COGBox 0.6 brings online play back to the Xbox 360 Gears of War games on PC, without Xbox Live

Four games and a launcher

COGBox is the work of Shagg and groups native Windows versions of Gears of War, Gears of War 2, Gears of War 3 and Gears of War: Judgment, made by static recompilation. There is no emulator: the Xbox 360 code is translated before you play and a renderer of its own draws with Direct3D 12 or Vulkan. The project is MIT-licensed and is back on GitHub as its main home, with GitLab as a backup.

Online play in 0.6.0

The November 12 release adds online matches between players on different networks, not just LAN. It uses its own matchmaking with a direct connection between players, with no Xbox Live and no relay servers. It includes friends, invites and profile pictures in the launcher's Social tab, three regions (US, Europe and Oceania), and works behind strict home routers without opening ports. It is off until you turn it on, and the launcher can delete your online account. The online play is by Flippage; the mod framework, by KiltedKernel, now allows campaigns of their own.

More performance in 0.6.1

The November 14 release measures gains on an RTX 3080 Ti at 1440p with no frame cap. Judgment goes from 78 to 105 fps on DirectX 12 (34% more) and from 47 to 84 on Vulkan, 77% more. Gears 2 rises from 148 to 174 on DirectX 12. On Gears 3 and Gears 1 with Vulkan the result is the same or slightly worse. The shader freezes of a first play on Vulkan are gone. Judgment also gets back the brightness it has on Xbox 360, since it used to look almost twice as bright.

What you need

Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit, a CPU with AVX2 and a DirectX 12 graphics card. On Linux and Steam Deck it works through Proton, experimentally. You need your own copy of each game and its title update, 8 to 16 GB free per game, and the project includes no game files. We do not link to copies.

Online play sends data to its matchmaking server. Read the privacy policy in the repository before turning it on.