If you're looking for a functional Xbox emulator, check out XQEMU or Cxbx-Reloaded.

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viXen

6th Generation (Original) Xbox Emulator

A fork of OpenXBOX by mborgerson, with a focus on LLE emulation. HLE kernel was an original goal of OpenXBOX; it will come later in viXen.

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 one of the various virtualization platforms supported by virt86) and runs whatever is in ROM, which is provided by the user.

If provided with a particular BIOS ROM and a raw hard disk image containing the Microsoft Xbox Dashboard, it will load the Dashboard software succesfully. It can also load games from an XISO, although without graphics, input, audio or networking nothing is really playable... yet ;)

The initial goal is to emulate the original 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 and a hard disk image containing the system software.

In the future, viXen will attempt to provide high level emulation of the kernel in order to sidestep the ROM and dashboard requirements. It is a long way off, as research on the kernel is still incipient and existing implementations are incomplete, incorrect or straight up copies of illegally obtained code.

How to Build

viXen uses CMake build files to generate projects for your preferred development platform. You'll need CMake 3.8 or later.

Windows

To make a Visual Studio 2017 project:

> mkdir build
> cd build
> cmake -G "Visual Studio 15 2017" -A Win32 ..   # for 32-bit builds
> cmake -G "Visual Studio 15 2017" -A x64 ..     # for 64-bit builds

The .sln file will be generated in the build folder, ready to build.

Linux

$ sudo apt-get install cmake
$ mkdir build; cd build
$ cmake .. && make
$ cd src/cli
$ ./vixen-cli -m <path-to-MCPX-ROM> -b <path-to-BIOS-ROM> -d <path-to-XBE> -r [debug|retail]

macOS

macOS is currently unsupported. Feel free to submit a pull request to add support for this platform!

Debugging Guest Code

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.