Many gamers look back at iconic consoles like the Nintendo GameCube and Wii with warm, and especially nostalgic, feelings. Yet a large proportion of them have moved with the times and now have a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series model in their homes. Good news, WANT editor Wesley Akkerman discovers, because the two things are perfectly compatible.
Many people don’t know it yet, but you can play Nintendo GameCube and Wii games on your modern-day Xbox. No, you can’t just shove that disc in your console and hope it will work out. What you can do is get your hands on an emulator called Dolphin Emulator.
Playing Nintendo games on your Xbox
That piece of software has been available for Android and Windows, among others, for a while, but now as a UWP app for Xbox. A UWP app is a Univeral Windows Platform app. If such an app works on one device, it will also work on another Windows device (provided it meets the minimum requirements).
The latest version of Dolphin is already available and from now on it also does it on Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S. Not so much too, because I am quite impressed.
That it works well can be seen in the above video from one of my favorite YouTube channels: Modern Vintage Gamer. This man has gained a lot of experience as a game developer and has been working on ports and emulations for years. In his most recent video, he runs Nintendo GameCube titles in 1440p resolution.
Jumping through some hoops
In order to play Nintendo games on your Xbox, you do have to jump through some hoops. For example, you must first activate Developer Mode (for a fee). In addition, you have to tweak and adjust things a bit to get everything running smoothly. A fun project to work on, on a drizzly Sunday afternoon.
And why stop there? Because with a well-known emulator like RetroArch, you can also just play games from other consoles on your Xbox (such as PlayStation titles not available for the PlayStation 5). To do all this, you need ISOs and roms. Stealing such content (downloading it from the Internet) is prohibited, but creating your own backup is allowed.
