A short history of WinDurango

WinDurango, formerly known as XBONEmu, is the first publicly available compatibility layer for the Xbox One. As of writing, it can only play Minecraft: Xbox One Edition. However, it does this with native performance and working splitscreen.

Origins

WinDurango was created on January 17, 2023 by Tyler Jaacks (VitalC0d3r). At first, he didn’t get very far because he had no access to dumps of Xbox One games and no outside help. The project stayed in an empty state for about a year and a half until he started to commit again but with little progress.

Collateral Damage

An exploit was found in 2024 called Collateral Damage that made it possible, among othe things in the Xbox One. This was huge for the Xbox scene, as the Xbox One never had any exploits of that seriousness before.

This intrigued the community for the Legacy Console Editions (LCE) of Minecraft. With a freshly dumped copy of the game, they attempted to get Minecraft: Xbox One Edition to run on Windows, but later found it was harder than they thought. They first attempted just running the executable, and messing with the DLLs in the EmbeddedXVD directory of the game. They also figured out registering the UWP app.

People from the LCE community joined XBONEmu because it would allow them to get an essentially native version of LCE playable native on PC with easier modding.

Other compatibility layers

The developers faced challenges with DLLs and worked slowly and manually to resolve them. Eventually, CactusDuper joined the Discord and gave some information to the developers. He was the one that told them that WinDurango wasn’t the only compatibility layer.

CactusDuper said that this was the rough process for making an Xbox One compatibility layer:

step 1: fix dlls
step 2: fix winrt/other api stuff + patch out some checks in the game
step 3: ???
step 4: profit

Soon after this, XWine1 was announced, bringing some media attention. A few XWine1 developers help out with WinDurango, giving support and advice to the developers.

Booting the first game

WinDurango development chugged along, but slowed down somewhat for a few months with d3d11_x. In the words of DaZombieKiller, a developer for XWine1:

D3D11.X is basically D3D11 with parts of D3D12 ported to it with a few extra features for interacting more closely with the GPU
It’s called the “monolithic” runtime because it combines the runtime and the graphics driver into one, because well.. it’s not like the Xbox One is going to have multiple different GPUs that need different drivers
At the surface level it’s very similar to regular D3D11, it just has “extra” stuff when you look deeper, and implementing that extra stuff properly is important if you want to run Xbox games

Fortunately, two new developers joined, Patoke and unixian joined the project making progress into 2025. Minecraft: Xbox One Edition was the target game that everyone was trying to get to work, and luckily it isn’t that difficult compared to other games because it doesn’t use a lot of D3D11 rendering extensions.

Finally, on January 9th, 2025, WinDurango booted into Minecraft: Xbox One Edition. Text did not render at all, and the game would crash if you pressed any buttons. For the time being, the game was also stuck in trial mode. You also had to run the game through Visual Studio’s debugger.

These issues were fixed very quickly and on the next day, WinDurango could get in-game on Minecraft: Xbox One Edition.

More features started to work, such as audio, saved games, and splitscreen, and the memory leaks were plugged.

Conclusion

The future of WinDurango seems bright with more games booting and active development on the project. With increased interest and attention, on the project, more developers could join. And There even has been progress on other games already. Sonic Mania and The Escapists now reach the title screen. A rewrite of the D3D11_x has now been completed, allowing for increased performance. A UI project is also in the works