New 'Xenia' Emulator Makes Xbox 360 Emulation Come Alive On Xbox Series X|S

Xenia was created for PCs, I didn't know about this version for Series X|S. I think that the release of Code Mystics' botch job emulation of Goldeneye 007 instead of Rare's remaster is a big reason to try this. Does it work in retail mode like Retroarch?

@BrilliantBill MGS4 will be re-released someday, I'm sure. I want Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing and Rare's remaster of Goldeneye 007. I even bought the former on the browser in spite of not having an Xbox 360.

So it is still the same useless emulator that's been on PC for ages now.

@Banjo- Don't think its supported through retroarch or at least it wasn't last time I looked. I have never used any emulators through my Xbox. prefer my PC for that stuff.

This is just awesome.
I still own a XBox 360 since a lot of great games are not in backwards compatibility.
Like Stranglehold, 007 Bloodstone, Sonic 2006,.....

Xenia is a long way off playing the full catalogue but I have 50 or so titles that run almost perfect for it. There are hundreds playable now, she's gettin there.

So... Is it allowed? I've seen a lot of videos of people using this or that emulator, and I admit I'm curious. Would love to emulate some PS2 games, but don't want to end up banned.

@Lup The software itself is perfectly legal but unless you own the games you play and have ripped them yourself then you are breaking the law. Retroarch uses cores for each system it emulates and there are 100's. The legal issues you could run into involve the games. PS2 uses Pcsx2 and i think somewhere in the region of 95% of the games run perfect and can be upscaled. Some of the games look amazing in 4k

Just yesterday I was thinking about all the 360 titles I would love playing again or for the first time. Surely going to keep my eyes on this project.

Side note, one of my recent academic obsessions are old Transformers and Spider-Man Games. I find it crazy (by todays standards) that High Moon Studios was delivering a new Transformers game in the War for Cybertron trilogy every 2 years. “These days”, we lucky if we get a sequel within 5 years.

I put “these days” in quotation marks because it’s disingenuous, I think, to call a window of 5 years “these days”.

Some of my favorite games have licensed music Tonyhawk and SSX Tricky and such. The release of the Hawk 1 and 2 remastered helped a ton. But there is still a bunch I wish I could play on modern hardware legally.

@InterceptorAlpha yep the compatibility is VERY low. Practically only Xbox live arcade games like Pacman and marvel Vs capcom 2 and a handful of other small XBLA games work right now.

They are 1/2 days from updating though and they're also doing a Xenia Canary version too which might see better performance and compatibility

@Banjo- yes it works in retail.

@Notoriousmakavel did you miss the 60fps part? The game could greatly benefit from an improved frame rate, looks like this is a step towards that.

@GarbonZoni Have you or anybody played Rare's remaster of Goldeneye 007 on Xenia? I would prefer to run those few not backwards compatible games on Series X including some I bought and haven't played (true!) like Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing so if anybody can give me some clues... @dreadful

@Lup You can download Retroarch on Series X in a legal way, in retailer mode, via gamr13. I did it and I played some N64 and GameCube games. Mario Kart Double Dash looks infinitely better than on GameCube and Wii/Wii U. When I play that game on Nintendo hardware it looks really blurry on my TV. If one day Microsoft feels like, they can remove all emulators from the Xbox platform but I really believe that they will never ban users, the worst scenario would be banning the app and an error saying you can't play the app if you already have it. That's my opinion, if somebody disagrees they can tell me. It's obvious that Xbox users have their libraries in legal form and Microsoft is not paranoid about emulation of older titles as Nintendo is.

I don't really care about xbox 360/ps3 emulators since most of the good games already remastered / remake for modern console and pc, or the game has pc version that we buy.

I use emulation station for steam deck for my emulation gaming, it's really cool to be able to play snes, mega drive, psone, gamecube, dreamcast, and others games with portable system 😃

This is awesome. Would love to see xemu or cxbx (any original Xbox emulator really) ported so I can finally play my Arx Fatalis disc on Series X.

@Tharsman Exactly! I get that games are more complicated than ever to make, but good lord do we have to wait F-O-R-E-V-E-R IN-between iterations. Games now are 1 entry per generation, 2 at best. You think with the manpower and budget of these bigger studios they'd be faster.

The only exception is COD. Say what you will, but for 3-year cycles per studio, they make top-notch, polished games. I guess From Software does too. But MS and Sony are so slow it's infuriating.

@stinkyx COD is an interesting study. They have multiple trams developing them in tangent but they still take 3 years to make, but they have not fallen for the “let’s make every game an open world 100 hour experience” trap. Each campaign is a relatively short linear level based campaign that can be about 6-8 hours.

I’d we didn’t have to wait 5-10 years between entries, I would not mind at all if a game took 8 hours tops to beat.

More games should go back to that.

If Xbox allowed & supported Emulators (like Android), it would be huge.

I'm not talking about piracy here...I'm talking about playing off your discs.

Imagine putting in PS1/PS2/360 discs in and just running the game on Xbox.

Sony would never allow it, so emulation could be a huge win for MS.

Emulation is completely legal if you own the disc and play off it.

@Lup I thought they removed RetroArch a few weeks after it was released? I've searched for it in the store and I've never been able to find it. When I get home today I'm going to download Xenia, because it'll probably be gone in a few weeks.

@GamerDad66 would that even be possible? Playing a PS1/PS2 DISC on an XBOX console through emulation. I thought the whole point of Emulation was to play off of a ROM.

@Banjo- lots of people are playing that unreleased Goldeneye. It seems that it randomly crashes or something and there's even a fix to stop that I think?

This is still mostly a proof of concept early development version of the emulator. It will get better but yeah, it's already running that Goldeneye game.

@HRMightFireMe you have to find a link to an upload of these apps. You won't find them in the store via normal search.

Xbox Emulation Hub on discord has all the links you need

@dreadful oh so you can install it via USB? I'm a bit confused. I'll check out the Discord. Thanks!

@HRMightFireMe you just type in a website link in the Xboxs edge browser and download the app. Takes literally 60 seconds.

@HRMightFireMe How do you download Xenia on Series X|S?

Answering your question, Retroarch was removed from the store because gamr13 has been changing how he does things lately. He posted "Apps will ONLY be posted on our Discord server for the time being."

@dreadful I may try downloading Retroarch that way on Series X if possible. I may also try downloading Xenia. About the remaster, it's a pity that it has not been officially released yet.