While there have been rumours going around of Microsoft working with the creators of Xbox 360 emulator Xenia to bolster the backwards compatibility offered by its consoles, the emulator’s developers have confirmed that this is not a case. On its official Discord server (as caught by Reddit user Stoksyxl), one of the developers behind Xenia said that the team is not associated with Microsoft in any way.
In the post, the team member also clarified that, for backwards compatibility on Xbox consoles, Microsoft makes use of its own home-made emulation techniques. The post also clarified that this will likely be true if the company wants to bring in Xbox emulation on PC in an official capacity as well.
“The Xenia (and Xenia Canary, by extension) team is by no means associated with, nor working alongside Microsoft in any capacity,” wrote the team member working on the emulator. “Microsoft uses their own emulation to provide backwards compatibility on Xbox One/Series consoles and as such has no reason to collaborate with Xenia, even if they decided to bring these titles to PC.”
“Xenia continues to be a community-run effort that encourages and enforces legal emulation practices both in development and within this server.”
For context, Xenia Canary is what can be considered the “cutting-edge” version of the emulator, often with new features that are undergoing testing. The Canary name is often used for these fresh releases, with the caveat that their cutting-edge nature also likely means that there will be plenty of bugs and other issues players might end up facing.
Xenia itself is an open-source emulator that can play Xbox 360 games on PC. However, the emulator is far from being perfect, and the team behind Xenia maintains a game compatibility list. While emulation itself is considered a murky subject by many, especially when it comes to its legality, the Xenia development team maintains that the project’s goal is experimentation, research, and education on the subject of emulation.
For its part, Microsoft has been focusing a great deal on ensuring its consoles have maintained backwards compatibility since around the mid-point of the Xbox One’s console generation. Since then, the company has been working hard to ensure that many games from across the Xbox and Xbox 360 library work well on the modern consoles. These same features have also been carried over to the current-gen Xbox Series X/S.
Backwards compatibility has been a hot subject in recent times. Even Sony, for its part, has ensured backwards compatibility between PS4 and PS5. However, for older titles that were originally released on the original PlayStation, PS2 or PS3, the company relies on cloud streaming these titles, likely due to the difficulty in emulating some of the more esoteric hardware of the time on modern systems.
Nintendo has also been focused on backwards compatibility with the Switch 2, going out of its way to mention that most Switch games will run on the new consoles. The company also offers titles from older consoles – NES, Super NES, Nintendo 64, and Nintendo GameCube – through its Nintendo Switch Online subscription service.
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