Summary
- Emulation for Xbox 360 games is good, but only a few titles are playable.
- The use of static recompilation, not emulation, may soon allow Xbox 360 games to run natively.
- Tools like XenonRecomp and XenosRecomp enable native ports like Sonic Unleashed on PC, hinting at game-changing potential.
Unless you still own a working Xbox 360, the only real way to play games from this era is via emulation, with some very mixed results. However, what if you didn’t have to use emulation to play these games? What if you could easily create native ports of these games for virtually any platform? That dream is quickly becoming a reality.
Xbox 360 Emulation Is Good, but Not Great
Right now, the best emulation solution for Xbox 360 games is the official Fission emulator, used to offer backwards compatibility on Xbox One and Series consoles. Not only is the emulation pretty great, these are often the best versions of these games with higher frame rates and higher resolution graphics. Unfortunately, only a small subset of the 2,154 Xbox 360 games that were released. Currently, the Microsoft site lists 426 backward-compatible games, or just shy of 20% of the catalog.
The most promising PC Xbox 360 emulator is Xenia, which can run about 300 games from that catalog, and not necessarily correctly. After all, the official Xbox BC program has strict quality control about which games are approved.
So while high-quality emulation is available for some games, it’s locked behind a proprietary emulator, and there’s no equivalent solution outside that walled garden.
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What if You Didn’t Need Emulation at All?
So the problem is that emulation is hard, and the more advanced the original hardware, the more difficult that emulation becomes. Even NES and other 8-bit emulators aren’t perfect, despite how fast the computers are that emulate them. PlayStation emulation has only recently reached the point where I would consider it the best way to play original PlayStation games.
The Xbox 360 (and the PlayStation 3) are probably the last generation of consoles that will require emulation to run, since the following generations use the same architecture as PCs, and in most cases those games are released cross-platform anyway. So there’s little chance of the game being lost or inaccessible. At least not for lack of capable hardware.
So, if you could just remove the emulation bit of the equation, things would go much better, but how?
Related
Static Recompilation Comes to the Xbox 360
The thing is, emulation isn’t the only way to get software written for one platform to work on another. One approach is to use compatibility layers like Whiskey, WINE, or Proton, which is how the Steam Deck plays PC games. However, that’s not an effective way to get console games running, especially if their hardware is very different from the new target system.
So the other approach is to “recompile” the software so that it will run natively on the new hardware, as if it were written for that platform in the first place. Some emulators use “dynamic” recompilation to convert a game’s code as it’s running, but a permanent solution is “static” recompilation. Here the game is converted once, and then lives as a native application on the new system.
That’s easy enough to say, but this means somehow reverse-engineering the binary code of a game and then translating it into a high-level programming language. The process of ‘decompilation” which is converting an program’s raw binary code back into human-readable source code is only a relatively recent breakthrough, and it’s key to allow for static recompilation.
We’ve seen it used to great effect with the recompilation of Majora’s Mask less than a year ago, but the Nintendo 64 is one thing, and Xbox 360 game is a much bigger fish.
Yet, we now have XenonRecomp and XenosRecomp, which are powerful software tools that coders can use to decompile and recompile Xbox 360 games. This is something that can be applied, in principle, to any Xbox 360 game without any help from the original developer or their code.
Sonic’s Going Faster Than Ever on PC
It’s not just theoretical either. Unleased Recompiled is effectively a native PC port of Sonic Unleashed with numerous PC upgrades to resolution and framerate, along with some other nice tweaks. If you own the game on disc, you can use the software to convert it into a native port and play it on your PC.
What This Means for Xbox 360 Games
Unleashed Recompiled is a clear and exciting test case for this new generation of recompilation tools. Now that the emulation community has seen that it can be done, I expect that we’ll see many more games recompiled in this way in the future. Once the floodgates are open, I expect the most sought-after games will get one of these impromptu portings.
Will this completely replace emulation? Right now, that doesn’t seem likely, since there are still reasons to emulate games from a preservation perspective. Also, these recompilers only work with x86 systems for the time being, which is great if you have a Steam Deck, but won’t help someone with an Android phone, for example. However this turns out, it’s undoubtedly one of the most exciting developments in the world of retro gaming history, and I, for one, can’t wait to see what we get next.
