I play Xbox 360 games on my PC now, and Xenia has finally made it worth it

Published Oct 29, 2026, 6:00 PM EDT Abhinav pivoted from a career in banking to pursue his first love in writing. Even while working full-time, he continued contributing as an editor-at-large, a role he has held for more than 7 years. A lifelong tech enthusiast who has built three gaming and productivity powerhouse PCs since 2018, his passion for technology keeps him closely following the semiconductor industry, from NVIDIA and AMD to ARM. His MSc dissertation explored how artificial intelligence will reshape the future of work, reflecting his curiosity about the wider social impact of emerging technologies. I've always found it regrettable that plenty of games from what can only be described as the golden age of Xbox gaming never made it to PC. Microsoft has tried, of course, but none of them let me play Fable II on my Windows 11 desktop today. However, an open-source emulator that began development in early 2013 gives me and players like myself a way to do so. Xenia's Canary builds are far easier to play on than most people realize. All that I needed to do was drag my disc images onto the emulator window, and two of my favorite titles from the 360 era booted without any system files, controller mapping hassles, or configuration issues at twice the resolution scale and held up their original 30 fps cap, all without any signs of stuttering. I'm now convinced that it's the best way to revisit the 360 library on a PC. Forza Horizon meets 1440p on a QD-OLED Back to being a "puppy in a dog's world" in Colorado If there was any place I'd want to revisit first in the Forza Horizon world, it would be Colorado, where it all began. Forza Horizon was naturally my first pick to drag and drop into Xenia, and I found myself waiting a couple of minutes for setup, followed by at least half an hour of troubleshooting that my experience with other emulators had mentally prepared me for. And so, when the emulator window greeted me with the all-too-familiar Playground Games logo, I was a little shocked. After the first few minutes of driving around and almost losing track of time, I set the resolution scale to 2x in the configuration file, and the game rendered at a stunning 1440p, up from its original 720p and matching the native resolution of my QD-OLED monitor. It felt surreal to see a 14-year-old title run that way. Over a 30-second drive on Direct3D 12, CapFrameX logged an average of 30 FPS against the game's original cap, with 1% lows of 27.1 FPS and zero stutter. My Ryzen 5 7600X did most of the work, with its busiest thread peaking at 98% while the RTX 4070 Ti Super averaged 39% load. This almost made me rethink upgrading to the 9950X3D. Having finished Forza Horizon 6 only recently, Forza Horizon showed me what recent releases had been missing: it felt a lot less PG-13 by comparison. Rivals here have real personas. They're snarky; they challenge and provoke your silent protagonist, and Ramona Cravache calls you "a puppy in a dog's world" before you humble her in a Mustang in the next race, which, out of pure hubris, she decides to bet her truck on. The game truly feels like the better days of racing. Fable II finally renders the way it should Bowerstone with cozy, crackling fireplaces and snow Fable II is perhaps the hardest test I imagined Xenia would have to face. The community guides list black floors and blurry characters among the reported bugs, but to my surprise, neither showed up on my run. Bowerstone's cobblestones, the snow on its walls, the faces of the young characters rendered as cleanly at 1440p with zero post-processing, as though they'd found a home here. Over a 60-second walk, CapFrameX logged a 30 FPS average against the original cap, with 1% lows of 28.4 FPS and no stuttering across the entire run. Fable II was even steadier than Forza Horizon, and I didn't know I could expect that kind of performance from any game. With an additional layer of Lossless Scaling's LS1, the game is definitely something you can play to completion and enjoy in 2026. That being said, the higher resolution does expose the game's age in certain places, which, to be fair, is expected. Inside Murgo's wagon, the tabletop is a low-res texture that looks smeared, but that's because it is a 2008 asset showing more detail than it was made for, and not an emulator-produced artifact. What makes Xenia so great, really? Over a decade of progress, and a seamless experience Perhaps the most beautiful aspect of playing Xbox 360 titles on Xenia is that anyone can replicate everything I ran with a game they own and a PC that meets Xenia's requirements. I grabbed the Canary build from the project's official GitHub release page, extracted it, and dragged and dropped my disc image onto the window, which completed the installation. Xenia does not ask for a BIOS dump or Xbox 360 system files, which makes most other console emulators an absolute chore. The controller support is just as seamless as the rest of the process. Xenia communicates with gamepads through XInput, the same interface Windows games use for Xbox controllers, which is why my Xbox Elite Series 2 controller worked without a single remap, and every button registered from the get-go. The only thing I changed was something that I wanted to change. The build I used had no scaling option in its menu, so I opened the Xenia Canary configuration file, set draw_resolution_scale_x and draw_resolution_scale_y to 2, and saved the file. Everything else, including the Direct3D 12 renderers, stayed on the defaults. Xenia Xenia is an emulator that lets you play Xbox 360 games on your PC from ISO files. There's no better way to relive the Xbox 360 age If you've got an Xbox 360 gathering dust with a collection of games on your shelf, nothing's stopping you from giving those games another go on your PC for free. Xenia ran both of mine in a way that the original console never could at 2x resolution. All of this just showed me that while the Xbox 360 may be long gone from my entertainment setup, thanks to Xenia, the games that defined it don't have to be.