oeuvre wrote:

A few years ago someone recreated Bomb Omb Battlefield in Unity 3D. It got shot down by Nintendo quickly.

One of my pet disappointments about video gaming is that gaming levels (as in playable areas in a game) aren't magically interchangeable. What I mean is, my favourite genre is the first person shooter, and I'd love to play death-match and last man standing in arena shooters like Unreal Tournament, using levels from my favourite single player games. Imagine being able to play against your friends in the Rapture levels from the first two Bioshock games, for example. That would be brilliant.

I know, there's copyright issues, the data layouts and values between two different games can be utterly different, finding someone who the brains, time, and enough knowledge of the two specific games to handle the task would be difficult, etc, but I can daydream.

Zup wrote:

gdjacobs wrote:

For a second, I thought the OP was talking about Superman 64 being decompiled. I guess even subconsciously I'm always looking for people who share my perverse sense of humour.

Maybe it would be a real challenge. Could anybody get that mess and make something playable?

A protoype rom of Superman 64 was leaked onto the internet a while back, and it's actually supposed to be much better than the released game. Not different enough to be actually good, but still a lot better than the staggeringly bad end product. If you're interested, here's more information:

http://micro-64.com/features/supermanbeta1.shtml

http://micro-64.com/features/supermanbeta2.shtml

https://assemblergames.com/threads/superman-p … analysis.46896/

http://gamester81.com/superman-64-beta-quest- … il-version-h4g/

https://tcrf.net/Proto:Superman_(Nintendo_64)

xjas wrote:

Somebody in the GBAtemp thread made a snark about an RTX port. I would LEGIT LOVE to see that happen.

I had to look up 'RTX'! It's ray-tracing, for anyone else who didn't know. What I don't know is why they used Quake 2 to demonstrate ray-tracing, as it wasn't exactly the most colourful game to begin with.

AlaricD wrote:

"Officially" really isn't the right word.

You're right of course, it's exactly the opposite of the situation. Sorry.

Kerr Avon wrote:

xjas wrote:

Somebody in the GBAtemp thread made a snark about an RTX port. I would LEGIT LOVE to see that happen.

I had to look up 'RTX'! It's ray-tracing, for anyone else who didn't know. What I don't know is why they used Quake 2 to demonstrate ray-tracing, as it wasn't exactly the most colourful game to begin with.

Oops, RTX is one of the biggest buzzwords of the non-retro hardware hype train in the last couple years. I figured everyone would know what it is. RTX is specifically Nvidia's hardware implimentation designed to make real-time raytracing feasible in games. The Quake II demo wasn't made by Nvidia at all and wasn't "chosen" to demonstrate (Nvidia made plenty of their own wanky & dubiously un-generalized demos to show off this tech), somebody ported it on their own. Q2 is interesting because everyone already knows the game, and it's a good platform to see what it looks like in a "real world" game.

That's a good reason to port SM64 IMHO. It pushed the original hardware hard & squeezed some pretty impressive visuals out of it, but it'd be really neat to see it rendered in a completely new way.

Minecraft RTX is really cool to check out too.

If there's any ridiculous reverse-engineer porting wish..... how about a Windows9x SGL version of Jet Set Radio 😀

^^ YES PLEASE.

Jet Set Radio Future on the XBox is supposed to be very good too (I have it, but never played it), I don't know how it compares to the original.

BTW, my two favourite consoles are the Nintendo 64, and the original XBox. And guess which two classic consoles are the two that can't be fully emulated yet...

You'd think that XBox emulation would be fairly easy, at least compared to it's contemporaries, since an original XBox is 95% just a PC, with a P3-733Hz CPU, a modified Nvidia Geforce 3, 64 MB RAM (remember when that was a lot? 😳 ), an IDE hard drive and DVD-ROM, and running a modified version of Windows 2000. But whilst emulation of the Gamecube and PS2 is apparently very good now, you cant play even one game on an emulator of the original XBox through to completion.

And amazingly, emulation of both the Gamecube and the Wii is more reliable and compatible than emulators for the N64 are! Why, I'll never know.

MVG had a recent video on the state of Xbox emu. I haven't ever really cared at all about the Xbox line, so I've been totally unaware of what did, and did not, work yet. Based on the MVG video (and a hypothesis I share given what little I do know about that scene) is that lack of emulation seems to be due at least partly to apathy. There are many XB games that exist on other platforms -- either Windows itself, or platforms with existing emulators. Those that are actually exclusive ran well enough through backward compatibility, so there just wasn't as much of a need beyond those that just want to emulate "because I can".

The only hesitation I have with that argument is.. well.. GCN and Wii are both emulated, despite three generations of consoles that have essentially perfect BC -- at least if you're willing to hack your U. OTOH, Nintendo systems are always going to get the most focus, and are relatively low-end hardware compared to the Xbox contemporaries. Also, you won't find Mario Sunshine on Windows.

PC port already in the works

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8882hqPS3WQ&feature=youtu.be

SirNickity wrote:

MVG had a recent video on the state of Xbox emu. I haven't ever really cared at all about the Xbox line, so I've been totally unaware of what did, and did not, work yet. Based on the MVG video (and a hypothesis I share given what little I do know about that scene) is that lack of emulation seems to be due at least partly to apathy. There are many XB games that exist on other platforms -- either Windows itself, or platforms with existing emulators. Those that are actually exclusive ran well enough through backward compatibility, so there just wasn't as much of a need beyond those that just want to emulate "because I can".

The only hesitation I have with that argument is.. well.. GCN and Wii are both emulated, despite three generations of consoles that have essentially perfect BC -- at least if you're willing to hack your U. OTOH, Nintendo systems are always going to get the most focus, and are relatively low-end hardware compared to the Xbox contemporaries. Also, you won't find Mario Sunshine on Windows.

It is true that many of the best games on the original XBox were also on the PC or on other consoles of the time, but the XBox still had some reallu good total-exclusives, such as Unreal Championship 2 (which *really* should have been ported to the PC so people could make mods for it, as it's in some ways the best multi-player Unreal game ever) and Breakdown. Another great advantage of the XBox, which of course means nothing at all as a reason for creating an XBox emulator for the PC, is that the XBox itself was fantastic for emulators that ran on the XBox. Since the XBox was basically just a PC, many of the best emulators were ported to the XBox, and some new features were added to the emulators when they were ported. On the XBox, you could play more or less perfectly all of the games from the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, SNES, Megadrive (Genesis), Atari ST, Commodore Amiga, arcade games vie MAME and Final Burn, and so on. Even some obscure computers and consoles from the 1980s were emulated, and most emulators had an onscreen emulation of the emulated machine's keyboard if needed, a rewind feature, cheat support, etc. Most emulators were excellent, with it only becoming problematic when you started to emulate 32 bit and above systems (games for the Playstation, N64, and Atari Jaguar, for example, were sometimes glitchy or even totally incompatible).

The XBox was a great emulation box, and most emulators had a really easy to use and comprehensive GUI. Plus thanks largely to the excellent fan-made media player XBMC (which was so good, it was even ported to the PC!)the XBox was a fantastic music and movie player, though it couldn't manage HD films since the XBox's CPU and GFX hardware were too old. But of course the XBox's emulators and skills as a media player are totally irrelevant as a reason to actually emulate the XBox itself on a PC, so it's all down to games. And for some reason most XBox exlcusives don't tend to be too fondly remembered today, from what I've seen on the 'net.

Still, some of us still love and use the XBox to this day, and new homebrew, emulators, and ports of existing PC games are still being released for it even now:

http://www.emuxtras.net/forum/portal.php

At the risk of getting off-topic here, I've been working on completing a console collection and the last stop is Xbox. (It would be a pretty glaring omission given I've even branched out into the deep cuts -- for the US -- like Famicom, Saturn, and PC Engine.) I've always been a Nintendo / PlayStation guy, so I've had to learn a lot about what's out there for the Sega and Xbox platforms. Sega has been pretty easy to get a handle on. With Xbox, the differentiators aren't as obvious to me.

I just picked up an OG Xbox and a 360 Slim and I'm off to a great start with it </sarcasm>, as I got the 4GB 360 and figured I would install an SSD of my own. Turns out it isn't quite that simple, so I bought an official 320GB HDD. Naturally, the first thing I do with any hard drive is run it through badblocks on 6-pass RW mode -- which it passed with no issues. And that's when I learned about security sectors, because the 360 wanted nothing to do with a blank drive, even one with the MS logo on it. So yeah, this is apparently not a PlayStation 3 -- which is happy to accept anything you can stuff in the drive slot. Oops. I really should've known better, but I had planned to hack it anyway (I always do, just so I know I can keep playing after the ODD inevitably fails), so now I'm going down that rabbit hole...

I'm definitely interested in finding out what the standout exclusives are. I've already started buying up the classics.. Halo, Forza, Fable, Gears of War... Not really sure where to go after that, so I've got some research to do and I'm keeping my ear to the ground when people (like you) talk about their favorites.