this post was submitted on 21 May 2025
49 points (93.0% liked)
PC Gaming
11717 readers
203 users here now
For PC gaming news and discussion. PCGamingWiki
Rules:
- Be Respectful.
- No Spam or Porn.
- No Advertising.
- No Memes.
- No Tech Support.
- No questions about buying/building computers.
- No game suggestions, friend requests, surveys, or begging.
- No Let's Plays, streams, highlight reels/montages, random videos or shorts.
- No off-topic posts/comments, within reason.
- Use the original source, no clickbait titles, no duplicates. (Submissions should be from the original source if possible, unless from paywalled or non-english sources. If the title is clickbait or lacks context you may lightly edit the title.)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
why would an xbox that runs an x86_64 architecture need a translation layer to run Windows binaries? This sounds like the next xbox is going to be a fixed hardware Windows PC with a custom interface replacement and probably all the unnecessary services ripped out of it.
This is based on my partial understanding of the xbox architecture. I suspect that there is a difference between full fat Windows and the xbox OS. So certain function calls (required by Steam) are not supported by xbox OS. So it won't be a traditional layer like WINE or Proton. Just enough for certain gamestore applications to run (Epic?).
I hope for this too. But how will traditional Xbox games run if it's just Windows? Will it have a built-in emulator running on top of Windows? Also, it will invite people to hack the device since it's a standard Windows OS. I doubt MS wants their next xbox to be so open, given their history regarding MS Store.
It doesn't need a translation layer, but it does already use a hypervisor even for running native games. It's how Microsoft guarantees every single bit of executable code is authorized.