HunterZ wrote:

Isn't there an XBox port as well?

But would that port work with the new XBox 360?

No. Different CPU, probably massively updated (and probably still braindead) OS as well. Between xbox and xbox 360 there is no binary compatibility and I'd expect no source compatibility either.

It has software emulation of the original XBox, but it remains to be seen whether it will be possible to access that emulation to run homebrew apps on it.

How could the 360 hope to even nearly match the original's speed if they emulate it? I mean, look at DOSBox, it's the same thing they would have to do, and you know how slow emulated speed is. I really doubt it works well and probably has lots of software compatibility issues for anything but some well-tested titles. I really can't imagine it is usable for any serious game.

I wouldn't know since I don't own a 360, but I've read that there is a specific list of original XBox games that are currently supported on the 360. I think they're doing lots of game-specific optimizations.

Also, I'd guess that only the CPU should have to be emulated in software (whereas DOSBox emulates just about *everything* about a computer in software, except possibly when using the dynamic core). The rest of the hardware probably uses similar APIs on both consoles. I would imagine things are a lot easier when the emulated and host systems are both known, fixed entities.

To my understanding, the XB360 has no real XB emulation whatsoever. The few "compatible" games only work via a specific patch to install on the HD. More like an updated executable, meseems.

Nope, it is true emulation, based on VirtualPC core. If you check the list you may find that it is a) actually quite long; and b) sometime does not make sense -- it has some some real dogs and is missing some important titles. It's actually a list of titles that MS QA found to be running sufficiently well with current emulator version, so they are unlocked. Everything else probably would run but with serious issues so the console just refuses to start those.
Speedwise it is fine. The only performance issue I've seen was that some movies are not as smooth as they should be. Halo actually runs better than on the original XBox, KOTOR runs much better thanks to faster DVD drive.

VirtualPC? Interesting. Thanks for the heads-up, Vasyl.

So Halo runs better on the 360? Excellent. Incidentally, it's the only XBox game I own 😀

(With Halo 2, that is!)

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I'd hope so. It's the XBox's flagship product (for some strange reason.....) and the game first designed for the XBOX so if any game should run fine in their emulation it would be that one.

That game was first designed for Mac 😉
There are a few things that made XBox emulation on 360 feasible. Having a lot of CPU power is just one but by itself it would not suffice. It has much faster and larger memory, that helps. The thing that really helped is, surprisingly, 3D. 3D functionality of 360 is essentially a superset of XBox 3D.It is not a superset in implementation terms but with some amount of translation tricks it can be (and was) done. That translation may introduce some per-call cost but the hardware itself is so much faster so the entire 3D part of the game works at least as fast as the original. In modern console games the 3D subsystem may take more than half of all execution time. Now, if you add free FSAA, faster DVD, faster HD interface -- you see that there is nothing strange about some games actually running better under emulation. If you think about it, there is one thing that would be penalized by emulation: 2D with massive on-CPU calculations -- two bottlenecks, one on CPU and another in texture upload. Guess what, movies in some games (Halo included) show jerkiness. Some games are better than others in that respect. That seems to affect older games more; newer games probably use better algorithms.

Yeah, if you go to the Rad Game Tools website and read their Bink history log, you'll see alot of Bink optimizations for the XBox.

If you could pinpoint the specific Bink version for each XBox game then you could probably find out which games are most likely to have jerky video.....without looking at game code the easiest way would be to just compare game release date to Bink date of each version.