.

Quote: Original post by HostileExpanse
So, the only real work would involve reverse engineering the instruction set, which of course would be a substantial amount of effort... but definitely not in the realm of impossibility for the threadstarter or anyone else who is willing to take up a bit of programming and wiring...

The XBox 360 uses a triple-core 3.2Ghz PowerPC CPU. No need to reverse engineer the instruction set of a well-known RISC-based processor.

Quote: Original post by HostileExpanse
An emulator is certainly the more feasible project, in any case. (Probably a fairly profitable one, at that. That old "Bleem!" seems to have opened a commercial path for such products.....) :dunno:

I wouldn't say an emulator is any more feasible, at least not for quite a few years. Consoles these days are too powerful to emulate on a computer. Perhaps with recompilation into a native executable, but otherwise, no. (The 360 has a 3-core 3.2GHz processor. Even with intel's most powerful & expensive processors today, you're looking at a 1:1 clock ratio. It certainly takes more than 1 cycle to emulate the cycle of another processor)

Quote: Original post by Programmer One

Quote: Original post by HostileExpanse
So, the only real work would involve reverse engineering the instruction set, which of course would be a substantial amount of effort... but definitely not in the realm of impossibility for the threadstarter or anyone else who is willing to take up a bit of programming and wiring...

The XBox 360 uses a triple-core 3.2Ghz PowerPC CPU. No need to reverse engineer the instruction set of a well-known RISC-based processor.

Hmm.... that's it? Wonder why emulator software hasn't been done already then :-O

Quote: Original post by HelplessFool

Quote: Original post by HostileExpanse
An emulator is certainly the more feasible project, in any case. (Probably a fairly profitable one, at that. That old "Bleem!" seems to have opened a commercial path for such products.....) :dunno:

I wouldn't say an emulator is any more feasible

Even if PC's wouldn't run the software as well, there's still no comparison in the difference in the scale of the two projects (developing an emulator versus replicating every hardware and firmware detail of an XBox).

Quote: Original post by HelplessFool
(The 360 has a 3-core 3.2GHz processor. Even with intel's most powerful & expensive processors today, you're looking at a 1:1 clock ratio. It certainly takes more than 1 cycle to emulate the cycle of another processor)

A 2-minute check showed that a person could theoretically put together a 3GHz dual-cpu rig with 4 cores each, giving a total of 8 cores for the PC to handle what the XBox handles with it's 3 cores. So .... I'd still say that it doesn't really seem outside the realm of feasibility to successfully emulate the XBox.