Work in progress: First homebrew emulator for the Xbox360, MAME360

It’s just been a little less than a week since the hypervisor vulnerability was first reported. In the short time between that and today, we’ve already seen a “Hello World” Proof of Concept being released. And today, we have a few bits of info about the first emulator for the Xbox 360. This anonymous developer was kind enough to send a few screenshots and describe what he has been up to.

First, a few screenshots:

Here’s what he said about his project:

In light of the recent 360 hack and possibility of widespread homebrew in the future, I wanted to share some news with you and X-S.

I’ve been working on a port of MAME to the 360. I call it ‘MAME360’.

Now for a bit about the project:

• It’s based on MAME 0.112 and is fairly easy to keep up-to-date (doesn’t need any messing around with like Mameox on the xbox).
• Originally it was based on SDLMAME but I’ve since ported a 360 specific osd layer (so SDL for the 360 exists – as an aside I also have a port of ScummVM in the works too).
• Mame doesn’t include any dynarec cpu emulation on anything other than an x86 platform. So any game that is PSX or N64 based for example doesn’t run at all well.
• Most other stuff (that I’ve tried) runs pretty well.
• At the moment it will only run on 360 dev/debug/test kits. Whether it will ever run on a hacked retail box remains to be seen.

Since there isn’t much of a difference when you run code on a debug kit and a hacked retail box, it is possible that if the hypervisor vulnerability is fully exploited, it will open up the Xbox360 to a lot of homebrew. Personally, I can’t wait for this to show up and be possible to run it on retail boxes as homebrew.

It’s just been a little less than a week since the hypervisor vulnerability was first reported. In the short time between that and today, we’ve already seen a “Hello World” Proof of Concept being released. And today, we have a few bits of info about the first emulator for the Xbox 360. This anonymous developer was kind enough to send a few screenshots and describe what he has been up to.

First, a few screenshots:

Here’s what he said about his project:

In light of the recent 360 hack and possibility of widespread homebrew in the future, I wanted to share some news with you and X-S.

I’ve been working on a port of MAME to the 360. I call it ‘MAME360’.

Now for a bit about the project:

• It’s based on MAME 0.112 and is fairly easy to keep up-to-date (doesn’t need any messing around with like Mameox on the xbox).
• Originally it was based on SDLMAME but I’ve since ported a 360 specific osd layer (so SDL for the 360 exists – as an aside I also have a port of ScummVM in the works too).
• Mame doesn’t include any dynarec cpu emulation on anything other than an x86 platform. So any game that is PSX or N64 based for example doesn’t run at all well.
• Most other stuff (that I’ve tried) runs pretty well.
• At the moment it will only run on 360 dev/debug/test kits. Whether it will ever run on a hacked retail box remains to be seen.

Since there isn’t much of a difference when you run code on a debug kit and a hacked retail box, it is possible that if the hypervisor vulnerability is fully exploited, it will open up the Xbox360 to a lot of homebrew. Personally, I can’t wait for this to show up and be possible to run it on retail boxes as homebrew.