Xbox Series X|S, an amazing emulation machine, now featuring PS2 emulation

I think the bigger issue is the drive actually being able to read the disc. Console game discs are not standard format and some require a specific read/write-head unit.

So even if they allow access to it (which they probably can since UWP apps on Windows also have access to drives, right?), it doesn’t mean that the discs are readable.

Is there such a thing? I thought the S/X all had a drive? Are there more versions? Only the PS5 (and xbox one “digital edition”) has a discless version to my knowledge unless I missed something :open_mouth:
edit: actually my bad, the S never has a drive, the X always has one… oh well.

It’s a standard blu ray drive in the xbox.

And there’s a large list of consoles that have direct disc game play on retro-arch now on PC. It’s relatively new for Retroarch (not like 2020 new, but fairly new). I am not 100% on whether the UWP version supports it though (on PC).

I’m not talking Gamecube games (obviously gonna have issues) or Dreamcast games (same) - but PS1, Saturn, etc. Actually Saturn would be really spiffy because the emulation has improved so much in the last year and they have those really cool wireless retrobit controllers that have USB dongles which should work on the xbox for UWP stuff…

How locked down is the hardware? Is it possible to run build a UWP program that uses OpenCL? How much if any of the GPU is accessible? The new consoles are ideal for distributed computing projects on paper, in practice probably not.

Not so much a limitation of the Xbox, but I know that historically you couldn’t use UWP to do CUDA acceleration just access things through DirectX. (Nvidia released something at one point that seemed to make it sound like you could use their GPUs through a UWP for certain accelleration but I never saw any documentation about this in follow up so it may have just been a poorly written/confused press release)

UWP is a super locked down client-application space. It happens to allow something like retroarch to run, and there’s tons of other like smart-home related use cases, etc. BUT it’s not great for performance oriented development. It’s a novelty.

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So I can pay 300 bucks for emulation power equal to my desktop? What a deal!

Honestly this is really neat tho.

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That can also play original Xbox, 360, and xb1 games natively (or for OG xbox/360… emulation but with stability significantly more consistent than what the emulation scene has to offer). 500 if you want to be able to run discs, but then you get a WAY beefier system and a 4k blu ray player with that… and don’t have to pay full price for 3 year old games down the road that are 20 bucks on Amazon vs. 60 bucks in the store lol (if you don’t play games “right away” you’re actually better of buying the disc based system as it pays itself off over time).

And you get a 50 dollar controller either way. And the new controller has a share button added… anyone who’s ever used an xbox controller for an emulator+front-end system has been begging for just 1 more button so that all the controls can be assigned to emulator commands, but you can still have a button available to access front-end menu without a keyboard.

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Huh. Neat. I’ll keep my PSP and 3DS I think, but neat.

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Oh man yeah, the modded PSP was crazy. I need to find mine and get a battery.

UWP is rightly regarded as trash that needs a liberal amount of fire applied to it, but needs must if it turns out that something can be done with it. Probably not, Vulkan most likely isn’t supported because of MS’s vested interest in DX12 so even a hacky solution trying to compile CL kernels to SPIR-V for use with a Vulkan wrapper seems like a dead end.

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There is a DirectX -> OpenCl pathway in the works: https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/introducing-opencl-and-opengl-on-directx.html

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Yeah, you had to CFW your PS3 in order to get Other OS working again.

BTW, if you ever did a full reset on your PS3, it also respawns a new encryption key for the HDD which renders your old HDD useless. If you were trying to do data recovery after the fact, it’s impossible because everything on that drive is encrypted.

Excuse me? What is that supposed to mean? Even if that was sarcasm that was offensive as I genuinely have a problem looking at the positives as a serious mental health issue.

It can do PS2 now… Not perfectly but it can do it, an xBox running PS2 games, damn.

There is something pleasing in seeing the AMD billboards in Outrun 2006 on a modern AMD console, though it runs terribly at the moment.

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I’ve heard you can get out of S mode into desktop mode one 10S, wonder if that would be possible

He does say in the video there is a 2GB ROM limit in dev mode but you can get RetroArch running in retail mode but would not discuss it due to possible legal issues.

emulation is legal, running roms on an emulator is legal, downloading is not so its fine

I think more to do with breaking out of dev mode on the xBox.

hmmm yeah I suppose so, I think its more of “microsoft really doesn’t like it and will ban your console” more than illegal but I could be wrong

kinda like it’s not actually illegal to put custom firmware on your PS3 and play PS3 games on it, as long as they’re your PS3 games that you went through the proper steps to back them up

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I’d be interested if the Cemu and ReDream guys would actually offer cores for libretro.
Also Steam Remote Play.

But I have said that already, so yea… that video of MVG was great once again.
Hope he keeps us updated on the Series homebrew scene as this time around, we are actually allowed to do things with the consoles for a little fee.

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RetroArch article on how to set it up and potential pit falls

https://www.libretro.com/index.php/retroarch-1-7-7-experimental-alpha-version-of-uwpxbox-one-version/