On my last post about my experiences with the Series S I made a slight nod to emulation but I feel like this is such a huge plus to the new Microsoft consoles that a separate post is warranted.
Microsoft's general openness is what's allowing all of this to happen and while they make an effort to crack down on emulators hosted through the public Xbox store, it seems like they're mostly turning a blind eye to this.
Whilst the "proper" way of running emulators and homebrew on a newer Xbox console is through dev mode, I assure you it's not hard to find all of this available publicly and for free at all.
And I'm all for that. It makes the Xbox feel more open, more friendly to the user who wants to get the full potential out of their machine - it isn't Steam Deck level of openness where you have access to the entire operating system, but it's still many steps above Playstation or Nintendo.
Some things will have to be kept in mind here: I'm running these games off an external USB 2.0 hard drive, so stutters may happen and they're not fault of the emulators themselves.
What I usually do when I want to play a game is move it to the internal storage, which is also easy to do with publicly available homebrew software.
My first test was the PS2 with two games that have been notoriously hard to emulate in past years: Burnout 3 and Ratchet and Clank.
For years and years Burnout 3 would simply not render its skybox properly when run under hardware emulation, making it unplayable for most as software emulation of the PS2 is very heavy on the CPU.
Those issues seem to be fixed now with all the new changes to PCSX2. The version I'm running here is called AetherSX2 but this is not the same emulator available on Android.
For some reason, the devs decided to merge new PCSX2 code as AetherSX2, it works though, really damn well.
Some very light stuttering happens very rarely, but the big problem here was screen tearing. I'm sure there's a vsync option somewhere that might fix this, but on default settings with resolution set to 1080p upscaling, there is quite a bit of screen tearing.
However, it is still playable and with the PS2's price steadily rising I'd say this is one of the best ways to experience that console's library now.
After that I decided to try out Gamecube via the Dolphin core on Retroarch.
Unfortunately it was very laggy through remote play, the game itself ran just fine on my TV but was completely unplayable when viewed through my laptop's screen.
This is probably a RAM constraint as otherwise the game looks and runs fine.
Another game I tested without recording was Zelda Twilight Princess and the performance there was also stunning, with a 16:9 patch making the game look very modern.
After that was the Dreamcast's turn via the standalone Flycast emulator and the results here are also perfect.
Image quality looks pristine when set to 4x internal resolution and stuttering from the slow external hard drive is very rare.
I decided to try out Dead or Alive 2 for this because of a conversation I had with this game's director about Dead or Alive 3 being exclusive to the Xbox, where he told me he didn't regret the game being an exclusive, even if it would've definitely sold way more on other consoles.
Just felt funny seeing as this never came to the Xbox, whilst its sequel did. Doing some justice here.
Me: "Itagaki-san.
Considering the poor sales of the Xbox in Japan, do you have any regrets about releasing "Dead or Alive 3" only on the Xbox?
It's a great game nonetheless, but unfortunately I feel that it did not receive the love it deserved (due to its exclusivity)."
Itagaki: "I regret nothing, for that is also fate."
Quite badass for a simple answer.
Doesn't excuse how bad Devil's Third was :P
For my last test I lumped two fifth generation system together: The Saturn and PS1.
The PS1 is a way simpler system to emulate in modern times, so I didn't feel like testing it thoroughly was much of a necessity, but the Saturn is notorious for being hard to emulate.
For the PS1 I went with standalone Duckstation and game pre-caching (loading the entire game onto ram as to avoid stutters) and for the Saturn I went with Yabause for Panzer Dragoon Zwei and Beetle Saturn for Gouketsuji Ichizoku.
The reason for the change in cores was because Gouketsuji Ichizoku was asking for the RAM cart despite it being toggled on in the emulator settings, it worked fine on Beetle Saturn out of the box.
I tested a 2D game alongside Panzer Dragoon because the Saturn is notorious for its great selection of 2D hits, and for the PS1 I went with Crash Team Racing as that's a graphically impressive game and one of my most played games from my childhood.
In conclusion, I could upload many many more videos about emulation performance on the Series S, but I feel that with these more harder to run/graphically impressive games, it's good enough to understand how capable this machine is.
It's a shame that Gamecube didn't run well through remote play as I do not own a capture card, but there are many other videos out there showcasing what the Dolphin core can do on the Series X|S, with high profile and more recent titles such as Mario Galaxy 2 running flawlessly.
The emulation capabilities of this system were one of the major selling points for me and I can safely say that this aspect of the next generation Microsoft consoles did not let me down one bit.
I hope y'all have a great rest of the week, if you'll excuse me I'll go play some Shadow of The Colossus on my Xbox 😎.
Also shoutout to 