Azimuth - Forza Horizon 2 Windows / Linux Port Released

Forza Horizon 2 was released back in 2012 for the Xbox One and Xbox 360, sadly never receiving a PC port. Like most Forza games the music seems to only be licensed for a couple of years, so the games get delisted for sale and essentially lost to time.

This is where Azimuth comes in. Azimuth is a wrapper that runs the Xbox One version of Forza Horizon 2 on Windows 10, 11 and even Linux through Proton. Azimuth translates the Xbox's WinRT calls to Win32 and Xbox DirectX 11.X to desktop DirectX 12. The end result is you can play Forza Horizon 2 on Windows and Linux without emulation.

As no emulation is involved Forza Horizon 2 even performs really well on low power handheld devices like the SteamDeck!

You have probably not doubt seen lots of decomps and recomps of old games recently thanks to the advancements of Ai. Azimuth caught my attention though as I believe this is the first ever Xbox One game that has got an unofficial port to the PC, a very good port at that I might add.

Azimuth's key features include:

• Resolutions from 720p up to your display's own
• Aspect ratios: 16:9, or your display's own shape (16:10, 21:9, 32:9)
• 30 fps, 60 fps, or higher, up to your display's refresh rate
• HDR10 output, with a calibration page
• Four graphics presets
• Anti-aliasing: off, MSAA 2x, MSAA 4x
• Every text language the game has, and a separate speech language
• Audio: Stereo, 5.1, 7.1, or what Windows uses

I've actually put around 4 hours in to playing Forza Horizon 2 on my Lenovo Legion Go so far and have been really impressed with just how well this works, so much so I thought it was news worthy for Digiex.

I'm playing the game at 1080p and it is pretty much locked to 60fps with the Legion Go limited to a 20w TDP to save battery. To make things even more impressive my Legion Go also runs SteamOS (Linux), so I'm running a Windows port of an Xbox game on Linux - rather inception like.

You can read more and download the PC port of Forza Horizon 2 on the official Azimuth release page.

The only downside is you need an Xbox One that has not been online for a couple of years to dump your own copy of Forza Horizon 2, however if you Google "FH2_Anthem_1.0.0.64_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe.rar" you might be able to find the files you need to test out Forza Horizon 2 on the PC.