when are they gonna figure out how to emulate this thing?
well, Microsoft has now, and with improved IQ/resolutions, which is more important than it seems
the Xbox is "off the shelf" parts except for the NVIDIA chip and some others, which Microsoft had locked up tight and most developers never really took advantage of to where the thing has never had extensive documentation floating around out there, and literally most of the calls are apparently wildly different from the chips its based on
NVIDIA themselves basically made the thing and never futzed with it after, to where the kerfuffle years ago where Microsoft had to threaten a suit because they weren't putting out the chips fast enough was in part because NVIDIA didn't give a shit
from all accounts it's essentially a GF2/GF3 hybrid with a pair of shaders bolted on, BUT, it shares the main memory with everything else, and this is the Xbox's bottleneck, the bandwidth to and from memory from literally every part of the system is very slow (compared to the competitor consoles), this was part of the major divergence between PS2 and Xbox, if you wanted to apply textures and effects to a model on the Xbox you sent it to the GPU and had it do all of them before sending back, on the PS2 because the bandwidth for this was absurd, you just drew it a thousand times if need be...everybody's PS2 tools and such got better and better at this while the Xbox was mostly a port where the team used the texture and pixel advantages to just draw in higher resolutions or stick in PC version models or something
to take one of the big debates of the era, Doom 3 pretty much can't be done on the PS2 because Carmack's design is totally inverse to the assumptions the PS2 is built around, Carmack was convinced the Xbox couldn't do it either despite having the shader units but Splinter Cell changed his mind and they let Vicarious attempt it, interestingly Splinter Cell on PS2 has a bunch of post-process effects that aren't even in Chaos Theory because the PS2 can do a screenwide post-process effect for comparatively free quite simply versus even the PS3, this is part of why GTA:SA's "heat haze" and other similar effects aren't in the Xbox (or PC) version or is highly diminished, drawing the screen again on the Xbox is too costly and the B team doing those ports didn't see it as necessary
but tl;dr, last year when these Microsoft emulation efforts really took off, there were a lot of rumors about unsolicited and weirdly complete (if undocumented) code and fixes being submitted by burner accounts to xenia (360) and cxbx (xbox) both of which made some fairly large leaps in compatibility shortly there after, which certainly gives the impression that Microsoft's newfound interest in emulating the old Xboxes may have led them to unofficially help out the unofficial independent non-console efforts
PSP emulation similarly went almost overnight from basically unplayable to woah, everything works? with a rumor attached to it that some going out of business dev sending parts of the devkit which included an emulator and documentation which helped fill in long baffling gaps
