If you're looking for a functional Xbox emulator, check out XQEMU or Cxbx-Reloaded
Open-Source (Original) Xbox Emulation Project
The current state of this thing is just a tad bit more tangible than vaporware. Essentially right now it just initializes an x86 system (courtesy of HAXM or KVM) and runs whatever is in ROM, which is provided by the user.
No networking, no audio, no graphics, no games... yet ;).
The goal is to emulate the Xbox at a low level. The user will have to provide their own dump of the MCPX and BIOS ROMs from an Xbox machine, as well as the appropriate game media dump in XISO format or from an extracted directory.
OpenXBOX uses CMake build files to generate projects for your preferred development platform. OpenXBOX contains multiple modules, as described in the Project Structure section below.
You will need to specify a CPU module for OpenXBOX to run. The CMake option
CPU_MODULE gives you a choice of default modules bundled with OpenXBOX that
can be used for development and release builds.
You'll need CMake 3.8 or later, Visual Studio Community 2017 and HAXM.
> mkdir build
> cd build
> cmake -G "Visual Studio 15 2017" .. -DCPU_MODULE=haxm # for 32-bit builds
> cmake -G "Visual Studio 15 2017 Win64" .. -DCPU_MODULE=haxm # for 64-bit builds
The .sln file will be generated in the build folder, ready to build.
You'll need CMake 3.1 or later. The Linux build uses KVM.
$ sudo apt-get install cmake
$ mkdir build; cd build
$ cmake .. -DCPU_MODULE=kvm && make
$ cd src/cli
$ ./openxbox-cli <path-to-MCPX-ROM> <path-to-BIOS-ROM> <path-to-XBE> [debug|retail]
macOS is currently unsupported. Feel free to submit a pull request to add support for this platform!
OpenXBOX is split into multiple modules:
core: the core of the emulator, providing basic emulation logic and a module interface for the various pieces of hardware that composes the Xbox. This is a static library meant to be used by front-end engines.cli: a command line front-end for OpenXBOX.common: common code shared across all modules.module-common: contains common definitions and types for OpenXBOX modules.cpu-module: defines the interface and basic types for CPU modules.cpu-module-haxm: Windows-only CPU module implementation using HAXM.cpu-module-kvm: Linux-only CPU module implementation using KVM
The guest can be debugged using the GDB debugger. Once enabled, the emulator will open a TCP socket upon startup and wait for the GDB debugger to connect. Once connected, you can examine the CPU state, set breakpoints, single-step instructions, etc. A sample .gdbinit file is provided with useful GDB default settings to be loaded when you start GDB in this directory.
Alternatively, on Windows, you can perform kernel debugging of the virtual Xbox by creating a linked pair of virtual null-modem serial ports with com0com. Use a Debug BIOS ROM and attach one side of the pair to the first Super I/O serial port, then connect WinDbg or KD to the other side to begin kernel debugging.