The 7th generation of console wars was a huge turning point as Microsoft managed to take a lead in releasing the Xbox 360 earlier than its rival Sony’s PlayStation 3 (R.I.P CELL and everything it leads to, honestly). The same generation also started the beginning of the Internet-augmented console gaming ecosystem with things like trophies and achievements, as well as “one profile for every online game”, online stores, and more.
And that’s in 2006 – 19 years ago.
While Microsoft itself has been avid in supporting backward compatibility in the latest consoles, the older titles are still frankly, “console exclusives”. And with cross platform releases being the norm in modern day gaming, surely there’s a certain group of people ever hoping that they can play Xbox 360 games on PC, not through emulators (There’s aren’t many, and those that does suck), but natively as a PC port.
Thanks to some godly software devs and engineers, the XenonRecomp tool is here to save the day and ready to preserve some games.
Available right now on GitHub, XenonRecomp essentially turns Xbox 360 executables (typically XEX files) into C++ code which can then be recompiled into any platform desired that is x86-based so yeah, no ARM for now.
The original Xenon processor’s architecture implements 3 PPC via the PowerPC instruction set created by IBM. Therefore, the tool directly converts everything it come across into x86 but not in a reverse engineered sense as most outputs are not human-readable (Assembly maniacs can challenge this otherwise).
Assuming that one can understand how to use the tool and start porting X360 titles, the result is quite the improvement with DirectX 12-based APIs, ultra-wide aspect ratio support, high FPS toggles, and more – depending on the guy’s ambition during the porting process.
If you want a more thorough and simpler explanation of XenonRecomp, check out the video by Modern Vintage Gamer here.
The official public release of the tool was last week and due to it being pretty new, it is important to keep expectations in check as they have stated many things to be iron out such as adding the rest of the PPC instructions in addition to the usual debugging and error handling issues.
But hey, Gears of War 1/2/3 on PC, soonTM.
