The original and best version of my poor, precious Deadly Premonition is still locked to Xbox consoles (though the fact that Microsoft included it in their back compat program was nice of them). Every few months I update Xenia and check if it’s gotten any better but the graphics are still busted.
I’ve been playing the Gears of War games, and while Gears of War 2 was pretty much perfect with only a handful of crashes and few misbehaving minor graphical effects, Gears of War 3 has a massively annoying issue where loading a checkpoint during most levels will completely fuck the game’s scripting and softlock you in various bizarre ways. It also crashed more often which synergises wonderfully with the aforementioned checkpoint problem. You basically need to finish most of the game without dying (or crashing) once
Gears of War Judgment doesn’t have the checkpoint problem, but instead has an issue where after the game has been running for about five minutes, textures begin failing to load, making the game look increasingly psychedelic:
At least it runs nicely and doesn’t crash 
Original Xbox emulation is still pretty hit and miss too. One moment you’re playing something on XEMU and it looks incredible upscaled, then something like this happens:
Not disparaging the devs who already work on these emulators, but it’s clear Nintendo and PlayStation projects have (understandably) way more people working on them
it’s not a lack of love, it’s the weird-ass architecture. even microsoft’s own emulator for their back-compat shit isn’t as good as dolphin
I thought their back compat was supposed to be amazingly efficient (any lowly Xbox One could run 360 games in higher res and with boosted fps) and accurate, but I’ve never owned an Xbone or a Series whatever
i know the original emulation on 360 has some accuracy problems, and i haven’t heard anyone say they fixed that for whatever the current models are called.
IIRC it’s not just emulation on the newer Xbox consoles- when you put in a supported 360 or Xbox disc (or download the game) the console downloads some kind of backwards compatibility patch which contains a new executable built for the new Xboxes
Aren’t xboxes just regular x86 computers in terms of hardware? It it playstations that have weird architecture.
My guess is there is something up with how xbox implements direct3d that emulators still haven’t fully nailed down
The 360’s hardware had more in common with an old Apple Powermac than with a typical Windows PC.
but it’s clear Nintendo and PlayStation projects have (understandably) way more people working on them
Yeah, partially because the xbox sorta has a problem, what even are the big names of the xbox? Like I mean, the face of the xbox to me has kinda started and ends with John Halo ever since CE, and right now the only halo game that isn’t fully playable on PC is 5. There’s just no other game that pops into my head when I think of ‘xbox exclusive’. Like yes I know there’s a whole list of xbox exclusives, but Halo really is the first thing I think of on the topic, and I have to try to think of the others afterwards.
Meanwhile compare this to playstation and nintendo consoles, they both have a long list of both first party titles that have never really been brought forward, and I know for sure in the case of the playstation side, having a long list of third party titles that have never really been brought forward in a meaningful capacity.
- Jet Set Radio Future
- Panzer Dragoon Orta
- Gunvalkyrie
- Every Extend Extra Extreme
- Burnout Revenge 360
- Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2
- Bangai-O: Missile Fury
- Beautiful Katamari
- Ace Combat 6
- a bunch of Cave shmup ports, especially Mushihime-sama Futari which has never been ported to anything else
Sure, these aren’t exactly the games that come to mind when you think of the Xbox, but they’re all currently stuck on Xbox consoles. Some of them are backwards compatible, but some of them like JSRF aren’t and never will be because of music rights, and it’d be nice to have another way of playing all of these.
It’s a bit disheartening watching all the amazing progress RPCS3 is making and how slick it is to use compared to Xenia which feels a decade behind and like it’s barely advancing
Same with PCSX2 and Dolphin vs XEMU and XBCD
The current PCSX2 experience is actually recent, the 2.0 stable release featuring the Qt UI (which is also used by Dolphin) didn’t come out until last year, until then the 1.6 stable version was around forever and still used that dated garbage UI.
Of course, daily version enjoyers got the good UI much earlier
I didn’t mean to imply that PCSX2 is dated at all. I used the nightly versions with the Qt UI long before it made it to stable
I was trying to say that PCSX2 and Dolphin are amazing compared to the two original Xbox emulators, XEMU and XBCD.
No, I was just saying that it took forever for PCSX2 to get as good as it did, hopefully the Xbox emulators can also adapt a similar interface.
i’m actually surprised how fast was the development of rpcs3 compared to pcsx2. i played the mgs trilogy around 5y ago and it was almost flawless on ps3 while the ps2 version had many problems. i haven’t tried it again recently but from small tests on other games, emulator looks way better than before
The 360 still has some viable ways to play a lot of the important games at least and the console is widely available with now an easily accessible way to mod the console so its eh.
However the original xbox is a goldmine of obscure and interesting titles that its really kinda sad xemu is so far behind. Especially considering the hardware is not accessible and many units are dying if the clock battery isnt removed or replaced.
The original xbox is probably one of my most favourite consoles and has what feels like a distinctly different and more experimental library than the other consoles. Also doom 3 and escape from butcher bay were glorious visually. Also it has the best way to play some of the splinter cell games as xbox was the target platform. It also has the better double agent release
It’s annoying trying to convince people that the original 360 version of DP isn’t “janky” or “so bad it’s good”. It’s just a good game with some weird design decisions. All the bad ports have completely warped how people view the game.
Precisely. The combat was certainly always a bit clunky though since it was added at the publisher’s insistence. The later rereleases tried to “fix” it by just permanently enabling easy mode. DP was also definitely a bit dated designwise compared to games in 2010, which works out just fine since hearkening back to the PS2 is Cool and Good
the nice thing is that XBOX as a console brand is completely dead so this problem will go away with enough time
i just want JSRF to work good :(
