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Xbox360 Forums => Xbox360 Software Forums => PC Tools and Utilities (Xbox 360 related) => Topic started by: tomanik on May 30, 2006, 08:06:00 AM
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Hi everyone,
Based on what Xexter had done with the NES emulator I thought I would try something similar for MAME. I'm not really impressed with the performance that the emulator seems to give on the XBox360 through the media edition extender and unless there is a way to run the code on the xbox360 I don't think it will get any better. That said I have only tried a few roms and maybe some of the ones I did not try would work fine.
First a couple of important points:
1) I did not right the JAVA emulator, Cottage is the efforts of other people, you can find out more about it here, http://cottage.consolemul.com/. I've only modified cottage to change a few of the button mappings for the xbox360.
2) I've not tried this all of the roms that are listed to be supported with Cottage so I don't know if they all work. Also, Cottage seems to be very particular about the roms it will work with. I've had to unzip and rezip roms to get them to work.
3) This is REALLY just a work in progress and has lots of bugs and missing features. That said the performance thing really bugs me and I'm not really sure there is anything that can be done about it.
4) There is NO sound. I'm thinking it might be possible to modify cottage to stream the sound to the Xbox360 but I have not looked into this.
5) There are no warranties or guarantees of anykind with this, use at your own risk
You can download the zip here
http://www.savefile.com/files/2122674
You need to unzip the files into your
Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Accessories\Media Center\Media Center Programs\
Button Mapping
1) Left Analog and D-Pad work for moving left/right/up/down
2) X - Button 1
3) A - Button 2
4) Right Analog Click (Push down) - Add Coin
5) Right Analog Left - Start Game as Player 1
Known issues:
1) when the game selection screen load, you have to move up or down before a game gets selected
2) the game selection screen should force you to select a rom, currenly it lets you select a game which does nothing
3) when the game selected is vertically lower on the page then the last rom listed, you cannot more over to the right to select teh rom for playing
Other Comments:
1) Cottage does support 2x scaling which would help make the game bigger for HDTV, right now it is only showing at original game resolution.
2) Cottage currently emulates a limited number of games, they do provide a template for adding support for other games if you have some java development skills and interest
3) I built Cottage using Java 1.4.2 so you will need that installed, presummably if you have a more recent JVM installed it will work with that
4) No roms are included with this, the game selection screen simply lists all the games/roms that cottage seems to support. If you want you can modify the cottageGameList.xml to remove those that you do not want to see.
Anyway, I would be interested to see if a faster MCE PC helps with the performance through the xbox360 but I don't expect so. May be worth the 400 points to play pacman on the 360.
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I've fixed a few defects with the menu selection screen and thought I would provide an update.
Fixed:
-Menu allows you to incorrect select a game instead of a rom
-Menu does not immediately highlight a game when the game selection screen loads
-Persisent scroll bar appears on the game play screen
cottage360 v0.6:
http://www.savefile.com/files/3537192
I'm also wondering if the video of the game could be streamed to the xbox like a wmv file. Not sure if this would improve the performance but I'm thinking that the whole remote desktop type technology they use to extend the MC to the xbox360 is the performance bottleneck
Anyway here are a few screen shots as well:
http://www.savefile.com/files/4395108
http://www.savefile.com/files/3259569