Microsoft officially launched console backwards compatibility for PC last week, bringing over a handful of original Xbox titles to the PC platform for the first time. Now, evidence suggests that Xbox 360 titles will soon be supported too.

According to a new report from Tom’s Hardware, the backwards compatible releases shipped with a native x86 version of Microsoft’s Xbox 360 emulator. Modders quickly discovered that the PC versions of the newly released OG Xbox titles were running inside Xe03, the same emulator used for backwards compatibility on Xbox One and Xbox Series consoles. This discovery was further backed up by dataminer findings shared by TheLunarixus, confirming that the PC packages contain both the 360 emulator and the OG Xbox emulator nested inside it.

With Xe03 now running natively on PC, modders have already begun loading Xbox 360 executables directly into the emulator with promising results. Early tests have seen titles like Plants vs Zombies, Steins Gate, Fuzion Frenzy and Midnight Club Los Angeles booting with varying degrees of stability. This opens the door for major Xbox 360 exclusives such as Gears of War 2 and 3, Fable 2 and Fable 3 and many more console-only titles to finally make their way to PC in the future, either through official releases or community driven projects.

Microsoft has promised to bring more backwards compatible games to PC over time, but it has not yet announced plans for Xbox 360 support. However, the fact that the emulation tech is already in place shows that Xbox 360 titles will be making their way over to PC in the near future.

KitGuru Says: There are a ton of exclusives from the original Xbox era and the Xbox 360 era that never came to PC. With official emulation tools in place, that should soon change. Even if a game isn't officially supported in the backwards compatibility program, there is a chance that those with enough know-how will be able to run unsupported games through Microsoft's own emulator. 

Over its many years of development, we’ve seen the PlayStation 3 emulator RPCS3 breeze past plenty of major milestones: including allowing for the injection of new post-effects such as AMD’s FSR while continually reducing the number of unsupported titles. Furthering these efforts, the team have revealed that 75% of the entire PS3 library is now fully playable through the emulator.

In going to the project’s official site, users can find a full compatibility list of titles, showcasing which games are supported by RPCS3 and whether to expect any issues.

Split into 5 tiers of support, each game is placed into one of the following categories:

1. Nothing (Games that don't initialize properly, not loading at all and/or crashing the emulator)
2. Loadable (Games that display a black screen with a framerate on the window's title)
3. Intro (Games that display image but don't make it past the menus)
4. Ingame (Games that either can't be finished, have serious glitches or have insufficient performance)
5. Playable (Games that can be completed with playable performance and no game breaking glitches)

As of now, across the PlayStation 3’s more-than 3500 games, 75.33% are considered to be playable, with 22.93% achieving ‘ingame’ status. At this point, very few titles suffer from major issues, with just 1.71% still stuck in the ‘intro’ stage and 0.03% only being loadable. Like we reported back in 2021, a total of 0% of the PS3 library remains in the ‘nothing’ stage.

Speaking of 2021, back then, the compatibility list looked quite a bit different, with around 63% of games being ‘playable’, 30% reaching ‘ingame’ and nearly 6% stuck at the intro.

With just how much momentum RPCS3 has seen over the years, there will hopefully come a time in which 100% of the PS3’s library will be fully playable. We will have to wait and see how long it takes.

KitGuru says: How often do you use emulators for gaming? Are you impressed with RPCS3’s progress over the years? Let us know down below.

Over the past couple years, we’ve seen a great deal of work and effort being put into various emulation projects, with one of the most notable being ShadPS4 – recently being updated to allow for online play without the need for PlayStation Plus. Looking ahead a generation however, great strides are already being made regarding PS5 emulation, with the SharpEmu project recently hitting a new milestone.

Available to download via Github, SharpEmu is described as “an experimental PlayStation 5 emulator for Windows, Linux and macOS”. Currently in its “early stages of development” the project is focused entirely on emulating PS5 titles, being “developed from scratch in C#.”

As with most emulator projects, SharpEmu has seen a great deal of improvements in a relatively short amount of time. Recently, the emulator was able to boot up the relatively basic title ‘Dreaming Sarah’ while also showing progress for the likes of Bluepoint’s Demon’s Souls Remake.

Since then however, the project has been making strides, with the latest update bringing in a working UI; audio/music; PS5 DualSense support and more.

As with all emulator projects, it will likely be many years before SharpEmu is able to be used by the general public as an actual fully-featured PS5 emulator. Still, their current progress is highly encouraging. Hopefully Sony does not try to get involved as it continues to improve.

Discuss on our Facebook page HERE.

KitGuru says: What do you think of SharpEmu so far? How long before the project is ready to be fully embraced by PC players? What PS5 games would you want to see supported? Let us know down below.

Over the years RPCS3 has become perhaps the most complete and fleshed out game emulator around, with the PlayStation 3 emulation software supporting pretty much every single game from the platform at this point. Of course, as with all such software, it isn’t flawless. That said, the latest update to RPCS3 makes running your 7th-gen titles even more seamless.

Taking to Twitter to make the announcement, the official RPCS3 team unveiled their latest update to the PS3 emulation software, writing: “Games now automatically configure themselves with the RPCS3 Wiki settings. Plug and play – no configuration. Playing PS3 games has never been so easy.”

For the uninitiated, the RPCS3 wiki page features game-specific tweaks and toggles recommended in order to make for the best overall experience. While users could always apply these changes themselves on a game-by-game basis, the update should allow for pretty much a one-click solution for near-complete seamlessness.

Explaining how this works exactly, the team stated “When you boot a game, it uses the settings defined in your global configuration, plus the wiki database value overrides. If you have a custom config set on that game, it only uses that instead. When creating a custom config, you can create it based on the database settings.”

As mentioned, RPCS3 is easily one of the most impressive emulation projects around, especially due to the awkward and unique architecture of the PS3’s hardware making such an endeavour that much more difficult to crack.

Luckily the RPCS3 team appear committed to making the emulator the best that it can be (and thankfully Sony does not appear interested in taking the project down).

KitGuru says: Have you checked out the emulator before? How big of a deal is this latest update to you? Let us know down below.