on the surface there's nothing remarkable about what i'm doing right now
until i do this
that's right ladies and gentlemen this
xbox you're looking at can run games from almost every major console ever
made and get this there's absolutely no
modding involved it doesn't void your warranty and it costs just 25 bucks
after seeing modern vintage gamers videos showing how well the series s
works as an emulation platform we knew we wanted to try it for ourselves i mean
it couldn't be that easy could it
well there are some little tricky bits but after we show you the ins and outs we
think you could be up and running in as little as 20 minutes giving you plenty
of time to first check out our sponsor happy holidays from seasonic
no products to promote i mean you can check out their stuff if you want but
it's there's literally nothing in my talking points hey have a great holiday
season from seasonic
the first thing you'll need to get emulation working on your xbox one or
xbox series machine that's right you don't even need the latest xboxes to do
this is a microsoft developer account so
we paid the minuscule 20 fee to be granted access and installed dev tools
for xbox giving us the ability to load our own code into dev mode a sandbox
where unsigned code can run the sandbox is a completely separate secure
operating environment that requires a system reboot to access and that cannot
run normal xbox games or applications what it does allow you to run though is
uwps or universal Windows platform apps
these are the same sort of packages that you see in the Windows app store and
after downloading retroarch's app from the website and plopping it into the
xbox web browser interface we were off to the races
kind of some consoles particularly older ones
like super nintendo game boy and n64
all just ran directly off of our external usb drive without any extra
steps but others say psp gamecube or wii
were a bit more troublesome i'm going to allow our resident emulation guru to
explain
retroarch is one of those programs that's super easy to
use as long as you already know exactly what you're doing
the step that many people miss causing untold frustration
is adding the missing BIOS files for each of the cores or emulators they want
to run the reason you need them is that some of the code required to emulate say
a wii game is copyrighted by the console maker the system menu for example
so an emulator cannot be distributed with these pieces included not legally
anyway fortunately there are ways to rip your own if you already own an old
system but you want to enjoy the convenience of emulation
so we definitely did that and didn't
just download them from totally reputable websites yeah that's that's
yeah once we had them it was as simple as pointing retroarch to the correct
directories so it could find those BIOS files like so
out of the gate playing some good old-fashioned playstation one
i would have straight up no way of knowing that i'm not on like a powerful
pc emulating this console there are some idiosyncrasies though uh for example we
couldn't find an easy way to map the joystick so
we're stuck with the d-pad which is obviously not ideal for a lot of
playstation games that's fine because we want to play more than just this game so
to get to the menu we're going to press both sticks at the same time let's have
a look at what we've got here should we start with something really simple super
super mario
i was in control i was in control i don't believe you to be clear
there were some challenges so let's fire up super monkey ball 2.
cool cool i always like black screen
simulator so compatibility ain't perfect
and even for games that work there might be some strange behavior let's do tony
hawk pro skater 4. now this we're expecting to work but this is a large
game and we found that anything over about what was about a gig
uh yeah around a gig yeah was hit or miss when loading off the external SSD
so we actually had to copy this game over to the internal SSD to get it to
work properly okay so this might be
hanging which would require like a lot of this is just
trial and error yeah sometimes it doesn't work so we're just
going to open it up by manually browsing to it
sort of so we'll go to load content then we go to our external drive which
is q we go down here wait jade's colin
it auto-populated i swear i believe you tony hawk pro skater 4. iso
and then nintendo gamecube open file picker but
wait normally we would like go find it
but we're not going to do that we're going to just press cancel and then
there's a solid chance it'll load now you saw me playing this game i did see
you playing this game at work why don't we try some of the more
approachable things uh psp works really well if you go into the history there oh
hello good day i'm bruce obviously you
know all the usual emulation bug bears exist like for example that's got like
squares and triangles and stuff and i've got a b x y so you just got to kind of
do your best with it i mean it's running great i mean given that nobody uses
universal Windows apps like obviously kind of amazing it runs this
well yay colin fixed tony hawk pro skater there was a setting in retro arch
that made it so that changes to the renderer we selected were not applying
uh so so we're good now oh boy i mean well we're something now
so let's try uh yeah let's try windwaker
oh she chugs a little she chugs the little boys talk to the little girl or
you can try and go so see that house right there are you looking right behind
your noggin i'm trying to go there hold on i'm trying to play video games here
colin can i just jump oh yeah
hey blindness ah got um
so it works it works ish
but even once you get the games launched
frankly it is not all sunshine and rainbows crash bandicoot the wrath of
cortex for example we got some weird purple flashes on loading screens and in
mario kart 64 there are some really weirdly rendered lines in the menu but
it's definitely playable and for the 20 dollars that this costs to do i really
don't see why you wouldn't add it to your xbox it makes this 300 console just
that much more appealing but
the question is what is microsoft playing at here other than to just
reinforce my arguments that xboxes are just pcs now why would microsoft allow
users to run unsigned code on their consoles for the relatively paltry sum
of 20 bucks to find out we checked out the excellent talk from tony chen from
microsoft's security team it is worth the hour to watch guys but if you don't
have that much time then you can still watch it but at 2x speed if that's still
too much for you then here's the summary people have been hacking consoles ever
since there was something to gain by doing so and that thing to gain could be
anything from saving a buck by pirating games to just unlocking the hardware so
it can be used in unconventional ways playstation 3 supercomputers anyone and
i get it people don't like being told what they can or can't do with their own
hardware that they own and they will void their warranties for reasons as
trivial as wanting to use a different system theme on their iphone whether a
new system will be pwned is a matter of how many hours not
if it'll happen look at the xbox 360. people wanted to play burned discs
straight up piracy but the firmware in the dvd drive built into the console
wouldn't allow you to read burned discs the drive's ability to be modified was
then locked by a grounded pin in the flash memory that was sealed inside the
chip after manufacturing disabling the ability to overwrite the firmware well
wouldn't you know it someone figured out how to locate exactly where that pin was
within 0.1 millimeter on that little dime size chip then using a dremel with
an led wired up to it they would poke a hole at that precise point on the chip
until the led turned on indicating that they'd hit the right point that disabled
the grounded right pin enabling the ability to flash the drive with new
firmware that tells the console a burned disk is legitimate and will then let the
code run this was aptly known as the
kamikaze mod i mean man the lengths nerds will go to to gain access to their
hardware it's hardcore just like our merch ltdstore.com
security is so critical in the console business though due to their entire
business model the so-called razer and blade model where the hardware is sold
at either slim margins or even at a loss
that is quickly recouped by selling games at much higher margins if you
can't secure your hardware to prevent piracy you're out of business it's as
simple as that this among other things led to the downfall of the sega
dreamcast in 1998. within a year that
thing had been completely pwned and developers don't want to release games
for a console where they will be immediately pirated no new content means
no more sales let's bring it back though why does microsoft allow just about
anyone to run whatever code they want well they figured out that if you give
people an easier way to run their own code they won't resort to more
outlandish hacky ways of doing it so then
has console hacking and game piracy been beaten so simply
not quite but admittedly microsoft and so has sony
for that matter has taken a lot of the reward out of the attempts between the
360 and xbox one generation the hardware
got much smaller and much more tightly integrated narrowing the gaps in the
armor on that side of things and it was also during this time that system
software updates became a normal part of the console experience
once that happened the ability for a manufacturer to quickly break exploits
after they'd been released or even brick your console made the risk not feel
worthwhile for a lot of people then the last big nail in the coffin in my
opinion is games developers have worked for years to make the online elements of
a game like multiplayer or community level libraries an integral part of the
experience so there's a lot of games where you could pirate them but you'll
always feel like you're missing out combine that with better games delivery
services like xbox game pass and it looks like a pretty killer one-two punch
i mean valve figured out way back in the early 2000s that the answer to software
piracy is to make the drm more convenient than the piracy and that is
exactly what microsoft has done here for a reasonable monthly fee you've got
access to enough games to keep you glued to your couch pretty much 24 hours a day
and it even sorts out that whole community element of gaming i mean how
many times have you and your buds gone to play some multiplayer
something or other only to realize that freaking jeff doesn't own this game and
smithy doesn't own that game and neither
of them feels like spending 60 bucks so you can't all play together well it
sucks but as long as you've all got game pass well now it's all good
just like our sponsor is good thank you ruggable for sponsoring
today's video rockable has a wide variety of patterns to fit any room and
one of their main features is that the rugs attach to their non-slip mat so
they stay securely in place the mat can be interchangeable with any other rug so
you can mix it up if you want to set certain moods the rugs are spill and
stain resistant and machine washable and they're even safe for babies pets or
anything else that makes its way onto the rug one great way to use this rug is
at your computer desk it allows you to protect your floors and you can save 10
today with offer code Linus 10 at myruggable.com Linus 10. well folks if
you liked that video why not check out the video i did with riley where we
tried out Android on a nintendo switch yes my friends it ain't quite totally
dead although nintendo even though that was a hardware thing they did eventually
fix it so yeah we'll have that in the end screen for you or if you want some
more in-depth info on emulation performance on the xbox series s go
check out modern vintage gamers video on the subject we're gonna have that linked
down below as well