With the recent announcement about backward compatibility on PC, we got to witness a company obliquely lie to it's core audience about the services it is charging them for. Put simply: Microsoft did not release true backward compatibility with consumers' already owned game discs; they are charging consumers for new digital licenses to what amounts to just a digital disc (an ISO) wrapped up in an emulator, acting as a single executable. This is not true backward compatibility with physical discs.

The community has already built a large ecosystem of robust tools around backing up, archiving, and 'dumping' their physical media but oftentimes this comes at great expense or difficulty - commonly requiring expensive disc drives and/or custom firmware to be flashed to the drive so that it is able to read the discs themselves. Even in these best case scenarios, the final result is still just the ability to rip or dump the contents of the physical disc to a digital backup for later use, not the ability to read straight from the disc as one would expect if they were playing music, watching a movie, or even placing that disc into a console.

I've put together a novel way to convince a stock, straight off the shelf, dvd drive plugged into a pc (or steamdeck, mac, linux, or android device) to read the contents of the original xbox game discs and feed them straight into XEMU, an original Xbox Emulator, and just start "playing" the game just as one would expect from a traditional video game console experience. True backward compatibility.

Anyways I thought you might appreciate checking it out.

The source code is completely free with an extremely permissive license. -> https://gdox.korze.org

Here is a video showcasing it working directly on a steamdeck. -> https://youtu.be/Hzyvm6w1pso