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.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.