ok i finally did a softmod on an original xbox. i'd guess that of any of last generations consoles this is the one that the average person is most likely to have everything you'll need to set it up but i had enough stuff to do a memory card exploit so i got to do it the easy way. otherwise you'll need to open up your xbox and your pc and swap ide cables while they're running. i'll probably have to do this myself later anyway if i want to put in a bigger hd. once it's properly prepared you can move things around via ftp, it's very convenient :o i used
this guide.
right quick, here are the emulators i tested out. i tried to make sure i had the latest version of everything, but microsoft doesnt like people hosting things compiled with their stolen sdk even today so it seems all scattered across the internet.
nes - fceultrax v15
no problems, at least after i turned on vertical sync which was off by default for some reason.
snes - zsnexbox 3.7
a port of zsnes. i didn't see a single flaw while testing. it seems to run at fullspeed even with filters on
genesis/32x/segacd - neogenesis v16
genesis and 32x emulation are fine. the only segacd game i had to test was snatcher which probably isn't the most cpu intensive segacd experience. apparently it supports just putting a cd in the tray and running it directly but this particular xbox doesn't seem to want to read anything but dvds. it may need some adjustment.
tg16/supercd - mednafenx-pce v5
there was a port of hugo but it was awful. it had the same graphical problems as the gamecube version, and the sound was just. wrong :< i felt a disappointment creeping in, but i noticed there was another pce emulator. it's much better :o and it has supercd support. but it has the same problem as i remember pce emulators having 12 years ago where it doesn't always get the message to stop playing audio track music and can create some weird audio situations. it's not a gamebreaker, at least not in any supercd game i own but who knows.
gb/gbc/gba - xboyadvance v10
a port of visualboy advance. if i had a gripe it would be that there doesn't seem to be a way to have different preset resolutions for gb and gba so you end up with either a stretched out gb game or a squished gba game. at least i dont know of an option like that i may have missed it? emulation wise it's pretty good though. some gba games may need some tweaking to make them run well but it is at least possible to have a good experience.
ps1 - pcsxbox v11
i messed with this for a while but i just couldn't get it to run as well as i wanted. movies and some gameplay situations are choppy, music doesn't always play. it's not unusable, and some things may work fine but i have too many playstations to spend too much time wrestling with it. also during the initial loading it makes a noise like your speakers are exploding.
pc286/386 - dosxbox v13
a port of dosbox. i was curious when i saw it so i had to try a little :o setup is a little awkward when you have to use the onscreen keyboard, and i was still having trouble getting things to work just right. it's likely i'll just need to mess with the options more but it does seem promising, and playing omf2097 via an xbox was pretty fun.
there is a tremendous amount of emulators available, pretty much anything sitting around that was open source seems to have been ported. i guess this probably is your best bet if you want an all in one console from the last generation. one downside is that it isn't possible to stream xbox game data over ethernet unlike the other consoles due to some restriction on the hardware. most people probably don't care about swapping disks though, and installing them to the hd is still an option.
Hybrid Mode
