Digital Foundry Got Windows 98 Games Running on Xbox Series X|S

Digital Foundry is testing Xbox again. This time, it managed to install Windows 98 on Xbox Series X|S and even play some classic games on it using DOSBox Pure, DOS games emulator, which had recently received support for Windows 98.

With the right stick on the Xbox controller substituting a mouse, Alex Battaglia could play Command and Conquer and Turok quite comfortably on Series X. Moreover, Quake 2 got "fancy lighting and baked radiosity just like the original." Battaglia says the system supports any Glide, Open GL, or Direct 3D titles.

There are several nuances to the whole setup. As Digital Foundry noted, emulating graphics hardware on an emulated Win98 OS means you need to install 3dfx drivers – "a bit of a headache." Another problem is that everything is emulated by the Xbox Series CPU, so rendering is slower than it would be on GPU.

The emulated CPU, however, is faster than it should be. For example, software-based rendering in Half-Life is about twice as fast as a real Pentium 2 at 450MHz. So, Battaglia says, the virtualized PC has the specs of a Pentium from circa 1995 but the raw speed of a 1.0 GHz Pentium 3.

As for Series S, when using software mode in Half-Life, Battaglia measured a five percent faster result on average with Series X. With OpenGL, Series X leads by around eight to ten percent.

Overall, Battaglia thinks all the limitations are worth it in the end when you can play such awesome old games on Xbox. 

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