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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
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.
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).