The nature of how FPGAs work (and therefore their current limitations) mean that an original Xbox or even a Dreamcast core is out of scope unless you buy a several thousand dollar (USD) FPGA board. There is significant overhead due to the preprogrammable nature of FPGA technology and so it means that even something like Sega Saturn is a challenge on $150 hardware.

However as an avid fan of the original Xbox, I want an original Xbox core too, so when I get FPGA hardware, I am going to begin work on a rudimentary open-source concept for an original Xbox core, either on the MiSTER or Tang platform, possibly both in the future.

@semplew: Surely there must be a viable alternative, is there nothing else that could be used?

How about some ancient intel Atom + Geforce Integrated Ion chipset repurposed from a decade ago?

Then again, xemu is pretty intensive so that probably wouldn't work. I don't know why it is either considering it's x86 -> x86, so there shouldn't be much CPU translation going on if any.

Or perhaps an updated AMD mendocino chip?

It's just frustrating to me that still nobody has reimplemented an almost 25 year old SoC into some kind of ASIC / FPGA yet.. :/

Is it really / can it be that difficult?

We already have raspberry pi's capable of emulating PS3 (a much more powerful console - although tbf rpcs3 is extremely well optimized compared to Xbox emus) at lower resolutions with light games, so I think we're almost at a point of getting some kind of power efficient hardware to work.

Quote from: OGXboxfan on January 25, 2025, 10:16:42Why do always people do these retro FPGA systems for consoles that already have rock solid emulation via software? So there's no real necessary immediate need for one.

Wish people would do something like this for OG Xbox, where the software emulation state is still not great. It's difficult to even get used hardware for such a system, extremely so if looking for brand new / barely used / open box. Even if you do there's no guarantee that the capacitors have corroded or it's even in a functioning state after all those decades.

Because an FPGA that is capable of supporting Xbox is either not available yet or is way too expensive. The 486 is barely playable under Mister, let alone a fully fledged GPU based gaming PC from the early 00s.

Why do always people do these retro FPGA systems for consoles that already have rock solid emulation via software? So there's no real necessary immediate need for one.

Wish people would do something like this for OG Xbox, where the software emulation state is still not great. It's difficult to even get used hardware for such a system, extremely so if looking for brand new / barely used / open box. Even if you do there's no guarantee that the capacitors have corroded or it's even in a functioning state after all those decades.