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RetroArch is a modular multi-system emulator system that is designed to be fast, lightweight and portable. It has features few other emulator frontends have, such as real-time rewinding and game-aware shading. For each emulator ‘core’, RetroArch makes use of a library API that we like to call ‘libretro’.

Libretro is the API that RetroArch uses. It makes it easy to port games and emulators to a single core backend, such as RetroArch.

For the user, this means – more ports to play with, more crossplatform portability, less worrying about developers having to reinvent the wheel writing boilerplate UI/port code – so that they can get busy with writing the emulator/porting the emulator/game.

WHAT’S THE BIG DEAL?

Right now it’s unique in that it runs the same emulator cores on multiple systems (such as XBox1, Xbox 360, PS3, PC, Wii, etc).

For each emulator ‘core’, RetroArch makes use of a library API that we like to call ‘libretro’.

Think of libretro as an interface for emulator and game ports. You can make a libretro port once and expect the same code to run on all the platforms that RetroArch supports. It’s designed with simplicity and ease of use in mind so that the porter can worry about the port at hand instead of having to wrestle with an obfuscatory API.

The purpose of libretro is to help ease the work of the emulator/game porter by giving him an API that allows him to target multiple platforms at once without having to redo any code. He doesn’t have to worry about writing input/video/audio drivers – all of that is supplied to him by RetroArch. All he has to do is to have the emulator port hook into the libretro API and that’s it – we take care of the rest.

The Xbox 1 port of RetroArch has the following features:

– Real-time rewinding (though most emus will not likely run fast enough on Xbox 1 to handle this at fullspeed)
– Switching between emulator cores seamlessly, and ability to install new libretro cores

EMULATOR/GAME CORES BUNDLED WITH XBOX 1 PORT

The following emulators/games have been ported to RetroArch and are included in the Xbox 1 release of RetroArch.

For more information about them, see the included ‘retroarch-libretro-README.txt’ file.

– Final Burn Alpha Cores (CPS1 – CPS2 – NeoGeo) [version 0.2.97.26] (***)
– FCEUmm (Nintendo Entertainment System) [recent SVN version]
– Gambatte (Game Boy | Super Game Boy | Game Boy Color) [version 0.5.0 WIP]
– Genesis Plus GX (Sega SG-1000 | Master System | Game Gear | Genesis/Mega Drive | Sega CD) [version 1.7.0]
– SNES9x Next (Super Nintendo/Super Famicom) (**)
– VBA Next (Game Boy Advance) (*)
– Prboom (for playing Doom 1/Doom 2/Ultimate Doom/Final Doom)
– Mednafen PCE Fast (PC Engine/PC Engine CD/Turbografx 16)
– Mednafen Wonderswan (WonderSwan/WonderSwan Color/WonderSwan Crystal)

All of the emulators listed above are the latest versions currently available. Most of them have been specifically optimized so that they will run better on Xbox 1 (some games would not reach fullspeed without these optimizations).

* VBA Next doesn’t run at fullspeed on Wii (VBA Next is a RetroConsole Level 2 emulator port). It will be replaced by a port of gpSP in the near future.
** SuperFX games will not run at fullspeed – a special version of SNES9x will be developed for Retro Console Level 1 systems.
*** The biggest Neo-Geo ROMs that can be loaded are around 23+MB in size, such as Real Bout Fatal Fury 1 and King of Fighters ’96.

For more information and a download please visit http://www.emuxtras.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=183&t=2156

I am pleased to announce another release of XBMC4XBOX – v3.2

A number of bugs have been fixed, including a working fix for the lockups when using UPnP. There has been some significant performance improvements also, with the addition of the libjpeg-turbo library. Based on some code from XBMC, and some of our own, we now use this SIMD optimised library for decoding and thumbnailing JPEG images. The speed up is very noticeable – with navigating photos feeling at least twice as fast as before. XBMC4XBOX will now also use less memory when displaying and zooming in on images.

Release Includes:

• libjpeg-turbo support for images
• Fixed UPnP lockups
• Browse by Country support in movie library
• Scraper fixes
• Switch to Roboto font in Confluence skin
• Plenty of misc bugfixes and code backports from xbmc mainline
• Lots of code refactoring to better match upstream changes

Thanks to all those who helped out, including those who spent lots of time helping users on the forums. Thanks to http://xbmc.org for the support after we lost our previous hosting place (see previous news). And thanks for all the code of course

Hope you enjoy the release, and should you want to show your support, donations are always welcome – and much appreciated. We are also always on the look out for anyone who is able to contribute time and skills to the project, from the main code development to skins and python scripting.

This is a brand new website for the XBMC4XBOX project. Please bookmark it – http://www.xbmc4xbox.org.uk

What has Happened?

The http://www.xbmc4xbox.org site was hosted and managed by someone else. They have not been around since the end of May 2012, and at the end of June 2012, the site went off-line for non payment. So far efforts to contact the admin have failed, and there has been no luck to bring it back on-line even temporarily as the hosting provider is only accepting payments from the account owner.

This was always my worry when not hosting the project myself, and when only one person has access to the system.

What about the old forum contents and Wiki

The forum does not seem to be cached anywhere, so I can’t even get a list of the forum areas. The content is lost so long as the admin is not contactable, and the site is offline.

The Wiki content is available on some web archives still. We also might be able to get a dump of pages from the xbmc wiki (rolling back to the point before they added material not related to the xbox1)

Please Help!

If you think you could help in anyway – perhaps you have a dump of the old wiki, or want to help rebuilding it, or anything else, please join in over at the forum

It’s been close to a year since the last stable release. The truth is, the nightly builds have probably been more stable than the last release as some useful fixes went in soon after. Due to lack of free time, and developers, it’s taken a while to get around to doing another point release but finally – here it is – XBMC4XBOX 3.1

There has been a lot of improvements over the last year – changes since 3.0.1 include:

• FFMPEG Updates
• DVDPlayer Updates/Fixes (Such as improved DVD Seeking and Slingbox support)
• PAPlayer Updates
• Updates to libcurl/polarssl/librtmp
• Scraper fixes
• Lots of other misc bugfixes and improvements.

For more details of changes you can check out the source history over at http://sourceforge.net/projects/xbmc4xbox/

Thanks to all the XBMC developers on over at http://www.xbmc.org as many of the changes are backports from their code base. Also a big thanks and farewell to Arnova, who has been supporting the XBOX over the years but no longer has any need for his XBOX1. He will continue to develop XBMC for Linux though.

We are now down to a single developer on this project. If you know some C++ or can help in other areas, and you wish to spend some free time helping out with the project – please do get involved and post an introduction over at the forums.

The old girl’s still got plenty to give. With hardware that’s now 10 years old you’d be forgiven for thinking the xbox classic’s time is up, however the old girl has still got plenty to give. True enough a lot of people now have HTPC’s, standalone media players or the latest games consoles to stream in true HD to their big screens. This however certainly doesn’t mean the demise of our trusty old xbox… Where else could you buy a media center that’s able to stream content from the internet (or locally) in a wide variety of formats, have an amazing library function, double up as an arcade machine and boot up in seconds? And all for the price of a couple of pints of beer! Yes these great warhorse machines can be picked up second hand for amazing prices, I know I’m not the only one to have picked one or two up for as little as 99p from a certain auction site.

So how do you use your xbox these days, are you still using it as your main media center? Obviously not everyone has an HDTV, in which case the xbox is still unbeatable but for those of us that do what happens to your xbox once you’ve upgraded to newer hardware? Personally I have one in every bedroom and also one in the shed (so I can sit in the garden and watch movies/football with a few beers in the summer). With a simple network connection (homeplugs are a great choice if you don’t like wiring) you can have all your media located on one dedicated machine and stream from there. Whether it’s a dedicated server, NAS or simply a PC you can store all media on that one device and then scan it all into your xbox libraries meaning thousands of movies/tv shows but only one large HDD needed. Of course you could just use the xbox to stream directly from the internet – how do you use yours?

Courtesy of Whufclee