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> Whether PC users, our core readership, will be interested in actually emulating Xbox One, looks unlikely. The 2013 system’s game library is largely overlapped

> Whether PC users, our core readership, will be interested in actually emulating Xbox One, looks unlikely. The 2013 system’s game library is largely overlapped in better quality on the PC platform. And this explains why it's stayed unhacked so long. There was very little incentive to hack the system when the games are all playable on a PC. Pirates, cheaters, archivists, and hackers could just go there. Microsoft's best security measure was making something nobody cared enough about to hack in the first place

aizk 7mo ago
Definitely there's some truth to it
bombcar 7mo ago
There was a time when it would have been a hot target, but everything the original modded Xbox could do could be done easier elsewhere.
- chocochunks 7mo ago
  Most of what was done on an original modded Xbox can be done on a retail stock Xbox One/Xbox Series with the exception of pirated Xbox games. Kodi (formerly known as XBMC) is just in the Xbox store, emulators and homebrew can be setup through dev mode with a little effort and $20. It's really just pirated versions of Halo 5 and a few others missing.
- jerf 7mo ago
  I know that's been dropping my level of interest for hacking consoles farther and farther. Why hack a console when it has almost no exclusives, even fewer of which I personally care about, and having a real computer hooked to a TV is no longer weird or difficult? I could fight to put an emulator on some locked down console or I can just install an emulator for almost everything ever made in like 10 minutes on my Steam Deck, so the choice is pretty obvious.
giobox 7mo ago
The other major incentive for hacking the console Microsoft removed was for the first time on a modern mainstream home console to allow side loading of homebrew code/emulators etc. The console supported a developer mode that allowed side loading of third party applications, so folks could get emulators and other traditionally "banned" content on the console through an officially supported route. There's a great presentation by Tony Chen on the Xbox One's security features: > https://www.platformsecuritysummit.com/2019/speaker/chen/ https://www.platformsecuritysummit.com/2019/speaker/chen/ Examples of the kinda software you can put on the Xbox One in developer mode: > https://xboxdevstore.github.io/ https://xboxdevstore.github.io/
- philistine 7mo ago
  You are 100% correct but they started clamping down on people using Dev mode strictly for emulators and homebrew. So here we are.
  - pjmlp 7mo ago
    This is what killed Linux support on PS as well, Sony was disappointed with what was being done with PS2Linux, instead of indie titles. Hence why PS3 Other OS no longer did hardware acceleration.
    - beAbU 7mo ago
      The PS3 was incredible value dollar-to-flop, given that it was sold at a loss. This resulted in universities and other research institutes buying them en masse to create supercomputer clusters. Naturally buying thousands of consoles but not a single game puts sony in a difficult position. Although I think it's sad the hardware got locked down in later revisions, I fully understand why they did it.
      - mschild 7mo ago
        The US Department of Defense went quite a bit further. They created the Condor Cluster in 2010 which was comprised of 1760 PS3s. At the time it was placed 33rd worldwide for a supercomputer. https://phys.org/news/2010-12-air-playstation-3s-supercomputer.html https://phys.org/news/2010-12-air-playstation-3s-supercomput...
Forgeties79 7mo ago
Also getting a dev account and loading up RetroArch/emulators in general is trivial. Best use of an Xbox one for sure. Well documented and exploited at this point. Not the same as emulating its titles, but a lot of interest in the Xbone/series line (outside of actual console users) is the dev accounts. So I imagine a lot more effort went there first.
- genthree 7mo ago
  How is this the first I’m hearing of it? Looks like I finally have a reason to own an x-box, aside from the best version of Perfect Dark (the HD release of the original with modern controls, I mean) being on the 360.
  - Forgeties79 7mo ago
    They used to charge too but now it’s free. I got mine set up after about 30min of work a few weeks ago just need to actually load it up now. It’s tedious and you have to share your personal ID but it’s not difficult.
  - chocochunks 7mo ago
    Perfect Dark works on newer Xboxes too. For Xbox One X and Series X it runs at 9x the res of the 360 version. It's included in Rare Replay which also includes Goldeneye 007 if you get it digitally.
- mrandish 7mo ago
  I was vaguely aware this is possible although the "sign-up for a dev account and boot it in dev mode all the time", even if free, was still enough of a barrier that I haven't done yet. I'm hoping this hack eventually leads to a simpler "one-click" way to run emulation, home brew and mods while still maintaining full original game and media playing functionality. Then I'll finally hook up the XBOne I have again and put it to some use on the downstairs TV. I already have a 'retired' PS4 filling similar role on the upstairs TV (although it must stay offline to remain 'liberated').
Retr0id 7mo ago
This is true, but it is also true that the Xbox One's security architecture and mitigations were ahead of its time. It would've taken a while to hack even with stronger incentives to hack it.
- autoexec 7mo ago
  True, I'm not trying to diminish this guy's efforts to defeat all the obstacles MS put in his way.
glenstein 7mo ago
>The 2013 system’s game library is largely overlapped in better quality on the PC platform. I get what this essentially means, but for those of us with a certain amount of love of language (or pedantry), it's fascinating to try and parse this literally because I don't quite think it works as intended. Clearly the intended meaning is something like eclipsed in quality. And it may be overlapped in the sense that the same games are separately available on PC. But overlap isn't a relation of quality; quality is generally better or worse when it's comparative. So it's like a smushed together way simultaneously saying the selection of games on Xbone overlaps with what's available on PC and is also better quality on PC.
- inertiatic 7mo ago
  It's clear it means that there's a large overlap in titles and they are available in better quality on the PC platform?
  - glenstein 7mo ago
    I already acknowledged that part several times?
    - Philpax 7mo ago
      Yes, but the grandparent poster and I would agree that the parse is not that ambiguous/the meaning is easily inferred. The sentence states that the library is overlapped _and_ that overlap is available in better quality: it may seem contrived, but it reads as a rather natural collapse of an implicit conjunction to me.
    - vdvebjrc 7mo ago
      [dead]
- autoexec 7mo ago
  I think they could have used some punctuation. examples: The 2013 system’s game library is largely overlapped, in better quality, on the PC platform. The 2013 system’s game library is largely overlapped (in better quality) on the PC platform.
louhike 7mo ago
One thing PC does not have are the Xbox/Xbox 360 updated games. Microsoft did a great job of making the old games playable on Xbox One with better resolution, performance, etc. It would be nice to play the exclusive games of those consoles on PC through this.
- pjmlp 7mo ago
  It might be coming as per GDC news, lets see.
  - philistine 7mo ago
    They're not going to bring over Xbox 360 emulation. This thing is dependent on the specific CPU and GPU of the Xbox One and Series consoles. They've lost their appetite for emulation and have reassigned the whole team dedicated to it.
    - pjmlp 7mo ago
      They announced a new effort at GDC.
      - vdvebjrc 7mo ago
        [dead]
foobiekr 7mo ago
the main value is that it's way easier to make an emulator of a console than some point-in-time windows PC.
zadikian 7mo ago
Maybe cheaters want to cheat somewhere nobody else cheats. Idk if these games do online cross platform nowadays.
- genewitch 7mo ago
  Helldivers 2 is cross platform (pc, sony, xbox all in same game at same time, doesn't matter who "hosts.") So it does exist in practice.
bor_real 7mo ago
The Xbox One has been emulated though (well not emulated, it's a compatibility layer like Wine). Before this hack, there was Collateral Damage. We were able to dump games with the exploit. Minecraft: Xbox One Edition (the Legacy version) was of keen interest to our community as it would be playing LCE natively on a PC if you used a compatibility layer which never happened before. So a few of my LCE cult friends contributed to WinDurango which was pretty much dead before they joined, and got Minecraft: Xbox One Edition to work. Of course, you'd ask "why don't you just play Minecraft on PC normally?" Legacy Console Edition has so many minute differences and details that it's impossible to discuss all of them--things as big as the Minigames and as small as the mipmaps. And then LCE source code from 2014 got leaked and that had a native PC port. Oh well.
- tzs 7mo ago
  > The Xbox One has been emulated though (well not emulated, it's a compatibility layer like Wine). The parenthetical is not needed. It is OK to call Wine an emulator. The "Wine Is Not an Emulator" thing came about later and was essentially a marketing change. How it came about is interesting. The first suggestion to change the meaning of the word from a shortening of "windows emulator to the not an emulator backronym was in 1993 over concern that "windows emulator" might run into problems with Microsoft trademarks, but no action was taken. Over time the not an emulator usage became an accepted alternative. The Wine FAQ in late 1997 for example said: The word Wine stands for one of two things: WINdows Emulator, or Wine Is Not an Emulator. Both are right. Use whichever one you like best. The release notes stopped calling it an emulator at the end of 1998. The 981108 release notes said: This is release 981108 of Wine, the MS Windows emulator. The 981211 release notes said: This is release 981211 of Wine, a free implementation of Windows on Unix. As far as I have been able to tell from my recollections of that time and what I was able to find when I looked into it later is that this happened for two reasons. 1. Wine was useful for more than just running Windows binaries on Unix. It could also be used as a library you could link with code compiled on Unix as an aide to porting Windows programs to Unix. 2. Hardware emulators that emulator old systems like GameBoy or Apple II had become popular. Many people were only familiar with that kind of emulator, and those (the emulators, not the people!) tended to be slow. That was fine when your emulator is running on a machine with a clock speed 300x that of the machine you are emulating and that has a much more efficient CPU, but when you tried to use a hardware emulator for something comparable to your machine it was usually unbearably slow. People only familiar with such hardware emulators might see Wine described as a Windows emulator and think it was doing hardware emulation and not even give it a try. By dropping calling it an emulator Wine sidestepped that problem.
Thaxll 7mo ago
This is not the reason, the reason is that the security is very strong. It's explained in the video.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
selectively 7mo ago
Yeah, you couldn't be more wrong here. The exact same people who thoroughly destroyed the 360 badly wanted to attack this system - they were just outgunned.
- Gigachad 7mo ago
  The security was way better with the Xbox One, but also no one cared about the Xbox one. The 360 was the last successful Xbox.
beAbU 7mo ago
There is this general vibe online that the newer generation xboxen are either bad, worse than playstation, or a straight up failure. My series x, combined with gamepass, is by a very large margin the most at-home-entertainment bang I have gotten for my buck. Before then I had what could be regarded as a "vintage" gaming PC: 1st gen i7 (nehalem?), a gts 450 and some amount of ram. An upgrade (read: full replacement) was desperately needed. This was in the middle of the crypto gpu boom, so a decent GPU alone would've wiped my budget. I settled for an xbox as it was cheaper than a ps5. I've always seen myself as part of the pc master race, and thought consoles to be very limited. But man, it just worked, the games just worked, and gamepass made it all a total steal. Even now, when our 3 month old baby is settled for the night, me and my wife's preferred entertainment is a session of bg3 over watching tv.
- wileydragonfly 7mo ago
  Series X is a premium experience. Walmart delivered one for $350 at 4am with Diablo 4. Still feels like robbery a couple of years later.
- ezst 7mo ago
  > when our 3 month old baby is settled for the night Seemed a credible comment till that point! (/s) Congrats :-)
  - beAbU 7mo ago
    Thanks, we are definitely in the 'if it's this easy we should have another one!'. She's been a treat so far and from what I've heard from other parents, very easy.
- bakies 7mo ago
  > gamepass made it all a total steal Doing the math i can't find this to be true. As some one that has honed my taste in games, and have a large steam library, I don't spend as much money on games as game pass cost.
  - 7mo ago
kleene_op 7mo ago
> Microsoft's best security measure was making something nobody cared enough about to hack in the first place Maybe that's what they're trying to achieve with Windows as well.
HerbManic 7mo ago
Pretty much, if you provide what people want elsewhere you will reduce the demand to crack the original system. One of the reasons the Wii U was slow to be hacked was because Android TV boxes had come along plus things like Ouya/Nvidia shield, and it basically took away a lot of demand for a console turned into TV unit to use hacked software. It still happened but not so quiclkly. Not like the original Wii which didnt really have much similar to it at the time.
Kiboneu 7mo ago
No it doesn’t explain it. This is legitimately a difficult target. Did you watch the talk? The people that MS hired to make and break this were top notch, and there is definitely incentive to maintain control over a content platform. This dude has been at this for /years/. I’ve been a fly on the wall on all sides to observe this. There has been a lot of interest in underground / pirate communities to hack this, but that’s not the only reason why people hack things.

aizk 7mo ago

Definitely there's some truth to it

bombcar 7mo ago

There was a time when it would have been a hot target, but everything the original modded Xbox could do could be done easier elsewhere.

chocochunks 7mo ago
Most of what was done on an original modded Xbox can be done on a retail stock Xbox One/Xbox Series with the exception of pirated Xbox games. Kodi (formerly known as XBMC) is just in the Xbox store, emulators and homebrew can be setup through dev mode with a little effort and $20. It's really just pirated versions of Halo 5 and a few others missing.
jerf 7mo ago
I know that's been dropping my level of interest for hacking consoles farther and farther. Why hack a console when it has almost no exclusives, even fewer of which I personally care about, and having a real computer hooked to a TV is no longer weird or difficult? I could fight to put an emulator on some locked down console or I can just install an emulator for almost everything ever made in like 10 minutes on my Steam Deck, so the choice is pretty obvious.

giobox 7mo ago

The other major incentive for hacking the console Microsoft removed was for the first time on a modern mainstream home console to allow side loading of homebrew code/emulators etc. The console supported a developer mode that allowed side loading of third party applications, so folks could get emulators and other traditionally "banned" content on the console through an officially supported route. There's a great presentation by Tony Chen on the Xbox One's security features: > https://www.platformsecuritysummit.com/2019/speaker/chen/ https://www.platformsecuritysummit.com/2019/speaker/chen/ Examples of the kinda software you can put on the Xbox One in developer mode: > https://xboxdevstore.github.io/ https://xboxdevstore.github.io/

philistine 7mo ago
You are 100% correct but they started clamping down on people using Dev mode strictly for emulators and homebrew. So here we are.
- pjmlp 7mo ago
  This is what killed Linux support on PS as well, Sony was disappointed with what was being done with PS2Linux, instead of indie titles. Hence why PS3 Other OS no longer did hardware acceleration.
  - beAbU 7mo ago
    The PS3 was incredible value dollar-to-flop, given that it was sold at a loss. This resulted in universities and other research institutes buying them en masse to create supercomputer clusters. Naturally buying thousands of consoles but not a single game puts sony in a difficult position. Although I think it's sad the hardware got locked down in later revisions, I fully understand why they did it.
    - mschild 7mo ago
      The US Department of Defense went quite a bit further. They created the Condor Cluster in 2010 which was comprised of 1760 PS3s. At the time it was placed 33rd worldwide for a supercomputer. https://phys.org/news/2010-12-air-playstation-3s-supercomputer.html https://phys.org/news/2010-12-air-playstation-3s-supercomput...

Forgeties79 7mo ago

Also getting a dev account and loading up RetroArch/emulators in general is trivial. Best use of an Xbox one for sure. Well documented and exploited at this point. Not the same as emulating its titles, but a lot of interest in the Xbone/series line (outside of actual console users) is the dev accounts. So I imagine a lot more effort went there first.

genthree 7mo ago
How is this the first I’m hearing of it? Looks like I finally have a reason to own an x-box, aside from the best version of Perfect Dark (the HD release of the original with modern controls, I mean) being on the 360.
- Forgeties79 7mo ago
  They used to charge too but now it’s free. I got mine set up after about 30min of work a few weeks ago just need to actually load it up now. It’s tedious and you have to share your personal ID but it’s not difficult.
- chocochunks 7mo ago
  Perfect Dark works on newer Xboxes too. For Xbox One X and Series X it runs at 9x the res of the 360 version. It's included in Rare Replay which also includes Goldeneye 007 if you get it digitally.
mrandish 7mo ago
I was vaguely aware this is possible although the "sign-up for a dev account and boot it in dev mode all the time", even if free, was still enough of a barrier that I haven't done yet. I'm hoping this hack eventually leads to a simpler "one-click" way to run emulation, home brew and mods while still maintaining full original game and media playing functionality. Then I'll finally hook up the XBOne I have again and put it to some use on the downstairs TV. I already have a 'retired' PS4 filling similar role on the upstairs TV (although it must stay offline to remain 'liberated').

Retr0id 7mo ago

This is true, but it is also true that the Xbox One's security architecture and mitigations were ahead of its time. It would've taken a while to hack even with stronger incentives to hack it.

autoexec 7mo ago
True, I'm not trying to diminish this guy's efforts to defeat all the obstacles MS put in his way.

glenstein 7mo ago

>The 2013 system’s game library is largely overlapped in better quality on the PC platform. I get what this essentially means, but for those of us with a certain amount of love of language (or pedantry), it's fascinating to try and parse this literally because I don't quite think it works as intended. Clearly the intended meaning is something like eclipsed in quality. And it may be overlapped in the sense that the same games are separately available on PC. But overlap isn't a relation of quality; quality is generally better or worse when it's comparative. So it's like a smushed together way simultaneously saying the selection of games on Xbone overlaps with what's available on PC and is also better quality on PC.

inertiatic 7mo ago
It's clear it means that there's a large overlap in titles and they are available in better quality on the PC platform?
- glenstein 7mo ago
  I already acknowledged that part several times?
  - Philpax 7mo ago
    Yes, but the grandparent poster and I would agree that the parse is not that ambiguous/the meaning is easily inferred. The sentence states that the library is overlapped _and_ that overlap is available in better quality: it may seem contrived, but it reads as a rather natural collapse of an implicit conjunction to me.
  - vdvebjrc 7mo ago
    [dead]
autoexec 7mo ago
I think they could have used some punctuation. examples: The 2013 system’s game library is largely overlapped, in better quality, on the PC platform. The 2013 system’s game library is largely overlapped (in better quality) on the PC platform.

louhike 7mo ago

One thing PC does not have are the Xbox/Xbox 360 updated games. Microsoft did a great job of making the old games playable on Xbox One with better resolution, performance, etc. It would be nice to play the exclusive games of those consoles on PC through this.

pjmlp 7mo ago
It might be coming as per GDC news, lets see.
- philistine 7mo ago
  They're not going to bring over Xbox 360 emulation. This thing is dependent on the specific CPU and GPU of the Xbox One and Series consoles. They've lost their appetite for emulation and have reassigned the whole team dedicated to it.
  - pjmlp 7mo ago
    They announced a new effort at GDC.
    - vdvebjrc 7mo ago
      [dead]

foobiekr 7mo ago

the main value is that it's way easier to make an emulator of a console than some point-in-time windows PC.

zadikian 7mo ago

Maybe cheaters want to cheat somewhere nobody else cheats. Idk if these games do online cross platform nowadays.

genewitch 7mo ago
Helldivers 2 is cross platform (pc, sony, xbox all in same game at same time, doesn't matter who "hosts.") So it does exist in practice.

bor_real 7mo ago

The Xbox One has been emulated though (well not emulated, it's a compatibility layer like Wine). Before this hack, there was Collateral Damage. We were able to dump games with the exploit. Minecraft: Xbox One Edition (the Legacy version) was of keen interest to our community as it would be playing LCE natively on a PC if you used a compatibility layer which never happened before. So a few of my LCE cult friends contributed to WinDurango which was pretty much dead before they joined, and got Minecraft: Xbox One Edition to work. Of course, you'd ask "why don't you just play Minecraft on PC normally?" Legacy Console Edition has so many minute differences and details that it's impossible to discuss all of them--things as big as the Minigames and as small as the mipmaps. And then LCE source code from 2014 got leaked and that had a native PC port. Oh well.

tzs 7mo ago
> The Xbox One has been emulated though (well not emulated, it's a compatibility layer like Wine). The parenthetical is not needed. It is OK to call Wine an emulator. The "Wine Is Not an Emulator" thing came about later and was essentially a marketing change. How it came about is interesting. The first suggestion to change the meaning of the word from a shortening of "windows emulator to the not an emulator backronym was in 1993 over concern that "windows emulator" might run into problems with Microsoft trademarks, but no action was taken. Over time the not an emulator usage became an accepted alternative. The Wine FAQ in late 1997 for example said: The word Wine stands for one of two things: WINdows Emulator, or Wine Is Not an Emulator. Both are right. Use whichever one you like best. The release notes stopped calling it an emulator at the end of 1998. The 981108 release notes said: This is release 981108 of Wine, the MS Windows emulator. The 981211 release notes said: This is release 981211 of Wine, a free implementation of Windows on Unix. As far as I have been able to tell from my recollections of that time and what I was able to find when I looked into it later is that this happened for two reasons. 1. Wine was useful for more than just running Windows binaries on Unix. It could also be used as a library you could link with code compiled on Unix as an aide to porting Windows programs to Unix. 2. Hardware emulators that emulator old systems like GameBoy or Apple II had become popular. Many people were only familiar with that kind of emulator, and those (the emulators, not the people!) tended to be slow. That was fine when your emulator is running on a machine with a clock speed 300x that of the machine you are emulating and that has a much more efficient CPU, but when you tried to use a hardware emulator for something comparable to your machine it was usually unbearably slow. People only familiar with such hardware emulators might see Wine described as a Windows emulator and think it was doing hardware emulation and not even give it a try. By dropping calling it an emulator Wine sidestepped that problem.

Thaxll 7mo ago

This is not the reason, the reason is that the security is very strong. It's explained in the video.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

selectively 7mo ago

Yeah, you couldn't be more wrong here. The exact same people who thoroughly destroyed the 360 badly wanted to attack this system - they were just outgunned.

Gigachad 7mo ago
The security was way better with the Xbox One, but also no one cared about the Xbox one. The 360 was the last successful Xbox.

beAbU 7mo ago

There is this general vibe online that the newer generation xboxen are either bad, worse than playstation, or a straight up failure. My series x, combined with gamepass, is by a very large margin the most at-home-entertainment bang I have gotten for my buck. Before then I had what could be regarded as a "vintage" gaming PC: 1st gen i7 (nehalem?), a gts 450 and some amount of ram. An upgrade (read: full replacement) was desperately needed. This was in the middle of the crypto gpu boom, so a decent GPU alone would've wiped my budget. I settled for an xbox as it was cheaper than a ps5. I've always seen myself as part of the pc master race, and thought consoles to be very limited. But man, it just worked, the games just worked, and gamepass made it all a total steal. Even now, when our 3 month old baby is settled for the night, me and my wife's preferred entertainment is a session of bg3 over watching tv.

wileydragonfly 7mo ago
Series X is a premium experience. Walmart delivered one for $350 at 4am with Diablo 4. Still feels like robbery a couple of years later.
ezst 7mo ago
> when our 3 month old baby is settled for the night Seemed a credible comment till that point! (/s) Congrats :-)
- beAbU 7mo ago
  Thanks, we are definitely in the 'if it's this easy we should have another one!'. She's been a treat so far and from what I've heard from other parents, very easy.
bakies 7mo ago
> gamepass made it all a total steal Doing the math i can't find this to be true. As some one that has honed my taste in games, and have a large steam library, I don't spend as much money on games as game pass cost.
- 7mo ago

kleene_op 7mo ago

> Microsoft's best security measure was making something nobody cared enough about to hack in the first place Maybe that's what they're trying to achieve with Windows as well.

HerbManic 7mo ago

Pretty much, if you provide what people want elsewhere you will reduce the demand to crack the original system. One of the reasons the Wii U was slow to be hacked was because Android TV boxes had come along plus things like Ouya/Nvidia shield, and it basically took away a lot of demand for a console turned into TV unit to use hacked software. It still happened but not so quiclkly. Not like the original Wii which didnt really have much similar to it at the time.

Kiboneu 7mo ago

No it doesn’t explain it. This is legitimately a difficult target. Did you watch the talk? The people that MS hired to make and break this were top notch, and there is definitely incentive to maintain control over a content platform. This dude has been at this for /years/. I’ve been a fly on the wall on all sides to observe this. There has been a lot of interest in underground / pirate communities to hack this, but that’s not the only reason why people hack things.