Windows NT 4 had a POWER port. This was discontinued when Windows 2000 arrived. If Microsoft wanted to release another version for POWER, they could easily do so.
"Windows NT 3.51 added support for the PowerPC processor in 1995, specifically PReP-compliant systems such as the IBM ThinkPad Power Series laptops and Motorola PowerStack series; but despite meetings between Michael Spindler and Bill Gates, not on the Power Macintosh as the PReP compliant Power Macintosh project failed to ship."
Actually, Sony and Nintendo were also on POWER at this stage. Sony ran a particularly exotic variant, the "Cell" processor; this used a single POWER core that was tied in a ring architecture to several specialized coprocessors.
For the next generation of consoles, AMD's integration of ATI graphics onto a single die CPU/GPU/APU proved irresistible, and both Sony and Xbox switched to AMD x86 variants. The Nintendo Switch adopted the Nvidia Tegra ARM architecure.
IBM essentially had one generation of consoles. I don't know why they didn't fight harder for this market.
Compatibility is pretty poor. No support for Forza 2-4, Gears of War 2 or 3, Lost Odyssey or Blue Dragon. And controller support is broken on Oblivion and many other titles requiring another app to fix.
Original Xbox had a tool released which could convert an Xbox binary to a Windows PE file and run it. Original Xbox was x86 running at 800mhz with a windows kernel IIRC.
In a bizarre plot twist, there is an actual project which tries to recompile Xbox 360 XEXes to run on x86 Windows: https://github.com/rexdex/recompiler
Agreed. It was what I kept running under emulation for years when I still had to maintain backward compatibility with IE on some sites. It was the last one that was actually a user-first OS as opposed to a corporate-first ad platform.
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