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[Videogamebuyer14]

A possibility for solving this problem, would be to have written, and of course this would involve modifications within mame-x itself, but here goes. Since Win2k, and WinXP both support something called "virtual memory", once the ram banks are filled, the hard drive is used for temporary storage of memory. This would involve implementing the virtual memory manager from Windows (os) and incorperated for support with the xboxkrnl libraries. A document further explaining the concepts of Virtual Memory can be found here I hope this helps out somewhat, four hours of research went into this, and I will perhaps further explain the archetecture of V-Ram possiblilties on the xbox. Lemme know what you think.  

[dankydoo]

I think that demand paging would cause emulations to stutter with larger roms because while you are playing games and something that is paged to the harddrive will have to be read back into memory and swaped for something that is there......this has been discused before Im pretty sure...

dankydoo

[leigao84]

Humm, I know they have stripped many componets of windows kernel to put it on the xbox. It doesn't even support multitasking. So I doubt virtual memory is still left inside the kernel. Unless you want to implemet the Linux kernel to play xbox games (This is extremly hard!) You'd have to either a) add all the components of virtual memory into windows, but wait since windows is not open sourced you'd have to B) rewrite a new kernel!

Good luck,  :-D , tell us when you're done.

[ekengren]

or if someone wrote his own handler for virtual memory and distributed it in a format such like xbFileZilla so that it can be like a module wich is implemented in the actual emulator itself.. or something like that..   what i mean is that the kernel don't need the vm support if the executable has it implemented.

[EvilWays]

But then the app is putting a heavy duty load on the system as it manages the VM and performs its function. You could add more RAM to the system, but you'd still hafta
A) use a bios that supports the additional RAM
B) muck with the heap stack (seems the 64MB limit is hardcoded there in retail systems)
C) patch your XBEs to take advantage of your added RAM
Now which one is easier?

*EDIT* sorry, damn smilies

[Videogamebuyer14]

It could, but like leigao said, multitasking isn't supported on basic performance on the xbox. So, either A. Superfro would have to implement the program into mamex to give it the options,
or B. It becomes reliant on the linux kernal and someone "may" discover how to boot games from the kernal...

Several more possibilities here, they just need to be discovered.

[opjose]

A lot of these posts seem to miss a key point. The Xbox cannot be said to really have a true OS per-se. Rather the BIOS forms the core of a resident API, more than anything else.

In NT/XP/Linux the OS is memory resident while the running application has partial control. The OS is able to therefor service user program requests.

In the Xbox this does not happen. In effect the application itself -IS- the OS.

So for VM, network resident games, etc. to work the "application" or game has to be coded to provide this functionality.

While there have been some proposed hacks to intercept API calls, all this could potentially do is to MAP a partition to a network resource. In turn the extra latency this introduces would kill performance.

Likewise a VM would swamp the CPU emulators during the context switches, with HD access, and the decently running roms would be slideshows.

[Videogamebuyer14]

Unfortunately this is true, but however, if the VM code was written into the program it could have threaded it into the memory of the xbox, or just plain running the vm code off of the xbox, but since xbes are not able to (RE) dissassemble, you cannot perform this on retail games. And if you tried network games amongst tunnels, this could cause several undesirable outcomes, overheating (due to cpu, and ram), network slowdowns, and several other things. Thanks for taking an interest in the topic, but I also believe its not possible. I guess we can all just look forward to upgradable chips.

[Lordscr]

I don't know all the internal component workings of an XBox or PC. But I remmember, a few years ago, when Neo-Geo was first emulated, playing all of the large roms like KOF, Blazing Star, and The LastBlade. My point is that all I had on my computer was 32MB and all of these roms were larger than that, and I was running mame in a dos box in Win98. I also got 30FPS. So in the end If someone got Vmem working for Mame-X, I'm sure it would run smoothly.

[justice7]

i dont think the point here would be FPS,  but rather that the game itself would RUN.

Tweaking and whatnot can come later  To make more games playable.