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Microsoft Operating Systems Software Windows XBox (Games) Build Entertainment Games

Microsoft Takes a Big Step Towards Putting Xbox Games On Windows (arstechnica.com) 87

Posted by BeauHD from the long-time-coming dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica, written by Peter Bright: Ever since the first Xbox was released, an obvious question has been hanging in the air: Microsoft already owns one of the premier gaming platforms, the PC, and both the original Xbox and the current Xbox One are more or less PCs anyway, so when is Microsoft going to bring the two together and let us play Xbox games on Windows? With the new Windows 10 builds, it looks like the company is taking some big steps in that direction. Microsoft has put big chunks of the Xbox infrastructure into Windows 10. This starts right from the moment you download the game: it's coming from the Xbox distribution servers, not the usual ones for Store apps. The game package itself uses a format called .xvc, which is used for Xbox One games, and there are PowerShell commands to work with these .xvc files and install .xvc games. Microsoft Gaming Services includes portions of this Xbox infrastructure; it includes a couple of drivers ("Microsoft Gaming Filesystem Driver" and "Microsoft Gaming Install Filter Driver"), along with a number of libraries that provide Xbox APIs.

The last few Windows 10 preview builds have included some vague instructions from Microsoft to install a special edition of a game, State of Decay, and report any problems with the process. There are no problems with playing the game but, rather, problems with installing and launching it. The instructions didn't give any indication as to why or what to look for. Naturally, people have been taking a closer look to see what's special about State of Decay and figure out why Microsoft is having Windows Insiders test it. Nazmus Khandaker, Rafael Rivera, and the pseudonymous WalkingCat have been poking around both the special edition of State of Decay and a helper application called Microsoft Gaming Services that insider machines are running. Brad Sams wrote up his findings. [...] The State of Decay package does nonetheless contain PC-oriented elements. In particular, it tries to install and update the DirectX runtime during its setup. We the users don't seem to be at the stage of simply running Xbox games unmodified on our PCs, or at least, not yet. But it looks as if the groundwork is being laid. The strange preview of a 2020 Windows release looks like it contains even more of this infrastructure, with signs of a layer to support Xbox's Direct3D variant on PC. "Microsoft could go the whole hog and simply make a Windows 10 PC with a suitable hardware spec into an Xbox that can play any Xbox game," writes Bright, adding: "it might just be there as a simple option for developers to enable if they choose."
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Microsoft Takes a Big Step Towards Putting Xbox Games On Windows More

Microsoft Takes a Big Step Towards Putting Xbox Games On Windows

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  • ARRRRR (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Oh the piracy!

  • The Console Advantage. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Tuesday February 26, 2019 @09:41AM (#58181906)

    The Console has one major advantage over the PC. Uniform Balanced Hardware.
    Game makers know how fast the system is, how much RAM, what type of RAM. The Video Chips used.... A game made for the platform tends to run much better then on a PC with much higher specs in most areas. Because there is code that is needed to account for dealing with different drivers for a set of hardware. When a PC is built, they will often get the Expensive Video Card, but cheap on on RAM, or get a slow drive. Hardware makers don't make it easy for most people to make informed decisions. Core i3, i5, i7, i9 6th, 7th, 8th gen? Sure 8th Gen i9 is probably the fastest, but it is wicked expensive. But am I better off with the 8th gen i5 or a 7th Gen i7? Then you build something with a random bottle neck that will slow down the game further.

    • Or you install a bad driver which can turn your 20th gen i57 into a toaster oven.

      Still, console games suck. So there's that.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Luthair ( 847766 )
      Its not quite uniform anymore, there are at least 2 different hardware configurations from both Sony & MS. Having started down this road I anticipate that there won't be a hard break over generations either, and new games will support the old hardware (at least pro/x) for longer.

    • That's where knowing th3 Xbox has a ryzen variant and an rx580 variant comes into play. Ryzen R5-1600x and rx580 would probably be best maybe even an R7-1700x or 2nd gen I guess. The Xbox however does have more CU's than the 580.

    • The Console has one major advantage over the PC. Uniform Balanced Hardware. Game makers know how fast the system is, how much RAM, what type of RAM. The Video Chips used.... A game made for the platform tends to run much better then on a PC with much higher specs in most areas. Because there is code that is needed to account for dealing with different drivers for a set of hardware. When a PC is built, they will often get the Expensive Video Card, but cheap on on RAM, or get a slow drive. Hardware makers don't make it easy for most people to make informed decisions. Core i3, i5, i7, i9 6th, 7th, 8th gen? Sure 8th Gen i9 is probably the fastest, but it is wicked expensive. But am I better off with the 8th gen i5 or a 7th Gen i7? Then you build something with a random bottle neck that will slow down the game further.

      This. It's basically the same reason macs are thought of as being generally better for graphics type stuff. Because macs have set hardware compared to the myriad pc options they crash less. Or at least used to, macs seem just as crash happy nowadays but I suspect that's a different issue.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        This. It's basically the same reason macs are thought of as being generally better for graphics type stuff. Because macs have set hardware compared to the myriad pc options they crash less. Or at least used to, macs seem just as crash happy nowadays but I suspect that's a different issue.

        No, It's because MacOS has support for color correction in the OS itself, so applying all the ICC profiles means applications inherit the color correction automatically.

    • Re:The Console Advantage. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mjwx ( 966435 ) on Tuesday February 26, 2019 @10:12AM (#58182046)

      The Console has one major advantage over the PC. Uniform Balanced Hardware.

      The 90's called, they want their excuses back.

      That hasn't been an advantage for consoles in a long time. Drivers, engines and interfaces have improved to the point where PC games are hardware agnostic. Doesn't matter if you have an AMD or Intel, Nvidia or ATI. ASUS or MSI.

      OTOH, Console hardware being uniform is a huge problem because if one console has a major design fault, they all have them and it's not like that's a rare thing (RROD, YLOD). It also is outdated by the time of it's release. The Xbox One uses a Radeon 7000 series chipset, that was released in 2012 and superceded by the R8000 in 2013, we're currently up to GCN 5th gen of Radeon GPU's whilst the Xbox is still using the GCN 1st gen arch. It's hardware uniformity has become more of a curse.

      • It is still an issue. While these Drivers, engine and interfaces are much better then the 1990's where a PC isn't a crashing mess anymore.

        Some hardware makers will fall back to the windows default driver, while really not fully supporting them. Even with good drivers, different devices have different features. So while they may work on the driver, the special features are often not utilized because the game may not be coded to use it, so it will fall back.

        However what people really fail to understand is b

        • > We are running $2k PC's to run games are nearly the same quality as a $400 console.

          Consoles at a shity 30 fps is NOT the same quality as PC's running a silky smooth 60 or 120 fps!

          Also, it depends on the console. There is a vast difference between The Switch, PS4, and PS4 Pro performance and quality.

          Lastly, games with crappy frame rates such as the original vs remastered Dark Souls also matter.

          --
          Only a blind fool thinks a crappy 24 fps is "cinematic" for stuttering camera pans.

      • The 90's called, they want their excuses back. .

        I'd definitely better than it used to be. But you're forgetting the simplest challenge: extremely wide differences in raw performance capabilities between client machines. That's a real challenge for PC developers, because while you want to target the minimum level feasible hardware, gamers with high-end PCs want to see games take advantage of the latest and greatest hardware features.

        I certainly won't call it an "excuse", but that doesn't mean scalability doesn't require a significant amount of extra wor

    • The Console has one major advantage over the PC. Uniform Balanced Hardware.

      Sorry to tell ya, but games were made better in the 90's before the internet allowed people with impulse control problems to allow game companies to take control of the software. The fact that windows 10 has defacto DRM in it is the worst possible outcome for a PC game nerd who games in the 90's. The console advantage isn't, since console gamers are on average more stupid and less demanding then PC gamers. They are the ones who ultimately forked out for "multiplayer subscriptions" (dumb shit) and stuff l

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Xest ( 935314 )

      Mostly the advantage used to be that having fixed hardware meant that developers could optimise specifically to the nuances of that hardware and get far more performance out of it than they ever could if they were just developing to the lowest common denominator they could reasonably support on the PC platform.

      But it's also becoming less relevant nowadays, game development is getting ever more abstracted away from the hardware. It used to be that every game had it's own engine, or at least, there was a fair

    • So, I don't think PC configuration is an issue....

    • Back in the bad old days of the 90's and early 2000's, any console games were built a rendering engine from scratch which was written for the hardware. Nowadays, most games are built on top of a rendering engine which is then ported to each console as needed. This advance is as groundbreaking in its scope as when Grace Hopper first introduced the compiler to make computer languages software development. The biggest name in this space is Unreal Engine. Whether it's PUBG [wikipedia.org], Fortnite [wikipedia.org], or Rocket League [wikipedia.org], each of t

    • A game made for the platform tends to run much better then on a PC with much higher specs in most areas. Because there is code that is needed to account for dealing with different drivers for a set of hardware.

      Sorry but no. Games on PC run just fine with the same hardware as consoles. The problem is that game developers shit the bed when it comes to making consoles work and then ignore the capabilities of the PC. That's how you get shit like locked 50fps gameplay, jagged edges on 4K monitors thanks to internal fixed rendering resolutions (often with bizarre choices such as rendering at 900p and upscaling to 1080p because consoles are so underpowered).

      Programming for a console is abstract enough that it doesn't ma

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Stan42 ( 5773912 )
      It is true, in a lot of senses. It's like playing a game on your phone or taking a picture with it (compared to a camera), results can be faster
  • That's an interesting take, PC gamers happen to use Microsoft's OS but their gaming platforms (Microsoft Store, Xbox on PC) have effectively a 0% market share.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mjwx ( 966435 )

      That's an interesting take, PC gamers happen to use Microsoft's OS but their gaming platforms (Microsoft Store, Xbox on PC) have effectively a 0% market share.

      The problem MS has isn't that they have 0% of the sales, its that they're losing their 100% of the platform. Steam has released on Linux, a lot of PC games are being released as cross platform. It's only a matter of time before being a gamer no longer means having to run Windows 100%. That scares them more than Steam dominating PC game sales.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

        That attempt has basically died out once MS backed off the windows store push. Almost no AAA titles, the big sellers in the industry are ported for linux. There's no market that matters there. Overwhelming majority of linux users will boot windows to play anyway, and that's reality of today.

  • Unless they are in all the stores and not just their own, its not worth anything.

  • Can you just add a Keyboard and Mouse to the XBox now? Shouldn't it be possible to throw an XBox under my desk with a KVM switch?

    • Yes you've been able to do this for some time but not many games support it. Fortnite is an example of one that does.

  • So no modding for these games too? People can't seem to mod Windows Store games without hacks, and mods are very limited even with the hacks. MS created some infrastructure allowing game creators to allow limited modding through those games but developers ignore that and still don't allow modding. I don't think things will get any better with straight up Xbox games running on Windows. It will probably also limit any useful hacks that help people adjust things like FOV, resolution, frame rate, vsync and othe

  • We'll have to go figure out how to get the console games themselves to work, built for controls that don't really map well to keyboard and mouse (no matter how much more sense it would actually make to play the games with keyboard and mouse), built for specs that make you wonder why you bought your new PC (because you can be sure that none of the features you have will be supported), and most of all, it's most likely that the games will only be available in one of the most clunky and user-unfriendly game st

  • Call me when Fable 2 is on Windows

  • Maybe MS can do the next step, and have XBox consoles also work as Windows 10 machines.

  • Just like we can Hackintosh a Mac or Emulate games at a higher resolution, we can make a custom pc that is a more Powerful Xbox than the official XBox. I can't wait to build a custom Xbox with Threadripper 3 and RTX 3080 Ti.
  • The holy grail, for me, would be the ability to buy a single console but play it from any TV in the house. I envision this as a wireless mesh network that sends my signals back to the console but displays on the TV in use. It's not always feasible to be tethered to the location where the console is located. I imagine this will involve some extra hardware, but it would be worth it (for me). Does anyone agree?

    • the lag will maybe it suck.

      Hell with an client / sever multi room dvr you can see the command delay (some thing that you don't want in gaming)

  • Give me graphically remastered early Halo games on my PC and Microsoft can have my money. I tried replaying Halo on a modern TV and the graphics have aged terribly. I don't pay full price for games but I probably would for that. The only other game I

    would

    have paid full price for was Metro:Exodus before they pulled their EPICally (see what I did there?) bonehead move to pull it from Steam.

    • They've already done Xbox One enhanced versions of early Halo games. The Master Chief Collection received extra enhancements for the Xbox One X.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        They've already done Xbox One enhanced versions of early Halo games. The Master Chief Collection received extra enhancements for the Xbox One X.

        The MCC has got to be one of the most updated games around on the Xbox - from the days of its early very shaky launch to having a few billion patches between release years ago and today making it one of the few games still updated and maintained today.

  • it was fun ... a long time ago.
  • Loved Halo 1 and 2 . . . because they were on my pc. Tried Halo 3 repeatedly on my Xbox. Nope. It wasn't that I couldn't play it there, it was because I didn't LIKE to play it there.

  • Since this is a Mammoth sized bloat with everything under the sun I wonder if we can port Xbox to SystemD and run them under it like we do Linux.

  • Why not just release specs for exactly how the xbox works and let the community release a near 1:1 emulator?

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