Xenia

Xenia is the one, and only Xbox 360 Emulator. Developed originally by Ben Vanik while he was between jobs and needed something to bide his time in the meantime. He noticed that there was a sheer lack of any progress or any interest in developing an emulator for the Xbox 360, so then the Xenia Xbox 360 emulator project was born.

Xenia has so far proven to be a very fruitful project, starting back in 2013, actually successfully managing to run a Xbox 360 game on PC seemed just like a pipe dream. After the sheer lack of any successful original Xbox emulators, many thought that the Xbox 360 would end up facing the same fate. However Xenia has now proven otherwise, while 3 years might seem like a lot of time, for a complicated system like the Xbox 360 its amazing what the team have managed to achieve.

As of August 2016, there is just over 50 titles that can now be successfully ran on the emulator while managing to achieve full speed. This is an incredibly impressive feat and shows that the emulator is well on its way to being able to successfully emulate the whole system. With any luck more developers will come to the project and help speed up work and help find improvements in the pre-existing code.

While Xenia is making a lot of progress, there is a couple of things that are worth noting. One you require a 64bit operating system, so don’t bother trying this if you have a 32bit operating system. The emulator relies on Advanced Vector Extensions 2 (AVX2) meaning you will have to ensure that your processor actually supports this feature set, there is no way around this due to the way certain things work on the Xbox 360. It is also recommended by the developers to use a NVIDIA GPU and an Intel processor.