> I believe I heard that the xbox360 contains an Xbox emulator for backwards compatibility. If it wasn't the Xbox360 it was some other console.

Yep, the external HDD for the Xbox 360 has the "secret sauce" / binary blobs that allows this to work and emulates certain Xbox games.

Similarly, the Xbox One also has the backwards compatibility library to emulate 360 games, but doesn't require an extra accessory. Each game download contains its own wrapper of the 360 emulator.