Original Xbox as emulation machine?

[Hateshinai]

I was thinking about picking up a second Xbox and using it for retro emulators on my living room TV since it would be much cheaper than building a crappy PC for the purpose. Not to mention it would also look better & it fits nicely in my current TV setup.
So my question is:
What systems can the Xbox emulate well?

[irixith]

It does well on everything pre-PSX/N64. N64 emulation is a bit of a wash no matter where you're coming from. Some PSX games work great, others, not so much.

..but the important systems (aka everything that came before ) work great.

[vlame]

wii is about the same but something just feels right about the wii...

[Weekend_Warrior]

How good is MAME on the oXbox? I've heard some brief mentions of it before

[itsmattxp]

How good is MAME on the oXbox? I've heard some brief mentions of it before

From my experience (Neo Geo and CPS2), it works great.

[AppleQueso]

dosn't FBA have an xbox port? I'd stick with that if I were you for cps and neogeo.

[Xeogred]

I've been looking into soft modding mine sometime soon as well, so these links might be useful:

http://worldofstuart.excellentcontent.c ... /xemus.htm
http://users.marshall.edu/~runyon78/emulators.html

[o.pwuaioc]

How about the 360 with N64 and PS1 emulation? Is it better, or are the emulators not as good which is why emulation on the original XBOX not quality?

[Anapan]

The N64 emulation is IMO better than on PC. It seems development of the settings file for the plugins kept on going for Xbox while the same .INI files didn't get worked on for PC (I can provide the latest I found if needed). Everything earlier is really good, with well-built interfaces. PS1 emulation is kinda hit-and-miss. The biggest plus is the pre-built controller-based GUI which is polished and easy to use for most everything (dosbox takes some getting used-to). Same goes for homebrew/freeware ports - easy installation and activation from your favorite dashboard. My biggest qualm with the mame emulation is the forced 480i scaling. Otherwise, it's polished and optimized to take full advantage of everything the xbox hardware has to offer (the big newere games have slowdown problems, but no worse than any old computer-turned-emulation box would have). In my experience everything on the system except some specialized firmwares just scale everything to 480i and this can cause some aliasing unless you use the right scaling filters and manually adjust the zoom just-right to get the games showing at 200% without any interpolation. All-in-all, I think it does an excellent job of taking advantage of a cheap 300-500gig hard drive to make all your favorite games play on a TV with a good controller and interface. Go for it!
I'll be setting another one really soon I think so a PM in the next few days can get a URL for the newest software packaged in a zip file for easy access..

[Nyukki]

I got an old 2.6 Ghz Pentium 4 for free from work which they were throwing out and turned it into my emulation machine, plays everything up to N64 and PSX perfectly through GameEx. You mentioned at the top that you don't like the look compared to an Xbox360, I can understand that, mine does look kinda weird in the living room, but I plan to buy a load of vinyl arcade stickers and plaster them over the machine, or you could buy a nicer looking case.

Point is, it's cheaper than even a second hand Xbox and it runs everything up to N64/PSX. I love it tbh, but I guess it's personal preference.