king_of_the_castle said:
Does anyone know how the 360 emulates the xbox? Is it all software, or is there some original xbox parts in there? |
One of the key design features of DirectX is that it acts as a hardware abstraction layer. Essentially, a Direct3D driver was generated for the GPU on the XBox and most games interfaced with the graphics hardware through this generic driver. On the XBox 360 a very similar Direct3D driver can be generated for the XBox 360's GPU. This means that the only problem that Microsoft faced was emulating an x86 processor on a PowerPC processor while maintaining performance (which isn't an easy task).
The PS2 (unfortunately) had very poor tools initially and most developers developed their own interface to the PS2's GPU which makes it (nearly) impossible to create a generic interface on the PS3's GPU which functions the same as the PS2's GPU. Basically, this means that the CPU and GPU of the PS2 both have to be emulated on the Cell which simply doesn't have enough processing power to handle both while maintaining decent performance.
