[russjr08]

> I believe I heard that the xbox360 contains an Xbox emulator for backwards compatibility. If it wasn't the Xbox360 it was some other console.

Yep, the external HDD for the Xbox 360 has the "secret sauce" / binary blobs that allows this to work and emulates certain Xbox games.

Similarly, the Xbox One also has the backwards compatibility library to emulate 360 games, but doesn't require an extra accessory. Each game download contains its own wrapper of the 360 emulator.

[stordoff]

> the external HDD for the Xbox 360 has the "secret sauce" / binary blobs that allows this to work and emulates certain Xbox games

IIRC, that's _partly_ because it requires Microsoft to pay a licensing fee to Nvidia for the original Xbox GPU, so baked that cost into the cost of the hard drive rather than the console itself.

[MBCook]

The original Xbox always had a hard drive and games expected it. The 360 had no-drive models.

I assume that’s why the drive was required.