A long time ago, there was a big difference between PC and console gaming. The former often came with headaches. You’d fight with drivers, struggle with crashes, and grow ever more frustrated dealing with CD piracy checks and endless patches and updates. Meanwhile, consoles offered the exact opposite experience—just slam in a cartridge, and go!
That beautiful feature fell away when consoles joined the Internet. Suddenly there were servers to sign in to and updates to download and a whole bunch of hoops to jump through before you even got to play a game. Now, those early generations of Internet-connected consoles are becoming retro, and that’s introduced a whole new set of problems now the infrastructure is dying or dead. Boot up and play? You must be joking!
Yeah, I expanded my hard drive (unofficial methods) in my 360 and “installed” all of my games to it. That way if the optical drive starts to go or my discs get messed up, all it’ll have to worry about is reading the disc initially to allow it to play from the hard drive. I did similar on my soft-modded OG Xbox but I don’t even need the disks for that one anymore (and the DVD drive is kaput anyway).
I haven’t messed with x360 emulators as I never had anything powerful enough at the time, but I saw not long ago there was one available for Android now, so I may look back into it.
But yeah, something like XLink Kai that somehow satisfies the cloud connectivity would be cool. But I’m not sure how that would work since it’d have to have valid certs for the hardcoded domains the system and games would connect to.