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Microsoft Takes a Big Step Towards Putting Xbox Games On Windows (arstechnica.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the long-time-coming dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica, written by Peter Bright: Ever since the first Xbox was released, an obvious question has been hanging in the air: Microsoft already owns one of the premier gaming platforms, the PC, and both the original Xbox and the current Xbox One are more or less PCs anyway, so when is Microsoft going to bring the two together and let us play Xbox games on Windows? With the new Windows 10 builds, it looks like the company is taking some big steps in that direction. Microsoft has put big chunks of the Xbox infrastructure into Windows 10. This starts right from the moment you download the game: it's coming from the Xbox distribution servers, not the usual ones for Store apps. The game package itself uses a format called .xvc, which is used for Xbox One games, and there are PowerShell commands to work with these .xvc files and install .xvc games. Microsoft Gaming Services includes portions of this Xbox infrastructure; it includes a couple of drivers ("Microsoft Gaming Filesystem Driver" and "Microsoft Gaming Install Filter Driver"), along with a number of libraries that provide Xbox APIs.

The last few Windows 10 preview builds have included some vague instructions from Microsoft to install a special edition of a game, State of Decay, and report any problems with the process. There are no problems with playing the game but, rather, problems with installing and launching it. The instructions didn't give any indication as to why or what to look for. Naturally, people have been taking a closer look to see what's special about State of Decay and figure out why Microsoft is having Windows Insiders test it. Nazmus Khandaker, Rafael Rivera, and the pseudonymous WalkingCat have been poking around both the special edition of State of Decay and a helper application called Microsoft Gaming Services that insider machines are running. Brad Sams wrote up his findings. [...] The State of Decay package does nonetheless contain PC-oriented elements. In particular, it tries to install and update the DirectX runtime during its setup. We the users don't seem to be at the stage of simply running Xbox games unmodified on our PCs, or at least, not yet. But it looks as if the groundwork is being laid. The strange preview of a 2020 Windows release looks like it contains even more of this infrastructure, with signs of a layer to support Xbox's Direct3D variant on PC. "Microsoft could go the whole hog and simply make a Windows 10 PC with a suitable hardware spec into an Xbox that can play any Xbox game," writes Bright, adding: "it might just be there as a simple option for developers to enable if they choose."

56 of 87 comments (clear)

  1. ARRRRR by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Oh the piracy!

  2. The Console Advantage. by jellomizer · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The Console has one major advantage over the PC. Uniform Balanced Hardware.
    Game makers know how fast the system is, how much RAM, what type of RAM. The Video Chips used.... A game made for the platform tends to run much better then on a PC with much higher specs in most areas. Because there is code that is needed to account for dealing with different drivers for a set of hardware. When a PC is built, they will often get the Expensive Video Card, but cheap on on RAM, or get a slow drive. Hardware makers don't make it easy for most people to make informed decisions. Core i3, i5, i7, i9 6th, 7th, 8th gen? Sure 8th Gen i9 is probably the fastest, but it is wicked expensive. But am I better off with the 8th gen i5 or a 7th Gen i7? Then you build something with a random bottle neck that will slow down the game further.

    --
    If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    1. Re:The Console Advantage. by Austerity+Empowers · · Score: 1

      Or you install a bad driver which can turn your 20th gen i57 into a toaster oven.

      Still, console games suck. So there's that.

    2. Re:The Console Advantage. by Luthair · · Score: 1

      Its not quite uniform anymore, there are at least 2 different hardware configurations from both Sony & MS. Having started down this road I anticipate that there won't be a hard break over generations either, and new games will support the old hardware (at least pro/x) for longer.

    3. Re:The Console Advantage. by Highdude702 · · Score: 1

      That's where knowing th3 Xbox has a ryzen variant and an rx580 variant comes into play. Ryzen R5-1600x and rx580 would probably be best maybe even an R7-1700x or 2nd gen I guess. The Xbox however does have more CU's than the 580.

    4. Re:The Console Advantage. by stealth_finger · · Score: 1

      The Console has one major advantage over the PC. Uniform Balanced Hardware. Game makers know how fast the system is, how much RAM, what type of RAM. The Video Chips used.... A game made for the platform tends to run much better then on a PC with much higher specs in most areas. Because there is code that is needed to account for dealing with different drivers for a set of hardware. When a PC is built, they will often get the Expensive Video Card, but cheap on on RAM, or get a slow drive. Hardware makers don't make it easy for most people to make informed decisions. Core i3, i5, i7, i9 6th, 7th, 8th gen? Sure 8th Gen i9 is probably the fastest, but it is wicked expensive. But am I better off with the 8th gen i5 or a 7th Gen i7? Then you build something with a random bottle neck that will slow down the game further.

      This. It's basically the same reason macs are thought of as being generally better for graphics type stuff. Because macs have set hardware compared to the myriad pc options they crash less. Or at least used to, macs seem just as crash happy nowadays but I suspect that's a different issue.

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    5. Re:The Console Advantage. by mjwx · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The Console has one major advantage over the PC. Uniform Balanced Hardware.

      The 90's called, they want their excuses back.

      That hasn't been an advantage for consoles in a long time. Drivers, engines and interfaces have improved to the point where PC games are hardware agnostic. Doesn't matter if you have an AMD or Intel, Nvidia or ATI. ASUS or MSI.

      OTOH, Console hardware being uniform is a huge problem because if one console has a major design fault, they all have them and it's not like that's a rare thing (RROD, YLOD). It also is outdated by the time of it's release. The Xbox One uses a Radeon 7000 series chipset, that was released in 2012 and superceded by the R8000 in 2013, we're currently up to GCN 5th gen of Radeon GPU's whilst the Xbox is still using the GCN 1st gen arch. It's hardware uniformity has become more of a curse.

      --
      Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
    6. Re:The Console Advantage. by blahplusplus · · Score: 2

      The Console has one major advantage over the PC. Uniform Balanced Hardware.

      Sorry to tell ya, but games were made better in the 90's before the internet allowed people with impulse control problems to allow game companies to take control of the software. The fact that windows 10 has defacto DRM in it is the worst possible outcome for a PC game nerd who games in the 90's. The console advantage isn't, since console gamers are on average more stupid and less demanding then PC gamers. They are the ones who ultimately forked out for "multiplayer subscriptions" (dumb shit) and stuff like horse armor.

      As the masses got internet the bottom of the bell curve came online and their idiot decisions changed gaming forever for the worse. Microtransactions directly incentivized the attack on game ownership which is why multiplayer of most modern games is so fucked up beyond all recognition. Watching quake as a property devolve into some f2p microtransaction ridden game means we are in the worst of all possible gaming futures because the average person today is a fucking mouthbreathing moron.

      The last 20 years has been the biggest heist and theft of videogames in all human history while the masses fell on their own sword and put mouth to corporate CEO dick and sucked it. Once the gaming public fell for the mmo scam, the rebranding of PC rpg's to get gamers to pay more then once for the same PC RPG, it was over, it proved the average gamer is a fucking moron. Which lead to steam and then finally leauge of legends - league of legends taught the game industry a powerful lesson - the internet focused the worlds stupidest, richest and those lacking impulse control and concentrated them all in once place. Since telecom reaches everyone that meant corporations had 24/7 access to the dumbest members of our species and those motherfuckers voted to destroy videogames because most of them are irrational and technologically illiterate.

      Watching PC gaming subreddit on reddit is watching idiots engage in their moronic thoughts not realizing the battle was lost as soon as you accepted mmo's... AKA not seeing that as soon as they control the game software they were going to rape us six ways to sunday.

      It's hilarious seeing the stupid masses think they are getting a deal when their hobby has literally already been invaded and destroyed because they are too dumb to realize when you don't control the software and make sure you own and control 100% of it, that means corporations no longer have to focuse on making the best games they can now just exploit the weak minded half of the population which internet gives them 24/7 access to.

      Everything us PC nerds feared in the 90's simply came true as the internet was the greatest gift to software corporations allowing them to steal software from the entire world from the comfort and safety of their offices. Like the world as a giant highschool where the evil nerds used the jocks and normies of highschool to rob from the other nerds. Shit is sad watching gmaing history being destroyed over the last 20 years because of drm and "always online" software nonsense has been a downright tragedy.

      Once internet penetration reached the tech illtierate morons of the globe everything went to shit. The fact that steam, mmo's, xbox live subscriptions and drm even exist is a testament to how fucking stupid the average person is on our planet.

    7. Re:The Console Advantage. by Xest · · Score: 2

      Mostly the advantage used to be that having fixed hardware meant that developers could optimise specifically to the nuances of that hardware and get far more performance out of it than they ever could if they were just developing to the lowest common denominator they could reasonably support on the PC platform.

      But it's also becoming less relevant nowadays, game development is getting ever more abstracted away from the hardware. It used to be that every game had it's own engine, or at least, there was a fairly substantial plurality of engines. This has become less true though, as the majority of games released nowadays are either built on Unity, or Unreal. The handful of studios that do still have their own engines are sufficiently large that they can support having them capable of performing on different hardware (and in fact, typically do anyway - Xbox, PS, Switch).

      So I don't think it's really such an issue anymore, I don't think anyone is building games that are tightly coupled with the hardware on which they're running anymore. Optimisation is often done at engine level without the game running on the engine even having to care; things like shadows, particle systems, lighting and so on are degraded automatically by the engine, as are cross platform optimisations and nuances.

      As such, it should be more possible than ever to get console games running on PCs providing the PC can provide the same services the console's OS can (achievements, party chat, cloud saves, etc.), which is really what this article is talking about.

    8. Re:The Console Advantage. by jellomizer · · Score: 1

      It is still an issue. While these Drivers, engine and interfaces are much better then the 1990's where a PC isn't a crashing mess anymore.

      Some hardware makers will fall back to the windows default driver, while really not fully supporting them. Even with good drivers, different devices have different features. So while they may work on the driver, the special features are often not utilized because the game may not be coded to use it, so it will fall back.

      However what people really fail to understand is balanced architecture. We are running $2k PC's to run games are nearly the same quality as a $400 console. These drivers and and interfaces to make everything talk the same language use a lot of processing power.
         

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    9. Re:The Console Advantage. by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 1

      The 90's called, they want their excuses back. .

      I'd definitely better than it used to be. But you're forgetting the simplest challenge: extremely wide differences in raw performance capabilities between client machines. That's a real challenge for PC developers, because while you want to target the minimum level feasible hardware, gamers with high-end PCs want to see games take advantage of the latest and greatest hardware features.

      I certainly won't call it an "excuse", but that doesn't mean scalability doesn't require a significant amount of extra work to get right. I'm working on an upcoming AAA PC game, and the feature I'm working on is potentially CPU intensive, but mostly has aesthetic effects. So, I have to be careful to ensure that no matter whether someone has 2 cores or 32 cores, of various speeds, the work I'm doing never exceeds a specified threshold, which I determine based on general hardware capacity and auto-scale in real-time.

      A lot of other features also fall into this category. A console game doesn't have to spend as much time on fine-grained graphics options, for example, making every little detail toggleable in case it has a performance impact. This is vastly different than a console game, which only has to worry about two performance levels these days.

      we're currently up to GCN 5th gen of Radeon GPU's whilst the Xbox is still using the GCN 1st gen arch. It's hardware uniformity has become more of a curse.

      The mid-cycle hardware refresh also means that people aren't necessarily stuck with older hardware if they want to upgrade.

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
    10. Re:The Console Advantage. by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 1

      > We are running $2k PC's to run games are nearly the same quality as a $400 console.

      Consoles at a shity 30 fps is NOT the same quality as PC's running a silky smooth 60 or 120 fps!

      Also, it depends on the console. There is a vast difference between The Switch, PS4, and PS4 Pro performance and quality.

      Lastly, games with crappy frame rates such as the original vs remastered Dark Souls also matter.

      --
      Only a blind fool thinks a crappy 24 fps is "cinematic" for stuttering camera pans.

    11. Re:The Console Advantage. by tlhIngan · · Score: 1

      This. It's basically the same reason macs are thought of as being generally better for graphics type stuff. Because macs have set hardware compared to the myriad pc options they crash less. Or at least used to, macs seem just as crash happy nowadays but I suspect that's a different issue.

      No, It's because MacOS has support for color correction in the OS itself, so applying all the ICC profiles means applications inherit the color correction automatically.

    12. Re:The Console Advantage. by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      A game made for the platform tends to run much better then on a PC with much higher specs in most areas. Because there is code that is needed to account for dealing with different drivers for a set of hardware.

      Sorry but no. Games on PC run just fine with the same hardware as consoles. The problem is that game developers shit the bed when it comes to making consoles work and then ignore the capabilities of the PC. That's how you get shit like locked 50fps gameplay, jagged edges on 4K monitors thanks to internal fixed rendering resolutions (often with bizarre choices such as rendering at 900p and upscaling to 1080p because consoles are so underpowered).

      Programming for a console is abstract enough that it doesn't make a difference anymore. There's no special magic hardware in an XBone that you can magically tune up to 11 which you can't on a PC.

      When a PC is built, they will often get the Expensive Video Card, but cheap on on RAM, or get a slow drive. Hardware makers don't make it easy for most people to make informed decisions. Core i3, i5, i7, i9 6th, 7th, 8th gen? Sure 8th Gen i9 is probably the fastest, but it is wicked expensive. But am I better off with the 8th gen i5 or a 7th Gen i7?

      Let me make this easy for you:
      1. Your gaming PC *has* more RAM than an xbox one.
      2. Your video card in your gaming PC (I'm talking about a machine built in the past generation (i.e. maybe 3 year old video card) is faster than the one in the xbox one.
      3. Your CPU is 100% completely irrelevant. Not just a bit irrelevant. But completely irrelevant. Unless you're playing Ashes, but that game is incredibly unique. So 8th gen i5? 7th gen i7? You've already lost. Your 6th gen CPU is more than sufficient for every game on the market.

    13. Re:The Console Advantage. by Stan42 · · Score: 1

      It is true, in a lot of senses. It's like playing a game on your phone or taking a picture with it (compared to a camera), results can be faster

  3. Re:Single OS by Austerity+Empowers · · Score: 1

    I expect this is a sign that Microsoft is planning to merge their Windows and Xbox operating systems to give them a single software ecosystem to mis-manage.

    Fixed that for you.

    Twice the suck at less than half the development cost.

  4. Re:The real question is... by Highdude702 · · Score: 1

    Wish I had mod points.. lol.

  5. Microsoft owns PC? by Luthair · · Score: 1

    That's an interesting take, PC gamers happen to use Microsoft's OS but their gaming platforms (Microsoft Store, Xbox on PC) have effectively a 0% market share.

    1. Re:Microsoft owns PC? by mjwx · · Score: 1

      That's an interesting take, PC gamers happen to use Microsoft's OS but their gaming platforms (Microsoft Store, Xbox on PC) have effectively a 0% market share.

      The problem MS has isn't that they have 0% of the sales, its that they're losing their 100% of the platform. Steam has released on Linux, a lot of PC games are being released as cross platform. It's only a matter of time before being a gamer no longer means having to run Windows 100%. That scares them more than Steam dominating PC game sales.

      --
      Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
    2. Re:Microsoft owns PC? by Luckyo · · Score: 1

      That attempt has basically died out once MS backed off the windows store push. Almost no AAA titles, the big sellers in the industry are ported for linux. There's no market that matters there. Overwhelming majority of linux users will boot windows to play anyway, and that's reality of today.

  6. Unless these games by DarkRookie2 · · Score: 1

    Unless they are in all the stores and not just their own, its not worth anything.

    --
    http://progressquest.com/spoltog.php?name=Son+Of+Son+Of+DarkRookie
  7. Can you just add a Keyboard and Mouse? by sproketboy · · Score: 1

    Can you just add a Keyboard and Mouse to the XBox now? Shouldn't it be possible to throw an XBox under my desk with a KVM switch?

    1. Re:Can you just add a Keyboard and Mouse? by Computershack · · Score: 1

      Yes you've been able to do this for some time but not many games support it. Fortnite is an example of one that does.

      --
      I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
  8. No modding for these games too? by HalAtWork · · Score: 1

    So no modding for these games too? People can't seem to mod Windows Store games without hacks, and mods are very limited even with the hacks. MS created some infrastructure allowing game creators to allow limited modding through those games but developers ignore that and still don't allow modding. I don't think things will get any better with straight up Xbox games running on Windows. It will probably also limit any useful hacks that help people adjust things like FOV, resolution, frame rate, vsync and other things when there is no menu option in the game.

    It seems like all the flexibility and customization that people love from PC games is being stripped out. Luckily we still have GoG and Steam and others for now, but I wonder how long until every type of game and app gets forced into some container that prevents any of this.

    --
    Twinstiq, game news
  9. Now we won't even get half-assed console ports by Opportunist · · Score: 1

    We'll have to go figure out how to get the console games themselves to work, built for controls that don't really map well to keyboard and mouse (no matter how much more sense it would actually make to play the games with keyboard and mouse), built for specs that make you wonder why you bought your new PC (because you can be sure that none of the features you have will be supported), and most of all, it's most likely that the games will only be available in one of the most clunky and user-unfriendly game stores in existence.

    I guess I'll pass.

    --
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  10. Sounds neat by mwn3d · · Score: 1

    Call me when Fable 2 is on Windows

  11. Maybe MS might do the second part, make XBox PCs by ctilsie242 · · Score: 1

    Maybe MS can do the next step, and have XBox consoles also work as Windows 10 machines.

  12. Sets the stage for Hackinboxes by xack · · Score: 1

    Just like we can Hackintosh a Mac or Emulate games at a higher resolution, we can make a custom pc that is a more Powerful Xbox than the official XBox. I can't wait to build a custom Xbox with Threadripper 3 and RTX 3080 Ti.

  13. Holy Grail of gaming (For Me) by WallStPoker · · Score: 1

    The holy grail, for me, would be the ability to buy a single console but play it from any TV in the house. I envision this as a wireless mesh network that sends my signals back to the console but displays on the TV in use. It's not always feasible to be tethered to the location where the console is located. I imagine this will involve some extra hardware, but it would be worth it (for me). Does anyone agree?

    1. Re:Holy Grail of gaming (For Me) by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 1

      the lag will maybe it suck.

      Hell with an client / sever multi room dvr you can see the command delay (some thing that you don't want in gaming)

  14. Re:Single OS by Penguinisto · · Score: 1

    They could, but maintaining a microkernel OS for PPC and X86 architectures at the same time would appear to be a pain in the ass. Doable, but a great big PITA.

    (Assuming XBox is still using PPC chips, yes?)

    Yes, I know Windows used to come out for multiple architectures, but that hadn't happened since when, Windows NT 4?

    --
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  15. Re:Single OS by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 1

    MS store only will lead to big anti trust issues + lawsuits. Also people will feel morally right to pirate games they all ready own that are forced to rebuy.

  16. and your own storage drives as well. by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 1

    and your own storage drives as well.

    1. Re:and your own storage drives as well. by Luthair · · Score: 1

      I'm not sure I follow what you're saying?

  17. Back catalogue by Nidi62 · · Score: 1
    Give me graphically remastered early Halo games on my PC and Microsoft can have my money. I tried replaying Halo on a modern TV and the graphics have aged terribly. I don't pay full price for games but I probably would for that. The only other game I

    would

    have paid full price for was Metro:Exodus before they pulled their EPICally (see what I did there?) bonehead move to pull it from Steam.

    --
    The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
    1. Re:Back catalogue by Computershack · · Score: 1

      They've already done Xbox One enhanced versions of early Halo games. The Master Chief Collection received extra enhancements for the Xbox One X.

      --
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    2. Re:Back catalogue by tlhIngan · · Score: 1

      They've already done Xbox One enhanced versions of early Halo games. The Master Chief Collection received extra enhancements for the Xbox One X.

      The MCC has got to be one of the most updated games around on the Xbox - from the days of its early very shaky launch to having a few billion patches between release years ago and today making it one of the few games still updated and maintained today.

  18. Paradox Mods for pc and xbox by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 1

    https://www.polygon.com/2019/2...

  19. container can have mods and config files workshop by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 1

    container can have mods and config files may not as easy as steam workshop but in game ones. Also container should be able to load / save data into user mydocs folders.

  20. Re:Single OS by beernutz · · Score: 1

    Pretty sure they are using AMD (Intel compatible) chips these days on the Xbox consoles.

    --
    (stolen from DaBum) I am dyslexia of borg - your ass will be laminated.
  21. Re:Single OS by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 1

    AFAIK it's a custom AMD APU.

    --
    #DeleteFacebook
  22. Most games bench your PC and adjust by lamer01 · · Score: 1

    So, I don't think PC configuration is an issue....

  23. Bye bye xbox by devlp0 · · Score: 1

    it was fun ... a long time ago.

    --
    >/dev/null 2>&1
  24. Re:Single OS by williamyf · · Score: 4, Informative

    Yes, I know Windows used to come out for multiple architectures, but that hadn't happened since when, Windows NT 4?

    The WindowsNT family has always supported multiple architectures in their current builds. Some people (me included) may say that X86 and AMD64 are different enough to be considered different architectures...

    But, let's go with the conventional wisdom and count x86+AMD64 as a single architecture.

    Pre-windows2000, there was support for x86, Alpha, MIPS and PPC.

    In windows2000 they stopped supporting PPC and MIPS (early betas had PPC and MIPS support). There was a Win2000 port for Alpha that got Axed by DEC shortly after release. Also in Windows 2000 there was the port of NT server for Itanum (last windows to support Itanium was server 2008R2, released on 2009, with no end of support in sight).

    As you clearly note, PowerPC was a supported architecture From NT 3.1 all the way to the Xbox360 (mantained until 2016).

    2012 brought Windows Phone 8 and windows RT supporting ARM, support which continues to this day.

    So, NT never has stopped supporting multiple architectures. But right now, the current builds support X86/AMD64 and ARM only.

    --
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  25. Re:Single OS by Computershack · · Score: 2

    You won't need to re-buy games. Microsoft already have the Play Anywhere scheme for quite a few titles so for example buy the digital version of Forza Horizon 4 on your Xbox and you can download the PC version from the MS Store for free.

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  26. Re:Single OS by Luckyo · · Score: 1

    The only reason for this is the catastrophic failure of xbone in this round of console wars. It didn't just lose to PS4. It got utterly crushed by it. The only saving grace has been the fact that since xbone, PS4 and modern gaming PCs are very similar in terms of architecture, it's fairly cheap to make versions for all of them after one version is done.

    You can fully expect that if MS manages to reverse this, it will adapt policies more in line with its past policies when xbox platform was significantly better positioned in console wars, and similar to policies adopted by the current undisputed leader Sony. Maximum lockdown of the platform to maximize monetization potential.

  27. Re:Single OS by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 1

    and does Play Anywhere take GOG , steam , Epic Games store keys?

  28. Halo again by The+Snazster · · Score: 1

    Loved Halo 1 and 2 . . . because they were on my pc. Tried Halo 3 repeatedly on my Xbox. Nope. It wasn't that I couldn't play it there, it was because I didn't LIKE to play it there.

  29. The Advantage is Unreal by Prien715 · · Score: 1

    Back in the bad old days of the 90's and early 2000's, any console games were built a rendering engine from scratch which was written for the hardware. Nowadays, most games are built on top of a rendering engine which is then ported to each console as needed. This advance is as groundbreaking in its scope as when Grace Hopper first introduced the compiler to make computer languages software development. The biggest name in this space is Unreal Engine. Whether it's PUBG, Fortnite, or Rocket League, each of these games are available on a wide range of consoles, PC and (in PUBG's case) iOS and Android BECAUSE they rely on this intermediary layer rather than by directly programming on a chipset. By extension, any gamer can simply tweak their GFX settings to what they like (most competitive gamers prefer a smooth framerate over GFX detail -- an option console gamers simply don't get).

    Other graphics engines which power games like Farcry, Witcher, or Metal Gear Solid/Pro Evolution Soccer follow a similar pattern. A secondary advantage here is going to a new piece of hardware (as it is released). C++ has also matured a bunch since the 90's (e.g. platform independent threading) which has also allowed programmers to be much more generic.

    --
    -- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
  30. SystemD box by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

    Since this is a Mammoth sized bloat with everything under the sun I wonder if we can port Xbox to SystemD and run them under it like we do Linux.

    --
    http://saveie6.com/
  31. Re:Single OS by Highdude702 · · Score: 1

    lol. Highly doubtful.

  32. Re:Single OS by Highdude702 · · Score: 1

    Its a custom ryzen chip(or maybe 6th gen APU cores? can't remember) with Polaris GPU CU's and it has a few more CU's than the RX580 from what I recall. PS4 is basically the same CPU. Apparently the PS5 will be zen 2 so that should be interesting.

  33. Emulator by philmarcracken · · Score: 1

    Why not just release specs for exactly how the xbox works and let the community release a near 1:1 emulator?

  34. Re:Single OS by Darinbob · · Score: 1

    I'd rather than XBox and Playstation just get rid of their idiotic "exclusive" games. Publishers shoudln't be bribed to make sure their new games only run on one platform.

  35. Re:Single OS by Ranbot · · Score: 1

    As a PC gamer [without an Xbox] I would have been more open to the integration of Xbox with Windows 10 if it was more complete from the start and not just bloat/spy ware. I upgraded to Windows 10 a couple years ago and found the Xbox app installed, which I poked around in out of curiosity... I'm not a MS hater and I'll give anything a chance. Xbox offered a game recording feature I didn't want, features for an Xbox Live account I didn't have or want, ads for Microsoft games I didn't want, and irrelevant system notifications. It was disabled promptly.

  36. Re:The real question is... by majidimmd · · Score: 1

    https://hamyarzaban.com/