Three months ago, Microsoft banned the downloading and installation of emulators on Xbox consoles. Developers have just found a way to make this possible again, but at a (small) price. We explain to you.
Remember: last April, Microsoft prevented the installation of popular emulators on Xbox consoles. A decision leaving on the floor the holders of a collection of retro games who had sometimes bought an Xbox precisely because it allowed it. It was all the more astonishing that the boss of Xbox himself pleaded for legal emulation.
There remains the solution to go through the xbox developer mode, but it requires somewhat complex manipulations and a payment of 19 dollars. No longer needed. A team has just developed a system to make installing emulators possible again on Xbox “commerce” consoles (the default mode). The advantage is that you don’t have to juggle between the two and manage your entire game library on a single interface, which is more practical.
How to Install Emulators on an Xbox Console
The developers offer the download of a pack containing the emulators Dolphin Emu (GameCube and Wii), XBSX2.0 (PlayStation 2), Xenia (Xbox 360) and RetroArch (for retro consoles like the Super Nintendo or the Megadrive, among others). Clicking on the button available at the end of this article will take you to a page of the “UWeaPons” store, an official platform for distributing Windows applications on Xbox.
There, you will have to make a small financial effort after clicking on “Official Page”, in reality a Patreon page. By means of $2 per month, you are whitelisted giving access to download the emulator pack. You will then receive a confirmation by email.
The team made sure that nothing was detected by Microsoft programs responsible for automatically blocking the distribution of emulators on the Xbox Store. And even if that were to happen, Sir Mangler, one of the project’s players, says they would be available again “within hours […] without too many problems”. Setting up access to the new pack for Patreon subscribers is automated. Lucid, SirMangler hopes the emulators will “survive at least 2 weeks, maybe longer”, but warns that they “could be deleted in 5 minutes. It’s a lottery”.