The Xbox Series X will now run one of the best retro versions of Windows

theverge.com:

You know what’s cooler than playing modern games on an Xbox Series console? Using Microsoft’s current hardware to emulate Windows 98 and playing retro games on it. Thankfully, thanks to a combination of RetroArch (a program that’s also let some Xbox users play PlayStation 2 games), a plug-in for it called DOSBox Pure, and a copy of Windows 98, Digital Foundry has shown that it’s possible to do just that. A video released on Saturday shows games like Turok, RollerCoaster Tycoon, and Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun all running on an Xbox Series X. Digital Foundry even ran traditional apps like Microsoft Paint and Word 97 on the Xbox as well (for that genuine Clippy experience).

Getting all this set up isn’t exactly easy. First, you have to get RetroArch running on your Xbox, which you can do either after activating Developer Mode, which costs $19, or going through a slightly convoluted side-loading process. Be warned: Archades Games, the channel behind the no Dev Mode tutorial, notes that using the latter method does come with the slight (but real) risk of your Xbox Live account getting banned.

After you’ve got RetroArch set up on your Xbox, you can pretty easily enable the DOSBox Pure core. Of course, that’s not the end of the journey. You still have to install Windows 98 on top of DOS, using a (legally obtained, right?) disk image for the OS. That by itself is no small task. Then you have to get images of your retro games over to the Xbox.

After you’ve gotten through all that, though, Digital Foundry reports that the experience is pretty impressive. Games seem to run well on both the Series S and X (obviously the latter’s extra power does marginally improve the experience), though software rendering seems to work better