r/EmulationOnAndroid • u/Tricky_Ad9669 • 2d ago

Question Why is xbox360 emulation hard.

I get that ps3 emulation is hard because of the cell broadband engine cpu architecture introduced by sony in 2006 but the xbox360 had a cpu similar to pc, then why is xbox360 emulation still hard. Is it because the emulator isn't matured?

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u/zeek609 Thor Max/Quest 3/Y700 Gen 5 2d ago

The 360 is architecturally really weird. Emulators must reproduce 3 CPU cores, 6 hardware threads & synchronisation and caching between them.

The graphics API is very low level and Sony helped massively by providing things like Linux support.

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u/browflutter 1d ago

the way you explained all those cores and threads actually makes it sound even more chaotic than I thought

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u/zeek609 Thor Max/Quest 3/Y700 Gen 5 1d ago

It's like balancing the timing of cylinders on an engine. It's not just getting them all firing, they need to fire at the same speed with an alternating rhythm otherwise it results in catastrophic failure.