The maker speaks of a painful procedure, but the result is definitely there. Windows 98 can be brought to the Xbox Series X via developer mode, and emulator. – including virtualized 3dfx voodoo accelerator.
It’s cumbersome, as Alex Battaglia, video producer, and tinkerer at Digital Foundry, explains in his detailed article describing his current project. The Xbox Series X can be converted into a Windows 98 PC for vintage games with some effort. “But be prepared for a lot of installation work, which is a bit of a painful process,” says Battaglia.
The first step: Thanks to a recent update, the DOSBox Pure emulator based on the Retro Arch emulation system can also support Windows 98. The maker describes the next step as a “surreal moment”: installing the 24-year-old operating system on the next-gen console. “That must be the future Bill Gates envisioned at the time,” said Battaglia.
But here’s the biggest hurdle: The only way to get and download any software, including Windows 98 itself, is through RetroArch’s support for disk ISOs. However, since it was not possible to use the Xbox drive here, the tinkerer opted for an FTP approach to transfer the ISOs from the PC to the console.
If you’ve gone through all these hurdles, you’re basically faced with a vintage PC with a full installation of the Windows 98 operating system — unfortunately with a different limitation. RetroArch does not currently support a USB mouse, moving the cursor must be done with the right stick on the Xbox controller. But very practical for use as a vintage machine: with DOSBox Pure, a virtualized 3dfx Voodoo accelerator with 12 MB RAM also ends up on the Xbox Series X.
This means that any Open GL or Direct 3D game can be brought to the console. At this point it’s worth looking at the whole structure: the Xbox CPU emulates the hardware first, then the operating system on this hardware, then the API and the driver layer. “It’s a huge pile of emulations and abstractions on top of a workload that CPUs aren’t capable of,” says Battaglia. The Xbox emulation’s 3D acceleration performance is, therefore, more comparable to the first Voodoo 1 map.
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