Xbox 360 emulators

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Revision as of 13:02, 31 May 2020 by 172.69.39.9 (talk) (Undo revision 33860 by 173.245.54.90 (talk))
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Xbox 360
Xbox 360.png
Developer Microsoft
Type Home video game console
Generation Seventh generation
Release date 2005
Discontinued 2016
Predecessor Xbox
Successor Xbox One
Emulated ~

The Xbox 360 is a seventh-generation console released by Microsoft on November 22, 2005 and retailed for $399. It had a PowerPC Tri-Core Xenon CPU at 3.2 GHz with 512MB of RAM. It had an ATI Xenos GPU. The console's life saw several updates to its OS to alter its appearance, as well as the option of a motion-sensing camera called the Kinect.

Emulators

Name Platform(s) Latest Version Active Recommended
PC / x86
Xenia Windows Linux Git ~
Consoles
Fission Xbox One Patch based

Comparisons

Xenia
The emulator that's made it the furthest so far. Progress on it is surprisingly fast. Only a relatively small number of games are playable, though, and those that are playable largely have issues and run slowly.
The devs have no plans on releasing Xenia for Windows 7 at this time.
The new DirectX12 branch making significant progress is only available for Windows 10.
Fission
The official emulator on the Xbox One supports a growing (500+) list of games. Load times are faster, but emulation suffers from input lag due to forced vsync. Beyond this, playback is incredibly faithful to the original system. Xbox One X improves on the emulation further with better framerate, texture filtering and higher resolution in some games. Note that an Internet connection is required on the first run of each game to download.

Emulation issues

Due to requiring a large number of resources (see Dolphin and PCSX2 for specifications for their respective consoles), as well as the hardware not being properly documented yet, Xbox 360 emulation currently isn't at a point where people can reliably emulate games. However, Xenia is quickly making progress on that front. That, plus the fact that Microsoft has implemented their own official emulation of the system through the Xbox One brings much promise to successfully emulating the system in the future.

Kinect

The Kinect is a device that works just like the EyeToy for the PS2. It is a camera capable of detecting gestures and voices in order to play games without any controllers unlike the Wii and its Wiimote; and the PS3 and its PlayStation Move. While benefiting from native support on PC, users still made open-source drivers for it.

Xenia is the only Xbox 360 emulator out there yet, and it doesn't support Kinect and no work is getting done in this direction. That does not mean that we will never be able to play Kinect Games with it, it just means that developers have higher-level or prioritized issues to tackle at the moment.

References