For quite some time, many thought emulation on Android would kind of “top out” with the Switch, even after Nintendo took down Yuzu and Ryujinx. Xbox and PS3 emulation was considered the “next frontier,” albeit one that we didn’t really expect to see anytime soon. Well, over the past year, that’s changed dramatically, as playing those original Xbox games on Android handhelds just keeps getting better and better.
This week alone, we’ve seen two massive updates to the existing emulator options, with hakuX v1.3 and Xenra v0.4.5 released. However, community developer Jdewitz jumped in on the action, by releasing hakuX-Advanced earlier today, which is forked from hakuX and comes with a few more bells and whistles.
As you can see in the video above, Zu and a few others on the team have been messing around with early development builds of hakuX-Advanced with varying degrees of success. However, it seems that between hakuX v1.3 and this latest build from Jdewitz, performance is getting dialed in quite nicely. In my limited testing, I played just a few minutes of Halo 2 without much of a hitch.
There is a catch, however, as you might notice that games won’t show any (or minimal) content on the screen, even after setting up the BIOS. I thought something was broken within the build itself, but Zu quickly reminded me that I needed to first install a Turnip driver. A few moments later, I loaded the latest Mr. Purple Turnip driver onto my AYN Thor and that sweet, sweet Halo 2 music started playing.
The development has been practically impossible to keep up with, as we’ve seen quite a few builds over the past few days alone. As you can probably guess by now, and as is the case with many other emulation and game ports recently, AI is being used in the development process. All of the projects mentioned here do include a disclaimer notifying everyone as such, but it’s still something we wanted to point out.
If you don’t care so much about AI being used to advance the emulation scene, then be sure to check out the emulators linked below and play Xbox games on modern hardware.
- Description
- HakuX-Advanced is an unofficial experimental fork of rfandango/hakuX, an original Xbox emulator for arm64 Android. The original authors and dependency contributors retain all attribution and licenses. This project is not an official hakuX release.
- Platforms
- Download
- Download
- GitHub
- GitHub
