Interesting.
Maybe too little to late, but it sure would be nice if they would make it around to some of the 360 titles, (Fable II hint hint...)

I wonder if this is an official Xbox emulator for Windows PCs which runs games that you can buy from the Microsoft/Xbox Store. Or if the games have been fully recompiled to run on x86 systems. In any case, that sounds pretty good to me, especially if they add resolution and frame rate enhancements like on Xbox Series X consoles.

And yeah, bring on the Xbox 360 titles too!

360 games have a different cpu arch?

Fairly sure it was a PowerPC variant?

Wikipedia seems to think so?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PowerPC … d_game_consoles

wierd_w wrote on 2026-07-22, 18:58:

360 games have a different cpu arch?

Shouldn't really matter.

Xbox Series X has backward compatibility with both OG Xbox and Xbox 360 games. Not all of them, but a decent bunch. A modern PC should be able to do the same, since Series X hardware is x86 based.

Interestingly, an unofficial port of the 360 exclusive Gears of War 2 was also recently released: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/third-person-sh … uild-from-2008/

Oh sure! There's emulators for that already!

https://xenia-emulator.com/

For example.

Fable II and III work fine! (Game engine is hardcapped at 30fps, but yeah.)

Can confirm! Have played!

However, 'native executable' is not a thing, because 'wrong cpu arch, games did squirrely things to the console, like unloading parts of the os kernel'

An emulator can deal with that. A recompile wont.

i'm sure the engineer who wrote the bc was already laid off by asha.

wierd_w wrote on 2026-07-22, 20:27:

However, 'native executable' is not a thing, because 'wrong cpu arch, games did squirrely things to the console, like unloading parts of the os kernel'

An emulator can deal with that. A recompile wont.

That GOW2 port does have a native executable. It's not emulation.

It's an old leaked build being 'fixed'. Unreal Championship 2 had the same.

Also apparently this "xbox backwards compatibility"s just the same thing for xbox 360 inside so it's not even new stuff. It's just damage control

Win 11 requirement and no steam releases is a big nope from me 🤣

It almost sounds like it is all cloud based but the requirements seem tangible.

Does feel a bit to little to late not really sure where the Xbox itself fits into the ecosystem if everything can be played on PC. Maybe things will head the way of the Steam cube and be a PC with a frontend.

Dan9550 wrote on 2026-07-24, 00:31:

It almost sounds like it is all cloud based but the requirements seem tangible.

Does feel a bit to little to late not really sure where the Xbox itself fits into the ecosystem if everything can be played on PC. Maybe things will head the way of the Steam cube and be a PC with a frontend.

If you have Gamepass Microsoft does let you stream some original Xbox, and 360 games. However, these four new releases run natively on your PC.

Supposedly the new "console" Xbox Helix is a hybrid. Microsoft has pushed Play Anywhere for a while so if you buy a digital game you get both an Xbox and Windows version you can play. This really seems like them catching Windows up to where the console is, and they get rid of the custom console only OS.

Lets see if those 4 games can can be hacked to run on at least Windows 10.

The xbox games for windows use acustom executable format, and need other garbage to run.

While i'd love to see WINE (and thus steam, and older OSes, through cross pollenation) get support for them, I wont hold my breath.

Digital Foundry covered this in their latest video.

Seems to be working as on Xbox Series X, offering an optional 4x increase in rendering resolution, plus 4xMSAA and improved Anisotropic Filtering. That said, there are some visual bugs at the moment, which will likely take some time to iron out.

Xbox 360 Games Are Coming To PC

In a new report from The Verge, Microsoft recently sent a document to developers with plans to bring Xbox 360 games to PC. According to the document, which was seen by The Verge, Xbox 360 games will be playable on handheld devices, “Xbox PCs”, and the upcoming Project Helix console. The report says that developers of Xbox 360 games can “opt into making them backward compatible, and they will have control over things like a game’s price and if it’s available on Game Pass.”

If X360 games played on PC get improvements to resolution and frame rate, it could make this pretty appealing. That hasn't been confirmed yet, I'm just speculating based on how Series X handles backwards compatibility.