the intolerance of Microsoft

[luispratas]

The first Xbox it's a descontinued product from 6 years, i don't understand the reluctance and the greed of Microsoft in provide the source codes and documentation of this console for you progress with the emulation. If other consoles of the same generation and later like Wii have emulators in advanced development and the respectives development companies of these consoles didn't had any problem to provide the documentation why Microsoft closed the door to Xbox emulation?

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Last edited by luispratas; May 9th, 2012 at 18:48..

[Phil]

So should Ford let companies copy the Mustang and sell it for profit?

Microsoft has no reason to release any documentation.

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[luispratas]

Then why the other companies like Sony, Nintendo and Sega released documentation? I think that it's very much greed of Microsoft for to think like that.
Why there are emulators for the other consoles?

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Last edited by luispratas; May 9th, 2012 at 19:34..

[blueshogun96]

Originally Posted by luispratas

The first Xbox it's a descontinued product from 6 years, i don't understand the reluctance and the greed of Microsoft in provide the source codes and documentation of this console for you progress with the emulation. If other consoles of the same generation and later like Wii have emulators in advanced development and the respectives development companies of these consoles didn't had any problem to provide the documentation why Microsoft closed the door to Xbox emulation?

How many times do I/we have to explain this?

1. No corporation is under any obligation to release any hardware documentation of any of their devices for starters. If the endeavour isn't making them money, they aren't interested in doing it.

2. I highly doubt Sega and other companies just released their hardware documents, they were more likely leaked by 3rd party developers (on an individual basis).

3. Even if Microsoft wanted to release the documentation, they STILL wouldn't do it because of numerous legal issues. A good example would be the NV2A northbridge and the MCPX southbridge; these are owned by NVIDIA, not Microsoft and NVIDIA will sue the hell out of Microsoft for releasing their specs without their permission (and NVIDIA is the most stingy video card company spec wise to date)! They don't own the hardware like the other companies that had customized hardware for their console, it's the very reason why the 360 isn't backwards compatible on a hardware level.

Sure, it would be great for us to see the official hardware docs released (and I'd drool a lugi large enough to fill a lake if I got my hands on it), but there's already enough unofficial documentation out there to write a fairly decent emu. Every hardware aspect is documented fairly adequately now except for the SoundStorm APU, and many of the hardware components already have freely available docs (i.e. Pentium III, AC'97, Motorola 56xxx, USB 1.x, port mapped I/O, Conexant Video Encoder, etc.) and most of the other hardware/software has been reverse engineered (i.e. NV2A, Gamepad, Network Adapter, BIOS, boot process, XB DVD format, Xbe format, HDD formatting, memory map, etc.) so all in all, we don't need it that much.

Correct me if I'm wrong in any way, please.

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[Fadingz]

For one things, "most of the popular/overrated/over-hyped games are on PC", so not that many coders are intersted in emulating the XBox.
Emulation is a tedious task, after all, if you have no interest in doing so.
Just play the PC duo if you wanna play a xbox game on pc in most cases.
Plus, you are not gonna have xbox live access with emulator.

People were interested in SEGA, PS, whatever, and somehow for the specs leaked out, and it happened to work out.
It's just happens to be not the case for Microsoft, nothing special.
SEGA/Sony were not giving them out, as stated before, and Microsoft is not the only one protecting their specs.

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Last edited by Fadingz; May 10th, 2012 at 08:02..

[blueshogun96]

Originally Posted by Fadingz

For one things, most xbox games are on PC

I wish people would STOP quoting this false statement!!!

A large percentage of Xbox1 titles didn't have PC ports. When people say this, they don't stop and think about games other than Halo and other overrated games. The absence of the image stamp reading "Only on Xbox" does not mean "Also on PC". More than likely, it was just also on PS2 and/or GC.

If you were to say "most of the popular/overrated/over-hyped games are on PC", then there'd be nothing to argue...

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[Fadingz]

There, fixed

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[JayFoxRox]

The others pretty much said it all.

However, worth to note that especially on the xbox LOTS of information was leaked.
Personally I believe th lack of an emulator can be explained because the xbox is just not too interesting (or worth emulating) from an emulation perspective for various reasons (technical and non-technical).

Also it's not true that the xbox has been discontinued for 6 years. Xbox games are still being sold for Xbox 360. I'm sure there are various other ways to make money too in the future (Portable (handheld) xbox for example).

Could you provide actual proof for a release of said documents of any of the companies you mentioned? I highly doubt any of them released documents. And if so, only in the form of patents or internal information to developers and engineers (which was leaked, hence not released)