If this ever comes to fruition wouldn’t it be cool, if not completely necessary, if they also pushed out an update to our current UI with these capabilities? If MS is making every potato on earth a competition friendlier xbox I think they should start with actual existing xboxes their very loyal fanbase currently owns. There is no reason any of us should be forced into another $600+ machine when they are making Galaxy Fold 2’s, iPhone 7s etc with new xbox UIs.
Xbox updated the article and changed the picture
Ok interesting!! I 1st saw it and I thought it said Stream.
I wonder if with this next Xbox being a pc and with it and ps6 being more powerful if we can hit framerates over 120? I usually buy a new tv at the start of each gen and that may make me go for a monitor if we can get games like hollow knight over 200 fps
Same, at least it pretty much confirms Steam on Xbox hardware.
So Jez just wrote his owm piece about this
This is pretty much the most important part
Windows Central understands that traditional Win32 will be the preferred development environment for the next mainline Xbox consoles, with Xbox One/Series X|S “ERA” environment gradually phased out. Where that leaves our existing library of Xbox ERA games remains to be seen, but it seems emulation is one avenue Microsoft is exploring for backward compatibility and game preservation.
Does windows central or the author even know and understand what the difference here is? Why do ERA games need to be emulated?
Jez didn’t mention anything technical, just the legal hurdles of maybe getting all the current PCs and PC Handhelds access to those emulated games.
I myself thought the current set up that allowed for both versions to be ready at the same time was the play. But this feels like they’re restarting their SDK again, but going with one that already has a kot of documentation.
They are not restarting their SDK. Win32 was always there from 1993 to now. Xbox dev environment is not that different afaik.
Yep as far as I recall, the GDK merge for late One generation / the Series generation was to get Xbox and the PC store using the same UWP format essentially (no idea if that’s still the name) while Steam and other stores use the more traditional Windows formats.
Given the UWP format was meant to be the future Windows format (Universal Windows Platform is in the name) at one point, it was heavily integrated into Windows 8 onwards (and I think for some 7 stuff) so while Microsoft may have not decided to force the format on everyone I think it’s still pretty dominant for Windows store apps and Microsoft apps (from the period at least).
So agreed, it’s very likely Windows (or an Xbox skin of Windows, like the Windows-lite version they currently run) would always support UWP, the traditional Windows formats (as they’ll likely always be around) and only the Xbox-hardware specific parts of UWP (guessing particularly early One) and the pre-One games (already run via emulators anyway) would need emulating…
I’ll leave it to someone more familiar with the exact specifics to confirm though - that’s just what I remember last time I took a look
It seems different enough that the updated version lost some compatibility with Capcoms MT engine. So I was thinking that leaving behind the current dev set up could cause similar issues.
Edit: or was that a capcom issue?
I mean lots of stuff is not different for game code between UWP and Win32. DirectX is a Win32 API after all and UWP uses the same language and toolchain for shaders. Storage, the host window and networking is different iirc but multiplatform devs should have abstraction layers for this anyway.
Oh yeah internally the code will be very similar, I meant more when compiled / packaged as thought that was the biggest UWP difference.
But agreed either way, the differences aren’t massive given Windows runs it all anyway and Xbox OS is meant to be a cut down Windows.
I imagine they can quite easily run an Xbox/360 emulator plus tweaks to UWP layer to run One/Series games on Windows and Windows on a custom PC build like the current Xbox really is, but it’ll be the other bits that are the challenge.
Making it simple for users, keeping it secure and licensing are probably bigger issues that compatibility - plus how to handle incompatible games (such as VR only ones, although think Steam can help there having done so with the Steam Deck) are probably the biggest issues…
WinDurango on PC is able to boot up and run some Xbox One games, so if a random dev is able to do that on his spare time I would assume that MS’s engineers would be able to pull it more easily. And since Xbox BC and Xbox 360 BC can run on Xbox One and Series, I would then assume those would also run in that compatibility layer, or at least that’s how I see it.
I highly doubt MS will start anew for their next gen system, and if it is more PC than before and more tightly integrated with Windows, you can bet they’ll figure something out and most likely have already been working on it for some time.
Getting all games available on PC would make the transition possible for people who want to move away from consoles and at the same time also possible in countries where the only available Xbox might be a third party OEM console from someone like Asus or Lenovo for example. If they can’t pull this off ain’t no way people are going to stick with them and they know it. It’s a move that’s necessary in order to keep your current userbase and also hope to get more users.
I agree, with their history with this so far, I have to imagine that they can pull this off.