Will Xbox2 Be Backward Compatible?

An anonymous reader submits "In an interview on Wired News, Bob Wiederhold, President and CEO of Transitive Corporation said QuickTransit will allow the Xbox Next (aka Xbox2, which will have a PowerPC CPU) to run first-generation Xbox games which were written for an x86 Intel chip. Transitive is a provider of software that enables transportability of applications across multiple processor and operating system pairs. This could mean Microsoft will after all make their next generation consoles backward compatible, unlike what was announced in June." I can't quite tell how hypothetically he's speaking; the no-performance-hit OS switching the article talks about sounds pretty hard to believe.

Comments

Re:joke-tag

[damiangerous]

Why? We seem to have no problem believing it when we call that OS "Linux".

You need to recompile an app when you move it from x86 Linux to PPC Linux. I don't think the source code to XBox games was included on the DVD last time I checked.

/. mentality

[TheHonestTruth]

But to me, it doesn't make much difference whether I need to have 1 or 2 additional consoles next to my tv.

I'm no Sherlock Holmes, but I'd bet dollars to donuts you aren't married.

-truth

Re:Ignoring the fact...

[Golias]

Exactly. Who cares about a "performance hit" when you are running games that were designed for a system that runs at a small fraction of the speed of the new one? It will be like assigning mundane chores to Marvin the Paranoid Android.

"Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they only want me to run HALO in two-player split-screen mode with the frame-rate of an old nVidia2 card. God, I'm so depressed..."