In 2018, a trivial bug in the network emulation was identified by JayFoxRox and mborgerson. The standard controllers are emulated with no known issues now.

More than 20 games were affected by this change. In July 2018, JayFoxRox improved controller emulation in XQEMU.

This has quickly lead to bug-fixes and allows other developers to gain a better understanding about the Xbox GPU. That same month JayFoxRox released nv2a-trace to debug and compare GPU behavior between the Xbox and XQEMU. In June 2018, mborgerson created a new website for XQEMU at an alternative domain,, was contributed by xbox7887. Shortly after, the project was rebased again to QEMU 3.0.0. Mborgerson has, since March 24, 2018, begun work on rebasing XQEMU on the latest QEMU tag, ' many years of performance enhancements to xqemu including support for native virtualization APIs.' The rebase branch, which was merged into the master branch on June 2018, incorporated over 30,000 commits from QEMU that were never merged over the years.

Old compatibility chart (Taken from John GodGames' 2015 list).

They provide decent performance boosts to games such as Halo: Combat Evolved but still weren't enough to run them at full speed. Throughout September 2018 and later, mborgerson has been showcasing KVM for Linux-based systems and HAXM for Windows and macOS systems in XQEMU. Issues have been filed in the respective projects and testing continues. Active development of HAXM, WHPX and HVF has made them more compatible with XQEMU, but problems remain. With the rebase to QEMU 2.x and 3.x in 2018, support for other virtualization technologies has become possible. KVM has been supported in XQEMU since 2013 and is the only stable CPU virtualization at the moment.

macOS: HVF (broken, awaiting fixes by Apple), HAXM (broken, awaiting fixes by Intel).

Windows: WHPX (broken, awaiting fixes by Microsoft), HAXM (broken, awaiting fixes by Intel).

The only implementation that's working right now seems to be KVM, at no fault of the emudevs. XQEMU supports CPU virtualization to improve emulation performance, at a minor loss of compatibility. The developers are always looking for more contributors to help the Xbox get emulated. As more developers contribute to the project and emulation matures, the focus will shift to performance. Due to the small number of contributors, the focus of development has always been on accuracy, but sometimes there are occasional performance improvements.

Many games work correctly in XQEMU, but there are performance issues in many games. XQEMU is currently the most accurate open-source Xbox emulator. XQEMURun by illwieckz (Python script Command-Line interface only).xqemu-gui by BigBrainAFK (Builds available GUI only).XQEMU-Frontend by Voxel9 (Builds available GUI only).

XQEMU-Manager (Official frontend by XQEMU developers.

XQEMU does not come with an Xbox specific GUI and needs a separate frontend for GUI features.

Original xbox emulation