I looked through my bash history and it looks like I needed it to build an Xbox eeprom editor for Xemu. Xemu doesn't (or at least didn't, I haven't used newer versions yet) have a built in eeprom editor and editing the Xbox eeprom is required for enabling both wide screen and higher resolutions for the games that support them natively.
I just looked at Xemu's documentation, and it looks like they've added a link to an online eeprom editor, so the editor I used (which they do still link to) is no longer required.