February 9, 2009by Chris

If you want to play Xbox 360 Games on your PC then bookmark this page and come back in 10 years.

Right now there are no Xbox 360 emulators available and nobody is working on one.

Home technology is still way too slow to handle the three core 'slightly modified cell processor architecture' IBM Xenon microprocessor and the R600-based ATI GPU - the left and right brain of the 360.

Yes, home technology is several times faster than the legacy 2005 tech of the 360, it's just that home tech needs to be exponentially faster to handle the brute force of reproducing a decent 30fps of emulated Xbox 360 games. That, plus the necessary brains to figure out exactly how to reproduce the execution of 360 games - Microsoft doesn't make it easy, it's not like the days of emulating the Atari 2600. So will we ever see an Xbox 360 emulator? Hopefully, all things are possible in the technology world.

Don't be fooled into downloading and executing an 'Xbox 360 Emulator' as it will likely be a trojan and will mess up your life. As reported in Q4 of 2008 - Xeon 360 is a trojan!

Xbox 360 Homebrew

On the flip side of things, just because you can't emulate the Xbox 360 doesn't mean that you can't run emulators on the 360. Right now, the only emulator available is NESCAFE - NES emulator for your Xbox.

There have been rumours of someone porting MAME to the 360 but nothing concrete has surfaced other than this suspect video on YouTube.

MAME has been successfully ported to the original Xbox - see MAMEoX. Emulation of the original Xbox is hardly off the ground with only two emulators that only play one game each - ie CxBx which plays Turok Evolution.

At the moment, there are about 30 Xbox 360 projects at SourceForge.net - ranging from Xbox 360 Keyboard support to HD video, even an X86 emulation project.

The 360 has sold more units in Canada than it has in Japan but it is selling strong - 28 million units sold worldwide (February 2009). By the end of its product life cycle, the Xbox 360 will have left a huge impact with many people on the planet. Probably enough to motivate one of currently young 360 fanatics to figure out how to emulate it a decade or two from now, passing up keg parties at college to reproduce his or her beloved console with the latest quantum processor technology.. Good luck kid, more power to you.

Right now, nothing emulates the Xbox 360 and emulators on the homebrew front are surprisingly scarce with only the NES being faithfully emulated. There are more emulators currently available for the iPhone.

MaxEm is always curious about any word on Genesis, MAME, 8bit, PSX, PS2, emulation - so if you have anything to say, leave a comment for everyone. What will the Internet be like 20 years from now? Think Xbox Live will still be around...for free?

CS 2.9