- Something to note is that Xenia just works with certain controllers, like Xbox 360 and Xbox one controllers. Online multiplayer isn't supported at right now. If you aren't particularly great with computers, Xenia has step-by-step instructions to help you download, install, and use Xenia correctly and play the games you want to play on your pc.
- .THIS VIDEO IS FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSE ONLY.You can tip me here: is an XBOX 360 emulator and capable to run most.
- Note that Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 and Python 2.7 must be installed in order for the emulator to work. How to Install Xenia Xbox 360 Emulator. First, Download Xenia Xbox 360 Emulator. Locate the downloaded file and extract it (Xenia is sometimes detected as a virus. Ignore the message). Install the extracted.exe file.
Xenia is a free and open-source Xbox 360 emulator. It runs on a Microsoft Windows OS, allowing you to play those Xbox games again. Emulators have been in the periphery of gamers for the longest time. These act as a platform to run software without having the Xbox 360 console. So, if you happen to be one of those that used to play with an Xbox but could no longer run revive them, you can still relive playing those Xbox games in a PC.
The software was started by Ben Vanik, who was purely passionate about gaming and development. After being with Microsoft for years, Ben pursued another quest. This time around, he wanted to make the Xbox games that locked for certain regions, available to gamers like him who did not particularly reside in that country. Since then, the task to accomplish this started and has now reached a stable state where Xenia is respected. With the involvement of another open-source developer, Xenia can support impressive gameplays from Frogger 2 to Halo 3. They are not slowing down any time soon. The developers are more eager to support future Xbox games in the emulator, including backward compatibilities.
Xenia is an open-source Xbox emulator that was launched back in 2018. It was one of the early birds that made it possible to emulate Xbox games on your Personal Computers.
System Requirements Needed To Run Xenia Emulator
Xenia runs mainly on Microsoft Windows. The support for Linux distros may come soon but you may need to check the latest releases that they publish from the site. To install Xenia, you must meet the following requirements. Note that these are the minimum requirements, not recommended. Anything higher than these minimum requirements can improve the overall gameplay experience.
- Windows 7+ x64 (For better performance, it is recommended to have Windows 10 x64 or higher)
- The minimum CPU should have a 64-bit processor, and Vulkan compatible. Please check out the Xenia site for the compatible listing
- Requires at least 4GM RAM, and Visual C++ Redistributable x64
Xenia developers also point out that it is not mandatory to have Xbox 360 files. Within their website, they also share instructions to rewrite games from your original discs.
Downloading Your Copy Of Xenia
To begin with the app, you can download the Xenia application from its official website. By using the official website, you can ensure that you will get the correct software package. In choosing the file, you will be redirected to the GitHub where the main code repository is available. Here, you can see the latest software master version of Xenia. We highly recommend that you download the latest file so that you can skip the issues found from previous builds. Once that is downloaded, you should be able to install the app as quickly as possible. Extract the file to your preferred repository and you can run the .exe file to launch the software.
Xenia also publishes a few more resources that can help you out, you can access this straight from their website. There, you can see a quick start-up guide and FAQs that could answer any initial questions that you may have. 3200 mac chainsaw manual. Since the Xenia software is a free, open-source application, this does not require any payout to install. The source code is also available for modification and distribution by other interested developers. We also mirror Xenia on our website and you can download it using the following links.
Installing Xenia On Your Computer
Installing Xenia is pretty straightforward. Xenia is a portable application, which means that it can be carried around in removable media devices. Simply double-click on the setup file to run the application. Once Windows finishes configuring the application, you will see a shortcut on your desktop and on the Start menu.
Installing games is quite different than installing the software. The Xenia Xbox 360 emulator is merely an app that should be able to run your games. However, to be able to 'install' the game requires just a bit more effort. You cannot exactly run your gameplay discs directly from the disc drive. Your games have to be burned to another storage device for you to play them. Luckily, Xenia has also published some steps to help you out. Before doing this, please also check the list of compatible games that have already been posted to reduce the hassle of trial and error. Once you have your game files accessible in the PC, you can open the Xenia Xbox 360 emulator and choose File > Open > select your game.
Xenia User Interface
The Xenia Xbox 360 looks very straight forward. Since it is currently made to be compatible with Microsoft Windows, the feel of the emulator frame follows the basic Microsoft user interface. This would include a toolbar at the top where you can see the File, CPU, Tools, and more – including icons to minimize, maximize, and close the window on the right-hand side.
As we have mentioned, when it comes to playing, the Xenia user interface is simple and clear. From the toolbar, you can choose File and Open the game file that you want to launch. Immediate after, your gameplay should start.
However, when it comes to advanced usage, the UI of the Xenia Xbox 360 emulator is a bit tricky. This is because the configuration does not have any user interface to deal with. All the configuration can be changed by opening file. So, you may have to be ready to open the file in notepad to change the configuration. There are several configuration options available from changing the resolution to the preferred input controllers (ex. Xbox controller or Windows keyboard). There is already a default setup provided and you can adjust them accordingly. This can go both ways. It can either increase or decrease your gameplay experience. Thus, we recommend reading through the purpose of the configs before changing them.
Conclusion
The Xenia emulator has a huge potential in the field of gaming platforms. Their development strategies for the software have been impressive, making them what they are today. In the last few years, we can see that the updates have ramped-up for Xenia and we do not see it stopping any time soon. Thanks to the same Microsoft baseline foundation for both the console Xbox 360 and Xenia software emulator, user compatibility issues are reduced. Xenia even boasts that they may be able to support the latest games in the long run, without having to acquire the console. This is certainly an exciting and sustainable platform for gamers that look forward to keeping Xbox games accessible at all costs.
Contents
- Blueprinting a new interface
- Components of a GUI
- Designs
- Current GUI Status
Preface
I decided to start this blog post detailing the development of the new GUI after about 9 months of working on it so most of the post is me recollecting decisions I made earlier rather than writing what I've been doing as it happens. Because of that, this blog is quite long so I apologise for that. Nothing in this blog post is final and any part of it is likely to change in the future.
Xenia is an experimental Xbox 360 emulator that has been in development for quite a few years now. Over the last few years progress has been made in every department, from a new D3D12 renderer being created to an ever increasing kernel implementation. The one area that has barely changed however is Xenia's user interface. That has, for the most part, stayed the same.
Why a new interface?
Xenia started off having no GUI at all. Users were expected to either run the executable from the command line or drag an xbox 360 game onto it from the file explorer. It wasn't until 2015 that the main window was even shown on launch.
Since then the interface of xenia has remained mostly unchanged. Support for DPI-aware scaling was added, and a new logo was created but those are the only major changes the interface has seen.
This interface is perfectly adequate allowing users to select their games through a file dialog and providing very basic configuration through the menu bar, but apart from that it is extremely barebones.
Although this basic interface has served the emulator well for over 4 years now, I believe it is now the right time to create a new, and much more advanced UI. Exciting things are happening with Xenia right now, such as the previously-mentioned D3D12 backend (and maybe even a new Vulkan backend too 👀).
How To Install Xenia Emulator On Maclasopaopolis Mac
Blueprinting a new interface
When I first decided to create a new GUI for Xenia I had a few vague ideas for the design I wanted to create. I decided to install Figma, a graphics design program, and begin prototyping designs.
Right from the start I knew I wanted the new GUI to be dark, or at least have a dark theme.The first prototype I made involved creating a dark version of the current interface to get a feel for things.This was nothing special but it gave me many ideas for what to design next. It just so happened that I have a friend who is a professional graphics designer so I asked her to help me create an initial design.
Design 2 - Sidebar
Me and my friend came to the conclusion that the interface would benefit from a sidebar, so we set to work on creating a prototype design that featured one. After a weekend of messing with colors and icons in Figma we had our first shell.
Mac tools et9040 manual. I spent most of this weekend figuring out how to use Figma properly as before this project I'd never designed anything before. I was feeling completely out of my depth here so was very glad to have a friend who knew what she was doing.
As you can see this is a very barebones design so over the next week or so we added more to the design, the biggest being a new library interface.
I'd quickly like to take a detour into some alternative designs made by my very skilled friend. Although these designs were never used I feel like they deserve recognition anyway.
I ultimately decided against using these designs for two reasons.
- I felt like these designs were too complex for me to accurately recreate using Qt, especially because I'd never used the library before.
- I felt the design, although looking very professional, would be suited better as a website design than a desktop program design.
From Design to Code
After this design was created, I decided to try and implement it in code. First though, I had to choose a GUI framework to use.
I had two ideas in mind for what framework to use for the GUI. Option #1 was to use Qt and C++. Option #2 was to use WPF and C#. Each framework had pros and cons
Qt | WPF |
---|---|
+ Qt is C++ meaning it is much easier to integrate a Qt-based UI into the existing C++ application. | + WPF and XAML allow for creating extremely rich interfaces in little code. They are also much easier to work with than the now ageing Qt widgets library. |
+ Qt is cross-platform. This allows any UI created with it to work across operating systems with little or no work. | + C# and WPF have a very large selection of 3rd-party libraries and interface controls. This is an area that Qt falls short in. |
- Qt can be difficult to work with. Especially the Widgets library as it is old and has to support legacy codebases. Qt created QML as a solution to this. | - WPF isn't cross-platform. That means any UI created with WPF would only work on Windows. While C# itself is cross-platform, there's no cross-platform C# interface libraries that have the level of maturity that I would like. |
- As WPF relies on C# it would introduce a lot of new dependencies to the Xenia project, making it bulkier. Meanwhile Xenia aims to be as lightweight as possible. |
How To Install Xenia Emulator On Maclasopaopolis Windows 10
In the end decided in favor of Qt. This was an easy decision in reality as the very first bullet point in favor of Qt outweighed the rest. The fact that Qt can be easily integrated into the main Xenia codebase is all that mattered.
I decided to familiarize myself with the Qt library by converting a previous design into a coded application. This took a little longer than I'd hoped as I'd never used Qt before and wasn't used to its quirks (and bugs), but this was the result:
You may notice that the iconography and theme is slightly different than the design it's based from. This was an intentional change, switching from Ionicons to Segoe MDL2 Assets. This change was made as I wanted the new UI to have a more 'Xbox/Microsoft' feel and what better way to achieve that than to use Microsoft's own icons?
On the subject of the GUI having an 'Xbox/Microsoft' feel, I decided to try switching the sidebar out for a top-positioned navbar, taking inspiration from the Metro and Fluent design languages. This sparked a friendly debate in the Xenia discord about sidebar vs navbar which even managed to make it onto Reddit!
The results weren't conclusive, so I decided to ignore them and worked on redesigning the GUI with a top navbar. This would eventually become the final design.
Components of a GUI
Finally, after a lot of backstory I can now go into details about the creation of the GUI. Let's start by listing all of the components that I feel are a necessity for the GUI to be of a high enough quality.
- Easy to configure settings for the emulator
- Able to control the entire app with a gamepad, not just games
- Have a sleek interface that is also themeable
- Support all operating systems that xenia is designed to run on (Windows and soon Linux)
As of when this article was written I'm only 1 for 4 on this checklist. The current UI can be themed but there are no settings or gamepad support yet. Additionally, although Qt is cross-platform I haven't yet tested the UI on Linux.
Just based off of this checklist it appears not much progress has been made, but that isn't the case at all. Let's take a look at the progress that has been made up until this point.
- Designs and ideas for the new UI, including
- What screens should be in the app and how they should be laid out
- The designs of various components
- A prototype that provides basic navigation around the designs
- A UI that's highly-customizable and sleek that's based on the prototype designs
- Includes custom variants of all common interface controls
- A (mostly) functioning game scanner and library
We'll take a closer look at the designs first.
Designs
The designs I've made for the new GUI are the furthest to completion out of the previous bullet points. They were created in the Figma design tool as Figma allows for easy collaboration with others.
Let's start with the Home screen.
Home
Walking through the main components of this design we'll start with the sidebar. I decided on a sidebar for this screen to host the most common actions users may do such as opening a game, improving the usability of the app. You may notice a slight difference between the sidebars in the two images. They have slightly different actions on them. This is because I haven't fully decided on what actions to incorporate into the sidebar, and probably won't be fully committed to any until the UI is nearer completion.
The sidebar is designed using inspiration from sidebars that exist on the Xbox One, which are built using Microsoft's Metro/Fluent design languages. This is a trend you'll see throughout the designs.
Next to the sidebar is a list of recently opened games. I plan to allow the user to choose between a grid view and table view for any game lists but as of right now I have only coded the table view, the grid view remains just a concept for now. As you will soon see, this part of the 'Home' tab is very similar to the 'Library' tab. I would like to add more information to the home tab to distinguish it more but I haven't yet come up with any ideas or designs. If you have any ideas I'd be happy to hear them.
Finally, you can see a design of a toast notification that could be used to show achievement messages and other things. Like the grid view, toast notifications are purely a concept at this stage.
Library
Above are four designs that represent two parts of the 'Library' tab. The first two pictures show the main game library view. This area contains a list of every game the user has scanned/opened. Like the home tab, I have designed both a grid and a table version of this section, hopefully allowing the user to choose which one they prefer more. I have only coded the table version so far however. The table view has a wide variety of columns including name, title id, path, version etc. These columns can be hidden if the user desires.
Above the game list is a toolbar containing useful actions such as adding a new game to the library or playing an existing one.
Not shown in the design is the context menu that will show if right clicking on a game. I plan for this context menu to provide at least the following options (and maybe more): 'Play game', 'Debug game', 'View game info', 'Remove game from library'.
The other part of the Library tab consists of a view that shows details about a specific game. As shown above, this view is split into 2 sections. The top section shows details about the game itself, including game title, title ID and path. Also in this section is a play button to launch the game. This was inspired by the Microsoft store layout.
The lower section contains a tabbed interface for extra information relating to the game, such as achievements and saves. The achievements tab will list the achievements for the game, as well as their status (unlocked/locked) for the current main user profile, with the saves tab showing savegames for the current user. The Updates tab will allow the user to manager/add title updates for the game. None of this functionality has been coded yet and is all hypothetical at this point.
This game details interface may not make it into the first few releases of the UI as it relies on some as of yet unimplemented code in the main xenia codebase, such as full gamer profile support.
Xbox 360 Emulator
There are two different designs for this Game Info view. A 'rich' version and a 'basic' version. The rich version contains more information and images then the basic one, such as box art, a background image, game description etc. This is because this data is not available from the game itself but must be pulled from Xbox Live. Therefore, I plan to give the user an option to allow connecting to an external API if they choose to pull this information. If they opt not to then the basic version will be shown instead.
Settings
The settings tab is the most incomplete tab as of right now. I have designed most of the different settings views but nothing is finalized yet, and there is no settings implementation at all in the actual code yet, unlike the other two tabs. Settings have been categorized into the following sections: General, CPU, GPU, Interface, Library, Controls and Advanced. These roughly match the same sections found in the config file introduced recently. In fact, the settings interface above will just set these config values behind the scenes.
It's worth clarifying that the settings tab and all its content is still WIP. Things are subject to change in the future as this is the part of the GUI I'm most heavily working on right now (along with game scanning). Please don't treat the above designs as final. In fact, if you have any improvements you can think of, please let me know!
There's not much to discuss about the settings views as the images show exactly what needs to be said. I'll quickly run over the layout however. The settings tab has a sidebar similar to the home tab, which contains a way to navigate through the different settings sections. In each section there is a top 'toolbar' of sorts, containing a title and a reset button. The rest of the tab contains the view for that specific section, which can vary depending on which section it is. Most section views consist of groupboxes containing relevant settings toggles.
Current GUI Status
Now I've shown you the designs I created for the new GUI, let's take a look at the actual progress so far. I've demoed most of the current progress in this handy 1 minute video so if you don't want to read the details you can just watch it below.
Let's start by talking about the app in general. The default theme, like the designs, is a dark theme with green accents (although the accent color may change in the future). The app has custom scroll bars that fit the theme better. The app is also completely themeable, a fact that we'll get to later.
First of the tabs is the Home tab. Features that have been implemented so far include working Open Game and Import Folder buttons and a working library view. This library view is meant to only show recently played games but for testing purposes it shows the whole game library right now. For the recent games list to work, a cache file/files is needed to store game information (including date last launched) which isn't yet implemented.
The play button in the home tab is currently somewhat functional as it is linked up to some proof-of-concept code created by DrChat to run games using the vulkan renderer from a Qt window. This code is old but can be found here. A lot of work is still required in the graphics department to make Qt play nicely with xenia's D3D12 renderer (and the new vulkan v2 renderer when finished).
The Library tab isn't currently linked up to anything, but theoretically the same table view from the Home tab can be displayed here with basically no amount of work.
The Settings tab is also quite bare so far, showing only a sidebar and placeholder views for each settings panel. This tab is the one I'm most actively working on as of this article.
The Debug tab, one that didn't exist in the prototype designs, is where the most work has been done so far. I use this tab as a sandbox of sorts to test the custom-designed components that will be used elsewhere in the emulator. This tab is designed to look like the Settings tab so much of the code here can be ported to the Settings tab too.
Theme support
The new GUI can be easily themed by users. There are two ways to create themes. Both involve creating a theme package, which consists of a theme.json and optional CSS files in a stylesheets subfolder. Each stylesheet named after the component it's for will be automatically loaded by the program. Xenia will search for themes in a 'themes' subfolder from the main executable. A more comprehensive theming guide will be available when the new UI is ready.
The structure of a typical theme is as follows:
Theme-root/
├── stylesheets/
│ ├── MainWindow.css
│ └── XPushButton.css
└── theme.json
The easier way to make small theming adjustments however is to edit the theme.json of the theme. The theme.json contains a list of color values which can be edited.
Here is the theme.json for the default UI theme:
If we were to edit the secondary
value to #FF0000
(pure red) the UI would look like this:
Xenia Emulator Game List
Final Thoughts
I hope this showcase of the new Xenia UI has been interesting. Although it's not finished yet, I'm glad that my work is starting to take shape into something great. You can view my fork of Xenia here.
Please feel free to join the Xenia Discord to give me suggestions for the new UI, and to talk Xenia in general, and don't forget to share this article with your friends (and enemies)!
I'll leave you with an unofficial roadmap of what I plan to do next.
Things to do before first beta:
How To Install Xenia Xbox 360 Emulator
- implement settings panel using xenia's new config system
- add support for the new D3D12 backend to actually support launching games
- allow the whole UI to be navigated just by controller (required by the main xenia devs before they'd consider merging it)
- implement a library cache so games don't need to be rescanned every launch, also enabling the recent games view to function properly
Things I'd like to do for v1.0:
How To Install Xenia Emulator On Maclasopaopolis Pc
- implement grid view for games
- implement the game detail view
- support retrieving extra game data from an external API
- (if profile support is added to xenia) support viewing/adding profiles to the UI, with achievements too