nxdk VS kobalt

In addition to what tehbeard mentioned, Xemu at least (which is what i have experience with as i used it to do some homebrew development[0] with the open source nxdk[1] SDK) is far from accurate and largely just a means for playing OG Xbox games on modern hardware. However the GPU emulation does not take into account NV2A's performance at all and simply translates the calls to OpenGL (despite the "DirectXbox" name, the GPU is actually designed around OpenGL :-P) so it is much faster than the real one and depending on what is going on the CPU performance can also be quite faster. IIRC it doesn't even emulate the real CPU the OG Xbox has as you can accidentally use instructions in Xemu not available on the real hardware.

Of course if your goal is to just have games from OG Xbox playable on a PC that is fine (if anything for most games it is an improvement as they'd run smoother) but if you want cycle accurate emulation it doesn't fit the bill. In that case basing the emulator on something like 86box might be better as that has been designed with the goal of achieving cycle accurate PC hardware emulation.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQpK6eX-04M

[1] https://github.com/XboxDev/nxdk/

Try NXDK. MS code free, open-source development kit.

I know that there are legal SDKs available. An older one is OpenXDK, and NXDK is a newer one still under active development. The xboxdevwiki acts as a hub of information on it.

NXDK - the new open source xdk is the development environment to use instead of the leaked Microsoft XDKs.

I found https://github.com/XboxDev/nxdk. Is that what I am supposed to use? Is there anything higher level instead of C/C++?

The Xbox SDK on the software side. I know there's the nxdk, a descendent of the earlier OpenXDK. And of course there are leaks of the original Microsoft tools, which I think might need XP or so to run correctly.

There is also this project: https://github.com/XboxDev/nxdk

Yeah, Kobalt seems to be new: https://github.com/abel0b/kobalt