New project brings us one step closer to Xbox One emulation

A new community project announced earlier this month is finally giving emulation fans a potential way to play Xbox One games on Windows PCs, overcoming one of the biggest hurdles for console emulation in recent memory.

XWine1 isn’t an emulator; rather, it’s a translation layer that takes Xbox software and “translates” it to run on a Windows PC. This is similar to how the Proton compatibility layer works on the Steam Deck, taking Windows titles and making them compatible with the Deck’s Linux-based OS.

The XWine1 team said in its initial announcement on September 8 that only six games were fully playable, including Minecraft: Xbox One Edition, Limbo, Peggle 2, Undertale, and Sonic Mania. Since then, other games have been shown to at least partially work with the layer. They can get past the intros in Forza Horizon 2, for example, and can reach the menu for Forza Horizon 3.

Introducing XWine1, an Xbox One translation layer for Windows PCs.
Currently six games are fully playable, with others reaching logos and in-game. More news to come! pic.twitter.com/Du6puJz6Dj

— XWine1 (@XWineOne) September 8, 2024

For a long time, it was impossible to emulate Xbox One games because it had great security, according to YouTuber Modern Vintage Gamer, who posted a video testing XWine1. (You can watch it below.) Before this year, there was no known kernel exploit for the console, but that changed with Collateral Damage. Now, users can dump Xbox One game files and decrypt them to make them available to view and possibly play outside the console itself. XWine1 can theoretically work with any file that has been dumped and decrypted.

The project, as you can imagine, is still in the early stages of development and isn’t available for public download. When it is ready, the developers say it’ll likely be open source.

There are plenty of Xbox One exclusives it can potentially make playable, including Halo 5: Guardians. Granted, the Xbox Series X and S are backward compatible with Xbox One games, so console exclusives like Guardians aren’t lost forever regardless of if the XWine1 team can pull this off. Still, this is a huge move in the emulation community, and great for game preservation in the event that these games lose modern console or PC support.