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Comment by jjulius | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps I'm speaking out of ignorance, but that just seems... excessive. The game's on the disc, why not just play it instead of downloading the whole damn thing?

Can someone explain why this option is preferable to just playing what's on the disc?

Edit: Three immediate, simultaneous, and helpful responses - thank you! :)

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The version it downloads isn't the version on the disk. The disc version is compiled for the Xbox 360, not the One/Series.

Xbox games are all VM images so im not it’s even sure it’s recompiled as much as emulated. All they are probably doing is ensuring compatibility . Dave Cutler said XBox is a variant of hyper-v.

Yep and each game comes with a weird windows os it runs the game with. XB360 was the power PC one so it has to do something to emulate it -- since hyperv doesn't emulate it may swap the OS or something

I guess it could still use the assets on the disk, in theory.

you'd have to emulate the 360 arch in software so just probably just easier to download a recompiled game than to solve all emulation challenges and edge cases

I believe that Microsoft actually does emulate the 360 [0] [1]. But compiling the game allows them to deal with some subtleties and also provide upscaled assets where possible.

[0] https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Fission

[1] https://www.ign.com/articles/2017/10/23/the-untold-story-of-...

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