The Xbox 360 was a powerful console in its day that, like the PlayStation 3, was considered impossible to emulate on PC since it used a different architecture. But just like with the PS3 and the RPCS3 emulator, the impossible has become a reality, and with the Xenia emulator we can now play Xbox 360 games on PC . In this article we explain how to do it in a simple way.
You must bear in mind one thing, and that is that in this case the Xenia emulator only supports “xinput” controllers, so you will not be able to play with a keyboard and mouse or with any controller, but you will have to have an Xbox 360 controller / Xbox One or compatible (that use xinput) to be able to play.
Install Xenia, the Xbox 360 emulator for PC
The first thing you should do is access the Xenia project website and download the latest available version of the emulator. Access the link that we just gave you and click on “master” to start the download.
What you will download will be a file called xenia_master.zip, which as you will suppose is a compressed file that you will have to unzip on your PC’s hard drive first of all.
As you can see, you don’t even need to install anything, just download the file and unzip it on your hard drive and you’ll be ready to run the emulator.
How to run games in Xenia
Xenia works just as well with games in ISO format as with XBLA files, but in any case you will have to have them on your hard drive or external storage drive, that is, you will not be able to play Xbox 360 games using the disc directly. You will therefore need to have downloaded a digital copy of the game you want to run, or to have first made a backup copy in ISO format of the games you own. In this tutorial we will not go into this.
Run Xenia, and simply click on the File -> Open menu to load the games. You must navigate to the directory where you have them.
Unlike other emulators, Xenia does not store a digital library of your games, but after opening an ISO image of one of them, it loads and runs it immediately. In other words, after hitting File -> Open and loading an ISO, the game will start instantly.
Note: Xenia is in development and is not compatible with all Xbox 360 games. If a game does not work, hangs or gives you graphic problems, it is best to try another title. You can also try testing the beta versions of the emulator, called Canary, which you can find on Github .
What should you keep in mind when using Xenia on PC?
In addition to what we have already mentioned about the need to have a xinput-compatible controller, you should know that Xenia does not offer options that can improve compatibility like RPCS3 does for the PS3. If you open your Documents folder in Windows, you will find a configuration file in the “Xenia” subdirectory, and although you can modify some parameters here, none of them will make a game that gives you problems suddenly start working well.
Also note that some options that would normally appear on the Xbox 360 dashboard (on the console) will now appear using their own windows in Xenia. For example, when you are in a game if you click to save game, a Xenia window will appear instead of the in-game option. Unlike when you do this on the console, here you will have to use the keyboard and mouse to modify the relevant options.
And this is all you need to know to play Xbox 360 games on PC using Xenia. It is expected that future versions of the emulator will improve compatibility with games and include a better way to display menus so that they appear within the game and not with separate Xenia windows. Each new version always brings new optimizations and greater compatibility, so if a game doesn’t work for you in the current version, when a new one is released it will always be worth trying again.
