 On the surface, there's nothing remarkable about what I'm doing right now. Until I do this! Ha ha! That's right, ladies and gentlemen. This Xbox you're looking at can run games from almost every major console ever made. And get this, there's absolutely no modding involved, it doesn't void your warranty, and it costs just 25 bucks. After seeing Modern Vintage Gamers' video showing how well the Series S works as an emulation platform, we knew we wanted to try it for ourselves. I mean, it couldn't be that easy, could it? Well, there are some little tricky bits, but after we show you the ins and outs, we think you could be up and running in as little as 20 minutes, giving you plenty of time to first check out our sponsor. Happy holidays from SeaSonic. No products to promote, and you can check out their stuff if you want, but there's literally nothing in my talking points. Hey, have a great holiday season from SeaSonic. The first thing you'll need to get emulation working on your Xbox One or Xbox Series machine, that's right, you don't even need the latest Xboxes to do this, is a Microsoft Developer Account. So we paid the minuscule $20 fee to be granted access and installed DevTools for Xbox, giving us the ability to load our own code into DevMode, a sandbox where unsigned code can run. The sandbox is a completely separate, secure operating environment that requires a system reboot to access, and that cannot run normal Xbox games or applications. What it does allow you to run though, is UWPs or Universal Windows Platform Apps. These are the same sort of packages that you see in the Windows App Store, and after downloading RetroArch's app from the website and plopping it into the Xbox web browser interface, we were off to the races. Kind of. Some consoles, particularly older ones like Super Nintendo, Game Boy, and N64, all just ran directly off of our external USB drive without any extra steps, but others, say PSP, GameCube, or Wii, were a bit more troublesome. I'm going to allow our resident emulation guru to explain. [♪ Music Plays. RetroArch is one of those programs that's super easy to use as long as you already know exactly what you're doing. The step that many people miss, causing untold frustration, is adding the missing BIOS files for each of the cores or emulators they want to run. The reason you need them is that some of the code required to emulate, say, a Wii game, is copyrighted by the console maker, the system menu, for example. So an emulator cannot be distributed with these pieces included, not legally anyway. Fortunately, there are ways to rip your own if you already own an old system, but you want to enjoy the convenience of emulation. So we definitely did that and didn't just download them from totally reputable websites. Yeah, that's that's that's yeah. Once we had them, it was as simple as pointing RetroArch to the correct directories so it could find those BIOS files like so. Out of the gate playing some good old fashioned PlayStation 1, I would have straight up no way of knowing that I'm not on like a powerful PC emulating this console. There are some idiosyncrasies, though. For example, we couldn't find an easy way to map the joystick. So we're stuck with the D-pad, which is obviously not ideal for a lot of PlayStation games. That's fine, because we want to play more than just this game. So to get to the menu, we're going to press both sticks at the same time. Let's have a look at what we've got here. Should we start with something really simple? Super Mario? I was in control. I was in control. I don't believe you. To be clear, there were some challenges. So let's fire up Super Monkey Ball 2. Cool. Cool. I always like black screen simulator. So compatibility ain't perfect. And even for games that work, there might be some strange behavior. Let's do Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4. Now this we're expecting to work, but this is a large game. And we found that anything over about a gig was hit or miss when loading off the external SSD. So we actually had to copy this game over to the internal SSD to get it to work properly. Okay, so this might be hanging, which would require like a lot of this is just trial and error. Yeah, that's fine. Sometimes it doesn't work. So we're just going to open it up by manually browsing to it. Sort of. So we go to load content, then we go to our external drive, which is Q. We go down here. Wait, change, Colin. It auto populated, I swear. I believe you. Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4.iso. And then Nintendo GameCube. Open file picker. But wait, normally we would like go find it, but we're not going to do that. We're going to just press cancel. And then there's a solid chance it'll load now. You saw me playing this game. I did see you playing this game at work. Why don't we try some of the more approachable things? PSP works really well if you go into the history there. Oh, hello. Good day, I'm Bruce. Obviously, you know, all the usual emulation bug bears exist. Like for example, it's got like squares and triangles and stuff. And I've got ABXY. So you just got to kind of do your best with it. I mean, it's running great. I mean, given that nobody uses universal Windows apps, like honestly kind of amazing. It runs this well. Yay, Colin fixed Tony Hawk Pro Skater. There was a setting in RetroArch that made it so that changes to the render we selected were not applying. So we're good now. Woo. Oh boy. I mean, well, we're something now. So let's try Wind Waker. Yeah, let's try Wind Waker. Oh, she chugs a little. She chugs a little, boys. Talk to the little girl or you can try and go. So see that house right there? They're looking right behind your noggin. I'm trying to go there. Hold on. I'm trying to play video games here, Colin. Can I just jump? Oh, yeah. Wee. Hey, Linus. Ah, got him. So it works. It works-ish. But even once you get the games launched, frankly, it is not all sunshine and rainbows. Crash Bandicoot, The Wrath of Cortex, for example. We got some weird purple flashes on loading screens. And in Mario Kart 64, there are some really weirdly rendered lines in the menu. But it's definitely playable. And for the $20 that this costs to do, I really don't see why you wouldn't add it to your Xbox. It makes this $300 console just that much more appealing. But the question is, what is Microsoft playing at here? Other than to just reinforce my arguments that Xboxes are just PCs now, why would Microsoft allow users to run unsigned code on their consoles for the relatively paltry sum of 20 bucks? To find out, we checked out the excellent talk from Tony Chen from Microsoft's security team. It is worth the hour to watch, guys. But if you don't have that much time, then you can still watch it, but at 2x speed. If that's still too much for you, then here's the summary. People have been hacking consoles ever since there was something to gain by doing so. And that thing to gain could be anything from saving a buck by pirating games to just unlocking the hardware so it can be used in unconventional ways. PlayStation 3 supercomputers, anyone? And I get it. People don't like being told what they can or can't do with their own hardware that they own. And they will void their warranties for reasons as trivial as wanting to use a different system theme on their iPhone. Whether a new system will be pwned is a matter of how many hours, not if it'll happen. Look at the Xbox 360. People wanted to play burned discs, straight up piracy. But the firmware in the DVD drive built into the console wouldn't allow you to read burned discs. The drive's ability to be modified was then locked by a grounded pin in the flash memory that was sealed inside the chip after manufacturing, disabling the ability to overwrite the firmware. Well, wouldn't you know it? Someone figured out how to locate exactly where that pin was within 0.1 millimeter on that little dime size chip. Then using a Dremel with an LED wired up to it, they would poke a hole at that precise point on the chip until the LED turned on, indicating that they'd hit the right point. That disabled the grounded write pin, enabling the ability to flash the drive with new firmware that tells the console a burned disc is legitimate and will then let the code run. This was aptly known as the kamikaze mod. I mean, man, the lengths nerds will go to to gain access to their hardware. It's hardcore, just like our merch. LTDStore.com. Security is so critical in the console business though, due to their entire business model. The so-called razor and blade model, where the hardware is sold at either slim margins or even at a loss that is quickly recouped by selling games at much higher margins. If you can't secure your hardware to prevent piracy, you're out of business. It's as simple as that. This, among other things, led to the downfall of the Sega Dreamcast in 1998. Within a year, that thing had been completely pwned, and developers don't want to release games for a console where they will be immediately pirated. No new content means no more sales. Let's bring it back though. Why does Microsoft allow just about anyone to run whatever code they want? Well, they figured out that if you give people an easier way to run their own code, they won't resort to more outlandish hacky ways of doing it. So then, has console hacking and game piracy been beaten so simply? Not quite, but admittedly Microsoft, and so has Sony for that matter, has taken a lot of the reward out of the attempts. Between the 360 and Xbox One generation, the hardware got much smaller and much more tightly integrated, narrowing the gaps in the armor on that side of things. And it was also during this time that system software updates became a normal part of the console experience. Once that happened, the ability for a manufacturer to quickly break exploits after they've been released, or even brick your console, made the risks not feel worthwhile for a lot of people. Then the last big nail in the coffin, in my opinion, is games. Developers have worked for years to make the online elements of a game, like multiplayer or community level libraries, an integral part of the experience. So there's a lot of games where you could pirate them, but you'll always feel like you're missing out. Combine that with better games delivery services, like Xbox Game Pass, and it looks like a pretty killer one-two punch. I mean, Valve figured out way back in the early 2000s that the answer to software piracy is to make the DRM more convenient than the piracy. And that is exactly what Microsoft has done here. For a reasonable monthly fee, you've got access to enough games to keep you glued to your couch pretty much 24 hours a day, and it even sorts out that whole community element of gaming. I mean, how many times have you and your buds gone to play some multiplayer something or other, only to realize that freaking Jeff doesn't own this game, and Smithy doesn't own that game, and neither of them feels like spending 60 bucks, so you can't all play together? Well, it sucks, but as long as you've all got Game Pass, well, now it's all good. Just like our sponsor is good. Thank you, Ruggable, for sponsoring today's video. Ruggable has a wide variety of patterns to fit any room, and one of their main features is that the rugs attach to their non-slip mats so they stay securely in place. The mat can be interchangeable with any other rug, so you can mix it up if you want to set certain moods. The rugs are spill- and stain-resistant and machine washable, and they're even safe for babies, pets, or anything else that makes its way onto the rug. One great way to use this rug is at your computer desk. It allows you to protect your floors, and you can save 10% today with offer code Linus10 at myruggable.com slash Linus10. Well, folks, if you liked that video, why not check out the video I did with Riley, where we tried out Android on a Nintendo Switch? Yes, my friends, it ain't quite totally dead, although Nintendo, even though that was a hardware thing, they did eventually fix it. So yeah, we'll have that in the end screen for you. Or if you want some more in-depth info on emulation performance on the Xbox Series S, go check out Modern Vintage Gamers video on the subject. We're gonna have that link down below as well.