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.
"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.
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.
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