That same forum has some recent posts about the same subject. But I do have to agree with you, Intel-based Macs are indeed a lot more powerful than PPC Macs.
I found another link, (probably the same emulator) that allows you to download the emulator itself, but to get the BIOS, you need to do some stupid surveys. I didn't try it, due to the surveys requiring a mobile phone number, and from my last experience, I got spam calls and texts like mad. Use at your own risk. http://xbox360emulator.net/about.html
I just know that it's not really out of this realm to emulate a 360. It's only a triple-core PPC with a relatively old GPU. The PS3 is harder as the Cell architecture has no PC parallel other than maybe emulating them on a GPU.
Well the architecture of current gen consoles is so different from pc's, it requires a lot of power to emulate the console.
The first xbox was pretty similiar to the architecture of a pc, heck it used a lot of pc components.
I understand the problem with the emulators, but isn't it possible to make a program that would "rewrite" the game in a "language" understandable to a PC, so we could install it and play it like any other PC game?
If it's a real thing, why advertise it with a three year old game that's MILES better on the PC anyway, retails for about 5 quid, and which the native PC version would run significantly better than trying to emulate the 360 version?
The problem is that the compiled assembler code in the retail product is specific to a certain CPU architecture (which the 360 and PC don't share), so you have to translate instructions on the fly as they're sent to the CPU. It's certainly possible to emulate any system, but this translation software has a large perfomance cost, assuming you even have the inside knowlege of the emulated CPU architecture to write it.
If you had the source code you could theoretically recompile it for a different architecture, but you'd still have LOTS of platform specific libraries which would need to be replaced for it to even compile, let alone run and be playable.
This is exactly what emulators do, but they do it on the fly. The problem with this is that there is no direct 1:1 translation between x86 instruction set and the instruction sets used by console CPUs. The process is somewhat similar to translating texts from one human language to another - you don't translate word by word, you rather extract the meaning and express it in a different language. This is one of the reasons why you need a top-notch PC to nicely emulate ancient PS2. There is also a problem with graphics acceleration, sound and input interfaces which you have to simulate via DirectX on Windows...
