I'll admit it; there's something about the vibe that consoles had around the OG Xbox era that I'm desperate to return to. Not just the Xbox, but the PS2, the GameCube, and even the Dreamcast; for me, that's when consoles still had that joy and whimsy to them before gaming got too serious and companies stopped doing fun stuff with their devices.

Well, if you want to go back to that time, someone has ported the original Xbox dashboard to PC. Not recreated. Not re-imagined. Straight-up porting it over to people's computers for you to run yourself. And the best part is, with a little bit of tinkering, you can get your Steam games on it, too.

This ported OG Xbox launcher is going to be my fascination for the next week

Okay, maybe two weeks

As spotted by Windows Central, this amazing feat was shown off by @dtoxmilenko over on X. The best part about this project is that this is the actual original Xbox dashboard, reverse-engineered and tinkered to work on computers. That's as close as you can get to the real deal without actually booting up the console.

The reverse engineering also meant the developers could add some extra features. For example, @dtoxmilkenko showed off an integration with Steam, where they imported a handful of their games using Title Maker. Now their Xbox dashboard has a dedicated Steam category, and their games have a title, an image, and a description. Incredible stuff.

If you'd like to try it yourself, head over to the TeamUIX website and download it right now. Be warned; the website does say it's currently "very buggy, very beta," and the repos are private, but I feel that's a small price to pay to feel like you're booting up Halo: Combat Evolved for the first time again.