Slashdot Mirror
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.
Emulating the NVIDIA chipset on ATI hardware won't be that easy.
AFAIK the DirectX libs & drivers are statically linked into the
games, so "use DirectX" is no way out in this case.
"Backward compatibility is the way to go. Nintendo's Game Boy line has benefitted quite a bit by allowing newer machines to play older games. I don't see why it wouldn't also apply to console systems."
Thing is, though, it's always been done in-hardware (with no emulation) in the Game Boy line - for example, there's a little switch inside of the GBA cartridge slot, which is pressed only by GB/GBC cartridges - this is how it differentiates between what on-board hardware to use.
Obviously, with the Game Boy line, the hardware is so small, that it can be added to a console relatively easily - but that's not quite so easy with the home-console market, where between generations, the capabilities of the consoles, and the kinds of processors they use, tend to change drastically, which can sometimes rule out in-hardware and/or emulated backward-compatibility.
A couple of caveats here on this theory,
1) VPC never performed at an equivalent speed to the native CPU. The best performer was of course Win95, the worst XP. IIRC XB1 was some kinda Windows embedded, so this remains a question.
2) With i think version 3 or version 4 VPC did not support 3D. The performance just didn't cut it. *HOWEVER* since the video in the XB1 is a known, I suppose it may be possible to just automatically route all the video calls to the GPU and just toss it onto the screen. (I am not an engineer so i don't know).
In conclusion, i think the best best would be to just toss an extra x86 cpu on the board with some graphics glue for the new gpu and go that way.
Totally different technology. Transitive is binary translation. Connectic is binary interpretation, as in CPU emulation.
Transitive's technology is more like what Transmeta uses to get various instruction sets to work on their VLIW architecture CPU.
Should have RTFA.
No weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men.-Ronald Reagan
Let's not forget that Connectix wrote Virtual Game Station (VGS), a PlayStation emulator for Mac and PC. So they certainly have experience writing game console emulators.
So yes, they certainly have plenty of in-house experience if all of those Connectix folks are still around.
-Geoff
They're both dynamic binary translators. Binary translation is a technique used to implement emulation quickly. The slow technique is interpretation.
The other, more specialized case is static binary translators, but they can never work in all cases (any code that emits code or modifies its own code will fail). There are no comerically significant examples of static binary translation.
Check out the RedAssedBaboon article which includes a link to a 2003 Wired article where they matter of factly state that the Xbox 2 will use Virtual PC technology to allow it to be backwards compatible with the Xbox.
I was going to be nice, but I see the lusers have been out modding you up and now I just want to start slapping people for their unutterable cluelessness.
*INSERT CLUE TO CONTINUE*
1- they changed CPU architectures.
Okay I am trying hard not to laugh here...
Even as I type I am running Intel x86 Linux *and* Microsoft Windows (at the same time, but different instances) on my PowerPC PowerBook.
Not only has this been done many many times (Connectix's Virtual Game Station that allows you to play Playstation games on the PC or Mac for a start, and there are plenty of other emulators that emulate other chips specifically to allow you to play titles for consoles like the N64 on other platforms), but Microsoft *just purchased* the leading software product which emulates x86 on PPC.
2- They changed GPU's and the previous GPU is hevaily heavily copyrighted.
Are you actually suggesting that would make it impossible or illegal? You'd of course be very wrong on both counts. So what's your point?
Someone already released a wrapper to allow you to run the leading Nvidia demo on an ATI system (as would be the case here), not only that but it performed faster on the fastest ATI card at the time compared to the fastest Nvidia card at that time.
As another example I'd again point to Connectix's excellent Playstation emulator for PC and Macintosh (which was tested in the courts, Sony's law suit failed, twice, in the end Sony just bought the technology from them it was that good).
Just to be clear - Connectix where also the makers of the said x86 to PPC emulator that Microsoft just bought.
3- they have only 5-10 games worth playing on Xbox
Not only do I disgreee with you on that given my own game collection, but I think I've established that I don't think your opinon isn't all that informed.
4- Emu of 3d graphics w/o glitches is a dream. Even ps2 had glitches and it included the god damn hardware.
You only have to be good enough, not pixel perfect in every single title. Virtual PC, Virtual Gamestation (released 1999) and a large number of other emulators pull (e.g. UltraHLE, Project64) it off just fine - certainly well enough it would seem to have been proven. Apparently you have been in a cave for the last 5 years.
Microsoft are the origional developers of both products here and they have huge reasources, talented staff and of course an intimate knowledge of both platforms, as well as a full x86 to PowerPC processor emulator (where as teams like Connectix and the UltraHLE developers had to reverse engineer the systems on their own with much smaller teams and reasources and no inside knowledge and they *still* managed to do a great job). In comparison to what teams like that have already done, for Microsoft doing this would be a cakewalk.
The PS2 used the same memory card inputs for PS1 games, so you could easily transfer your game information from one machine to another. I'm going to guess that the PS3 will have a similar memory card slot. Heck, Sony made a good business decision to require the additional purchase of a memory card to save any of their games.
So we can only hope the following will happen:
- the X2 will have a hard drive
- the X2 will allow the transfer of information from the X1 to the X2 (think of all those custom soundtracks you have loaded up!)
While I can understand that Sony/Microsoft want to head towards online/networked/distributed gaming consoles, there still will be a need for some sort of local data storage. (I'll guess that the PS3 will have a slot for a Memory Stick, allowing you to do digital picture slideshows).
Last time I checked, neither the Xbox, or the Xbox 2 are/were running Unix-like operating systems...
-phixxr
ungggghhhh