Mere hours after Microsoft announced its Xbox Backward Compatibility on PC initiative, dataminers have discovered that the Xbox emulator in question isn’t an Xbox emulator—it’s actually an Xbox 360 emulator that is running Xefu, which is the same emulator that Xbox 360 hardware used to emulate original Xbox games.
If that sounds a bit too confusing to wrap your head around, let me put it this way: it’s an emulator inside an emulator. As spotted by True Trophies, this was originally revealed a couple of days ago on X by dataminer Lunarixus, who concluded that this “probably does confirm that yes Xbox 360 games will also be backwards compatible in the future.”
By combining Microsoft’s recently-released PC port of XeO3 with specific components of XWine1, SlimEra namely, it becomes possible to run dumped backwards-compatible Xbox 360 and Xbox Original games before they see an official PC release, with varying degrees of success pic.twitter.com/6eocCCT1cW
— XWine1 (@XWineOne) July 23, 2026
They can remove the “probably” from that statement at this point, though, as the team behind the Xbox One translation layer project known as XWine1 has already managed to run several original Xbox and Xbox 360 ROMs on Microsoft’s Xbox Backward Compatibility emulator “with varying degrees of success.”
Of course, the “varying degrees of success” part is a pretty huge sticking point, but just as Lunarixus predicted, it does mean that the emulator is more than capable of running Xbox 360 games, even though Microsoft has currently only released four original Xbox games through the Xbox Backward Compatibility on PC service.
Now, if we’re all being completely honest, this isn’t exactly surprising news. It’s nice to have this confirmed, but I think the majority of us assumed that Microsoft’s new Xbox PC emulator was paving the way for Xbox 360 games down the line.
It’s also nice to know that certain Xbox 360 games won’t have to stay trapped on console for eternity, as classics such as Lost Odyssey and Blue Dragon aren’t (officially) available on any other platform. Here’s hoping we get an announcement regarding Fable 2 relatively soon, as I’d love to see that one become more widely playable before Playground Games drops the Fable reboot next year.