(09-02-2012, 08:09 AM)Xtreme2damax Wrote: [ -> ]Yes dumped, but not decrypted so these dumps are basically useless until the encryption is broken. That could take years or even never, it depends on if someone can find a weakness in the encryption algorithm and create an exploit to bypass the encryption. Even if someone breaks the encryption running homebrew will still be technically impossible.
I doubt anyone will actually break the encryption, like through brute force or cryptoanalysis. You could always hope to get lucky, like how the PS3 used to use the same "random number" for the key (or something like that), but I think everyone in the industry has learned that lesson.
More likely, people will just find the key on the system itself, though it probably won't just be sitting around for the taking. The 3DS has to decrypt games to play them, control enough of the 3DS itself, and it should be possible to find out how it does that. The trick, imo, is gaining that access in the first place and subsequently knowing what the you're supposed to be looking at.
Runo Wrote:Anyone here get the impression the emulation scene is slowly dying? Every new generation of consoles takes more and more time to emulate. At this rate, there will be a point where it just wont be worth the effort of writing an emulator :/
There may very well be a period where emulators for this console generation don't get very far. But eventually, what's new and complex today might seem slow and trivial to the future. I wouldn't be surprised if a bunch of college kids 20 years from now inspire a "renaissance" 7th gen emulation using techniques we never thought were possible (or maybe just never had the time to work on). But it could just as well keep being stagnant.
We'll know know the future when it happens.
If computing power grows enough, one day we may be able to scan a console, and then run it in a circuit tester program. I also have a feeling that we may be able to do that with a Wii before we can jit a powerful modern console with freeware from the internet.
Also, as I've said before, I'm sure Microsoft have a XBox emulator which works by x86 virtualisation, but haven't told the public.
Quote:If computing power grows enough, one day we may be able to scan a console, and then run it in a circuit tester program. I also have a feeling that we may be able to do that with a Wii before we can jit a powerful modern console with freeware from the internet.
.......what?
How do you scan a modern IC and determine the gate logic from the scan? We need an electron microscope just to be able to see the transistors and even then with modern chips it's nearly impossible to determine the gate logic from that alone because we don't get a clear enough image of the multiple layers of logic stacked on top of each other. The last chips that we were able to do this with successfully as far as I know where from the mid to late 90s when transistors were half a micrometer in diameter and barely stacked at all if ever.
Quote:Also, as I've said before, I'm sure Microsoft have a XBox emulator which works by x86 virtualisation, but haven't told the public.
There is a lot more to xbox emulation than x86 virtualization.
I'm meaning a Star Trek Tricorder type scan, ie using a scanning technology we don't have yet, but may do by the time we can emulate chips from transistor level upwards.
There's also a lot more to wii emulation than emulating the wii's CPU as well, but that doesn't mean that it can't be emulated. Everything I've seen on the internet about why people haven't made an XBox emulator says it's mainly because x86 CPUs won't emulate correctly, as they can run multiple instructions at once, so getting the timings right is very hard. x86 virtualisation may fix this, if done correctly.
There are lots of good other reasons why people haven't made a proper xbox emulator, yet. Insufficient knowledge about x86 CPUs is the least problematic of these.
All of the data that the public doesn't have is available to Microsoft, so as I've said, Microsoft could make an emulator much more easily than that guy could. Most of his problems are from lack of knowledge of the hardware/low level software, so these would all be solved. The virtualisation idea could potentially solve the CPU issue, so suddenly, all of the issues are fairly small.
There's also the fact that they've already released an emulator which runs on the PowerPC chip in an XBox 360, which is less powerful than a modern x86 CPU, so I'll take some serious convincing that it would be impossible for Microsoft to have a fully functional or nearly fully functional XBox emulator, which has never been released to the public.
Even if MS doesn't have an xbox emulator for x86 ready, it would be trivial for them to code one. I'm not arguing about this, my point is just that you're ignoring all the reasons why not one is working on an xbox emulator in his free time. Again, system complexity is the least important one.
Also, you're making things too easy. Do you even have a clue if x86 virtualization is suitable for xbox emulation?
Nope, but from what I've read, it may be. If i had the know-how, I'd try, but I don't. Maybe we should kidnap Microsoft and VMWare employees, and see if they can do it?
Also, I haven't disagreed with what anyone has said, just said that it doesn't actually apply to my own particular conspiracy theory.
[!!!WARNING!!! The following post was written while NaturalViolence was extremely annoyed with the content of a thread. If at any time it seems like NaturalViolence would want nothing more than to watch you slowly die in a pit of fire please try not to take it too personally.]
Quote:Everything I've seen on the internet about why people haven't made an XBox emulator says it's mainly because x86 CPUs won't emulate correctly, as they can run multiple instructions at once, so getting the timings right is very hard. x86 virtualisation may fix this, if done correctly.
I'm sorry that this is going to sound horribly rude but that is one of the stupidest things I have ever heard.
1. Nearly every microprocessor made from the mid 90s onwards runs multiple instructions at once (in the same pipeline stage) via VLIW or superscalar design. If you count pipelining as ILP (which computer scientists do) then you start with the late 80s. This includes the cpus in the PS, N64, Sega Saturn, Sega Dreamcast, Gamecube, Xbox, PS2, PS3, Xbox360, Wii, and so on.
2. ILP doesn't have to be emulated. In fact I don't know of any emulators that do this because it's extremely hard and completely unnecessary. OOO CPUs run programs as if they were a stream of instructions being executed one at a time in order, so that's how you emulate them regardless of what they do internally.
3. Very few emulators attempt to emulate timings at that level (the cpu micro-operation/microcode level, you literally can't get any lower than that, well I guess you could if you emulated the electrical timings of the wires and transistors).
4. I've read several major articles on the difficulties of xbox emulation and I haven't seen any mention that.