Xenia Xbox 360 Emulator Successfully Ported To Xbox Series X|S

Emulators are considered the gateway to reliving the nostalgia of the late 90s and early 2000s. They allow gamers to play games that would otherwise be impossible to run on modern machines. But there are limitations to this as well, as almost all emulators are restricted to PC or Mobile.

There are no next-gen console-compatible emulators. But this is seemingly going to change. After a recent development in one of the emulator projects for Xbox 360. The development team for that project seems to have made the breakthrough that would allow Xbox 360 emulator to run on Xbox Series X|S.

The contributors for the project, known as Xenia – Xbox 360 Emulator project, had been largely working on optimizing their emulator for PC. But due to increasing demand from gamers, they decided to look into porting it for Xbox consoles.

To make their emulator work for next-gen Xbox consoles, they utilized the fact that those consoles support Microsoft’s Universal Windows Platform (UWP).

The development team of Xenia exploited that to port their emulator to Xbox Series X|S consoles in the form of the UWP-compatible app. The app is still in its early form, but it has opened new possibilities by bringing the Xbox 360 emulator to these powerful consoles.

At first, this might not seem like a big deal. But this development has the potential to change the emulation landscape. It might potentially give Xbox the edge as its rival consoles do not have any compatible emulators.

This is not the first time UWP has been manipulated by developers. In the past, other programmers have used UWP to port third-party apps, such as YouTube and Discord, to Xbox consoles.

Xenia started as a solo project by a programmer name Benvanik. According to the information on the official project website, Ben first came up with the idea when he was working in Japan. There he bought a region-locked Japanese game but was left frustrated as he could not run it on Xbox 360 console.

As he already had experience programming a PSP emulator, he thought to do the same with Xbox 360. According to him, there is no roadmap for the project. In his own words, he does this “because it’s fun.”

The development team at Xenia has worked on other emulators as well. They are behind the development of a powerful emulator known as Dolphin. Dolphin enabled gamers to play Nintendo Wii and Gamecube games on PC. It was ported to PC through Microsoft’s UWP as well.

Many fans are hoping that this will spur the development of emulators for other consoles, especially PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5.

Will this development pave the way for emulators to be developed for other consoles as well? Tell us what you think in the comments below.