[dinartem]

I called the simulator Sbox and it was just a simple console app. I didn't implement the GPU, so no graphics just the hypervisor and kernel and some simple non-graphics apps. I made it so that you could build the Xbox 360 kernel on your windows machine, then just run sbox.exe and it would automatically find the just built kernel image targeting the PPC64 and boot it. Then if you typed control-C it would drop into the kernel debugger as a sub process, and you could poke around at the machine state as if it were the real Xbox hardware, showing all the PPC instructions and registers. It was a lot of fun writing it, and quite useful.

[Zeetah]

You should also talk about the lwarx/stecx bug. IIRC - in the first version of the chip there was a bug in one or both of these instructions. Your code booted on SBox but didn't on the hardware. You compared the two and then figured out it was these instructions.

You filed a bug report and then dug into them and used SBox to figure out what must have been going wrong.

The chip supplier came back with a workaround and within five minutes you simulated it on SBox and said it wouldn't work, why, and then said how it should be fixed.

The supplier didn't believe you as yet. And you worked out a workaround so we could be unblocked. Two weeks later they agreed with your fix...

[maximilianburke]

I recall an issue when trying to use lwarx/stwcx on Xbox 360 directly that the compiler (or maybe even the kernel, on program load? it's been a while) raised an error and said to use the Interlocked intrinsics instead -- is that related?

[fragmede]

That sounds like a lot of fun! What was your career like before that, that led you to be in the place to do such fun things?