XBOX already has everything ready to bring Xbox 360 games to PC

The last Xbox update already includes compatibility for Xbox 360 games on Windows.

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The arrival of the first games from the Xbox original natively compatible with PC has not only been great news for gamers, but it has also opened the door to a possibility that has been on the table for years: the arrival of the Xbox 360 catalog to Windows through Microsoft’s official retrocompatibility.

Although Xbox has not yet announced this feature, the community has not taken long to analyze the update and the first findings suggest that the company has already laid the groundwork to make it a reality. In fact, several dataminers claim that support is already present in the system, although it has not been publicly activated yet.

Dataminers discover support for Xbox 360 games on PC

Just hours after the release of the first four Xbox original games for PC, different members of the community began to investigate how this new layer of compatibility worked. Among them is TheLunarixus, who claims to have confirmed that Microsoft is using an adapted version of XEO3, also known as Fission, the emulator that already makes it possible to run retrocompatible Xbox 360 games on Xbox One and Xbox Series.

This discovery goes a step beyond the simple emulation of Xbox titles. According to the analysis, this same compatibility layer already includes support for running Xbox 360 games, although the function remains disabled for the public.

The theory has gained even more strength after the team responsible for XWine1, an unofficial project focused on Xbox game compatibility on PC, managed to run some Xbox 360 titles using components of this new implementation. Although it is a technical demonstration and not a function available to users, the result suggests that the necessary infrastructure already exists.

For now, Microsoft has not confirmed when it will expand Xbox retrocompatibility on PC to Xbox 360 games, but recent statements by Jason Ronald already hinted that the company’s intention is to continue expanding the library of compatible titles. If these findings are officially confirmed, PC gamers could be getting closer to accessing a large part of the Xbox 360 retrocompatible catalog directly from the Xbox app for Windows.

Fun fact: The new OG Xbox Backwards Compatibility layer released by Microsoft for the PC is actually an Xbox 360 emulator running Xefu (the OG Xbox emu for the 360), confirmed by the XEX2/STFS magic and strings in the kernel such as “XENON KERNEL EXITING”. Crazy.

— Nathan (@TheLunarixus) July 22, 2026