Xbox Emulation Makes Surprising Strides With WC Arena (August 20, 2022)

[ChrisReid]

Music_Guru tipped us off about some really exciting progress on the Xbox emulation front. I've known for years that people have been tinkering with this, but I had no idea that folks were this far along. illusion0001 over at Github has posted screenshots of Wing Commander Arena running on the Xenia emulator. The game apparently loads and allows you to go through the various game selection menus and even choose fighters, which is pretty impressive. Things crash when an actual game mode is launched, but this is still much farther into things than I would have expected. As the game still is not forward compatible with the Xbox One/Series X, this gives me some hope that something will persist in some form after Xbox 360 Live functionality is eventually discontinued. Until that point though, you can still buy the game for $9.99 and fire it up on you old vintage Xbox!

The menus work properly and the title screen shows demo gameplay at full speed.
However, once in-game, no matter which mode is selected the game will crash after a few seconds.

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Original update published on August 20, 2022