- On the surface, there's nothing remarkable
about what I'm doing right now. Until I do this. That's right, ladies and gentlemen. This Xbox you're looking at can run games from almost
every major console ever made. And get this, there's absolutely no modding involved. It doesn't void your warranty, and it costs just 25 bucks. After seeing modern vintage gamers video showing how well the Series S works as an emulation platform, we knew we wanted to try it for ourselves. I mean, it couldn't be
that easy, could it? Well, there are some little tricky bits. But after we show you the ins and outs, we think you could be up and running in as little as 20 minutes, giving you plenty of time to
first check out our sponsor. Happy holidays from Seasonic. No products to promote. I mean, you can check out
their stuff if you want. But it's, there's literally
nothing in my talking points. Hey, have a great holiday
season, from Seasonic. (upbeat music) The first thing you'll need to get emulation working on your Xbox One, or Xbox Series machine, that's right, you don't even need the latest Xboxes to do this, is a Microsoft developer account. So we paid the minuscule $20
fee to be granted access, and installed Dev Tools for Xbox, giving us the ability to load
our own code into Dev Mode. A sandbox where unsigned code can run. The sandbox is a completely separate, secure operating environment, that requires a system reboot to access and that cannot run normal
Xbox games or applications. What it does allow you to run though, is UWPs, or Universal
Windows Platform apps. These are the same sort of packages that you see in the Windows app store. And after downloading
RetroArch's app from the website and plopping it into the
Xbox web browser interface, we were off to the races. Kind of. Some consoles, particularly older ones like super Nintendo, Game Boy, and N64, all just ran directly off
of our external USB drive without any extra steps. But others, say PSP, GameCube, or Wii, were a bit more troublesome. I'm gonna allow our resident
emulation guru to explain. (rock music) - RetroArch is one of
those programs that's super easy to use, as long as you already know
exactly what you're doing. The step that many people miss
causing untold frustration is adding the missing BIOS
files for each of the cores or emulators they want to run. The reason you need them is that some of the code required
to emulate, say a Wii game, is copyrighted by the console maker. The system menu, for example. So an emulator cannot be distributed with these pieces included. Not legally, anyway. Fortunately, there are
ways to rip your own if you already own an old system. But you want to enjoy the
convenience of emulation. So, we definitely did that, and didn't just download them from totally reputable websites. Yeah, that's, yeah. Once we had them, it was as simple as pointing RetroArch to the correct directory, so we could find those
BIOS files, like so. - Out of the gate playing some good old fashioned PlayStation One, I would have straight up no way of knowing that I'm not on like, a powerful PC emulating this console. There are some idiosyncrasies though. For example, we couldn't find an easy way to map the joystick. So, we're stuck with the D pad which is obviously not ideal
for a lot of PlayStation games. That's fine 'cause we wanna
play more than just this game. So to get to the menu, we're gonna press both
sticks at the same time. Let's have a look at what we've got here. Should we start with
something really simple? Super Mario? I was in control. - [Colin] I don't believe you. - To be clear, there were some challenges. So let's fire up a Super Monkey Ball 2. Cool, cool. I always like a black screen simulator. So compatibility, ain't perfect. And, even for games that work, there might be some strange behavior. Let's do Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4. Now this we're expecting to work. But this is a large game. And we found that anything over about, what was it about a gig? - [Colin] Yeah, around a gig. - Yeah, was hit or miss when
loading off the external SSD. So we actually had to copy this game over to the internal SSD,
to get it to work properly. - [Colin] Okay, so this might be hanging, which would require like, a lot of this is just trial and error, to be honest with you.
- Yeah, that's fine. Sometimes it doesn't work. So we're just gonna open it up, by manually browsing to it, sort of. So we go to load content, then we'd go to our
external drive, which is Q. We go down here. Wait, cheats, Colin. - [Colin] It auto-populated, I swear. - I believe you. Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4.ISO and then, Nintendo GameCube, open file picker, but wait. Normally we would like go find it but we're not gonna do that. We're gonna just press cancel, and then there's a solid
chance it'll load now. - [Colin] You saw me playing this game. - I did see you playing this game at work. - [Colin] Why don't we
try some of the more approachable things. PSP works really well, if you
go into the history there. - Oh, hello. G'day, I'm Bruce. Obviously, you know,
all the usual emulation bug bears exist. Like for example, it's got like squares and triangles and stuff. And I've got ABXY, so you just gonna kinda,
do your best with it. I mean, it's running great. I mean, given that nobody uses
universal Windows apps like, just like kind of amazing
it runs this well. Yay, Colin fixed Tony Hawk Pro Skater. There was a setting in RetroArch that made it so that changes
to the render we selected were not applying. So, we're good now. Woo, oh boy. I mean, well we're something now. So let's try. - [Colin] Wind waker? - Yeah, let's try Wind waker.
- [Colin] Cool, yeah. So,
- Oh, she chugs a little. She chugs the little boys. - [Colin] You can talk to the little girl or you can try and go, so see that house right there that you, right behind tour model, try to go there. - Hold on. I'm tryna play video games here, Colin. Can I just jump? Oh yeah. Hey, Lienus, ah, got 'em! So that works. It works ish. But, even once you get the games launched, frankly it is not all
sunshine and rainbows. Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath
of Cortex, for example, we got some weird purple
flashes on loading screens. And in Mario Kart 64, there are some really weirdly
rendered lines in the menu. But it's definitely playable. And for the $20 that this costs to do, I really don't see why you
wouldn't add it to your Xbox. It makes this $300 console
just that much more appealing. But the question is, what is
Microsoft playing at here? Other than to just
reinforce my arguments that Xboxes are just PCs now, why would Microsoft allow users to run unsigned code on their consoles, for the relatively paltry sum of 20 bucks? To find out, we checked
out the excellent talk from Tony Chen, from
Microsoft Security Team. It is worth the hour to watch, guys. But if you don't have that much time, then you can still watch
it, but at 2X speed. If that's still too much for
you, then here's the summary. People have been hacking consoles ever since there was
something to gain by doing so. And that thing to gain
could be anything from saving a buck by pirating games, to just unlocking the hardware so it can be used in unconventional ways. PlayStation Three supercomputers, anyone? And I get it. People don't like being told
what they can or can't do with their own hardware that they own. And they will void their
warranties for reasons as trivial as wanting to use a different
system theme on their iPhone. Whether a new system will
be poned is a matter of how many hours, not, if it'll happen. Look at the Xbox 360. People wanted to play burned disks. Straight up piracy. But the firmware in the DVD
drive built into the console, wouldn't allow you to read burned disks. The drive's ability to be modified was then locked by a grounded
pin in the flash memory that was sealed inside the
chip after manufacturing, disabling the ability to
overwrite the firmware. Well, wouldn't you know it? Someone figured out how to
locate exactly where that pin was within 0.1 millimeter on
that little dime size chip, then using a Dremel with
an LED wired up to it, they would poke a hole at that
precise point on the chip, until the LED turned on. indicating that they'd
hit the right point. That disabled the grounded right pin, enabling the ability to flash
the drive with new firmware that tells the console a
burns disc is legitimate and will then let the code run. This was aptly known as the Kamikaze mod. I mean, man, the lengths nerds will go to to gain access to their hardware. It's hardcore, just like our merch, LTTStore.com. Security is so critical in
the console business though, due to their entire business model. The so-called razor and blade model, where the hardware is sold
at either slim margins or even at a loss that
is quickly recouped, by selling games at much higher margins. If you can't secure your
hardware to prevent piracy, you're out of business. It's as simple as that. This, among other things, led to the downfall of the
Sega Dreamcast in 1998. Within a year, that thing
had been completely poned, and developers don't wanna
release games for a console where they will be immediately pirated. No new content, means no more sales. Let's bring it back though. Why does Microsoft allow just about anyone to run whatever code they want? Well, they figured out that if you give people an
easier way to run their own code they won't resort to more
outlandish hacky ways of doing it. So then, has console
hacking and game piracy been beaten so simply? Not quite. But admittedly Microsoft, and so has Sony for that matter, has taken a lot of the
reward out of the attempts. Between the 360 and Xbox One generation, the hardware got much smaller and much more tightly integrated, narrowing the gaps in the
armor on that side of things. And, it was also during this time that systems software updates became a normal part of
the console experience. Once that happened, the ability for a manufacturer
to quickly break exploits after they'd been released,
or even brick your console, made the risks not feel
worthwhile for a lot of people. Then the last big nail in
the coffin, in my opinion, is games. Developers have worked for years to make the online elements of a game, like multiplayer or
community level libraries, an integral part of the experience. So there's a lot of games
where you could pirate them but you'll always feel
like you're missing out. Combine that, with better
games delivery services, like Xbox Game Pass, and it looks like a pretty
killer one, two punch. I mean, Val figured out
way back in the early 2000s that the answer to software piracy is to make the DRM more
convenient than the piracy. And that is exactly what
Microsoft has done here. For a reasonable monthly fee, you've got access to enough games to keep you glued to your couch,
pretty much 24 hours a day. And it even sorts out that whole community element of gaming. I mean, how many times
have you and your buds gone to play some multiplayer
something or other only to realize that fricking
Jeff doesn't own this game, and Smithy doesn't own that game. And, neither of them feels
like spending 60 bucks, so you can't all play together. Well, that sucks. But as long as you've all got Game Pass, well now it's all good. Just like our sponsor is good. Thank you, Ruggable, for
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with offer code linus10, at myruggable.com/linus10. Well folks, if you liked that video, why not check out the
video I did with Riley where we tried out Android
on a Nintendo Switch. Yes, my friends. It ain't quite totally dead. Although Nintendo, now, even though that
was a hardware thing, they did eventually fix it. So yeah, we'll have that
in the end screen for you. Or, if you want some more in-depth info on emulation performance
on the Xbox Series S, go check out modern vintage
gamers video on the subject. We're gonna have that
linked down below as well.
