Today we are going to talk about Xenia Emulator, a project where they aim to emulate various Xbox 360 games. Started in 2015, this ongoing project was first started by “benavik”. From a way to play region-locked Japanese games that they picked up, the project then expanded into a full-on emulation experiment. It is updated semi-frequently as the authors only improve on it within their spare time.
Their official site features a roadmap, stating plans to implement various emulation features and to expand the library of games that are available. They are also gunning for cross-platform support, with plans to get the Linux version working as soon as they get a contributor to man this initiative. MacOS support is looking to be quite a difficult affair as the system doesn’t offer much in terms of Vulkan support.
Some features already implemented onto the Emulator include support for installing DLCs, as well as an Ultra-wide hack for users with wider monitors. Note however that this Ultra-wide setting will not increase the game’s resolution, so some games will have graphical issues running under this option. There are currently 16 language options available which include English, French, Japanese, Spanish, and others.
For other details on this emulator, the developers have set up a GitHub page. Their project page includes a list of compatible games, as well as a request thread for those which are still not fully playable. It also has a guide on how to extract games from official Xbox 360 discs, as well as the features which will not be worked into the emulator anytime soon for a variety of reasons.
Lately, they have even released an update which details what the team were doing during the past 6 years of development. They’ve stated that not only does Xenia play 221 Xbox games near-flawlessly, but also that they’ve made strides in GPU emulation. This not only improves the rendering speed of the emulator, but also improves its accuracy in replicating the graphics of the original Xbox 360.
Along with their Github page, they also have a Discord Server for those who want to ask questions directly to the developers. Other sites where you can follow this project on include their official Patreon page and their official twitter account.
According to their site, running Xenia Emulator requires an operating system that’s at least Windows 7+ or higher, as well as a 64-bit processor. Linux users can also run this program through Wine, a piece of software meant for running Windows apps on Unix-based systems. For GPUs, Xenia requires 64-bit video cards with support for Direct3D 12 or Vulkan. The former of these requirements is only available for Windows 10 users. Those using AMD GPUs might experience some graphical bugs, as well as those who use integrated GPU setups. Lastly, your PC should have about 4 gigabytes minimum and 6gb for optimal performance. Other miscellaneous requirements can be seen on their GitHub page.
If you would like to know more about the Xenia Emulator, you can watch the following YouTube video.
