Xbox port not possible now?

[hcfcoder]

Hi! I am HCF, a developer of the original Xbox scene. I have followed your excellent work, and I also followed this old thread (related to the possibility of making an Xbox port) during much time:

forums.ppsspp.org/showthread.php?tid=2406

I remember that in the development section, in those days the Xbox was marked as "possible but slow", so around a year ago, I tried to start a proof of concept. I was discouraged because this was a titanic task, due to some obstacles that were pointed in that thread... and also due to the fact that PPSSPP has been developed using a huge amount of C++11 code! Unfortunately, in Xbox development we can only use old compilers (like VS2003) without C++11 support, so lots of changes are needed to compile your code in our compilers (we must translate everything to "classical C++").

After a couple of weeks of work, I had ported and compiled only around 15% of the code, so I thought that this could be made, but with months or even years of work. Due to my little free time, I finally halted the project

Recently, I missed this thing and I came back, discovering some nice surprises (some work has been made in DirectX!) but when I thought that these were good news, I saw that in the Development section the Xbox has been changed to "NOT POSSIBLE" (due to lack of RAM).

I would like to ask the reason of this change, because in the future maybe some developers of the Xbox scene can take a look to PPSSPP again. I mean, maybe the RAM requirements have increased in modern versions of PPSSPP? If this is the "only" problem, we could use a solution that we have already used in several Xbox ports (like the MAME, PSX or Atari Jaguar emulators): porting an OLD version (with less requirements) and after that add to that version the changes that make it more compatible without wasting more resources. This gives us a "partial" but acceptable emulation in most cases.

On the other hand, if the Xbox port has been changed to "NOT POSSIBLE" for other reason, it would be very nice to know it. As I have said, the port would be a titanic task, so if you have seen any new thing that Xbox developers would need to know, it would be very nice if you could share with us here.

Don't be afraid of using technical language. I read in the original thread that some people thought that there aren't expert programmers in the Xbox scene, but I can tell you that this is not true: there are still very talented people.

Finally, let me tell you that the Xbox is a bit more powerful than people imagine, due to one important thing: the Xbox has a processor of 733 MHZ... but it doesn't have any kind of operating system or multitask. In other words: when we are executing an emulator, we have the full 733 MHz dedicated to that emulator. This makes that the Xbox can be faster than other machines with the same or even better CPUs, like the Wii or some old Android machines.

If you could tell us the reason of this change, it would be very appreciated.

Thank you very much, and congratulations for your amazing work!