The X-Box did a pretty good job of fucking up consoles as well.
Before the X-Box, the "console wars" as we know it hardly existed. Oh sure there were rivalries and potshots between owners of Playstation and Nintendo and Sega systems, but on the same level as rivalries had been back in the 80s between home computer users. In the 80s PC gaming was a joke, a side attribute to what was a workstation for all intents and purposes, but by the mid-90s that had clearly changed, but the mentality hadn't. So the PC was rarely dragged into these disputes and no one ever claimed that the PC was any "Glorious Master Race". (Even if they should have when the console emulators started rolling out.)
Up until 2000 multiplatform releases were mostly a matter of finding people willing and capable to port a title to a platform with sales potential, even if it meant that the game had to be downgraded and lose features to fit on the platform, then trying to get all those versions released in roughly the same timeframe. In some cases a platform was using technology that was either oddball or way ahead of the curve (Sega Saturn) so conversion jobs were often pretty tough. By the time Microsoft steamrolled into the gaming market they were securing exclusivity deals that either delayed titles from being released on other platforms, or flat out prevented titles from being released on other platforms, even though these other platforms were not only perfectly capable of running the titles "as is", but could actually run them better. Don't forget that the X-Box is little more than a PC in a tripped-out casing with a controller attached, it didn't take people long to realize that, and before long people were asking questions like: "How come this X-Box title isn't available for my PC? My PC can run it perfectly fine."
I'm pretty certain that a lot of X-Box users felt cheated by their purchase, but they'd be damned if they ever admitted it. Naturally there were people that had no clue what the gaming landscape had been before the X-Box, so those (and their "descendants") just jumped on the bandwagon and are still herpaderping the gaming scene, even today. But this added a new edge to the console rivalry of old, and turned it into a full-scale war. Somewhere along the way someone finally noticed that the PC is a stronger gaming platform than the consoles, and whatever technological advances the consoles may gain with each new release are quickly left in the dust with the PC's constant strides in hardware technology. Then they heard about the emulators and everything went nuts. That was when the Live stores starting selling retro titles specificially "re-programmed" (read: Used emulators) to run on modern consoles, and users started coming up with ways to make some of the emulators work on their consoles.
