It is so annoying how companies insist on dictating what we can or cannot do with the hardware we’ve already paid for. It’s doubly annoying when you consider how it contributes to e-waste because it limits our ability to repurpose these things for other use cases. My old PS4 is just sitting in my closet gathering dust because I don’t have an old enough firmware that let’s me put Linux on it.

I guess the fact that consoles are usually loss leaders are a major contributing factor to why these devices are so locked down, but still…In this case, Microsoft is preventing emulation enthusiasts from running in retail mode and partaking in their game store! Maybe they just don’t want the legal repercussions of dealing with Nintendo or something.

If emulation is your jam, I highly recommend just building a small form factor PC or going with a mini-PC instead. More expensive in the short term, but less troubles and more flexibility in the long-term.

It seems like this only affects people using a bypass to run emulators on retail mode, instead of developer mode which was the usual method for a good while now.

Still annoying, but it doesn’t look like they’ve really changed their stance yet. Hope that’s not what’s to come.

I bought a ps1 classic to use for emulators, back when they were on clearance. It’s only good enough for 5th-gen gaming (N64-era), but that’s good enough for me. I can use my PC for everything else.

If the 360’s controllers didn’t eat batteries like something that eats a fuckton of batteries, that’d actually be a pretty good idea I haven’t turned that thing on in a while