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Will Xbox2 Be Backward Compatible?

Posted by timothy on from the time-will-or-will-not-have-told dept.

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.

13 of 94 comments (clear)

  1. Good move. by keiferb · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Good move. by echeslack · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Well, I think there is more incentive in portable players, simply because you don't want to carry around all the different platforms. But to me, it doesn't make much difference whether I need to have 1 or 2 additional consoles next to my tv. However, I can see the incentive for really serious gamers who own all the consoles in different generations where necessary.

      --
      GMail invites for completed freeipods.com of
    2. Re:Good move. by Rick+the+Red · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Well, it makes a heck of a difference to me whether I need to have "1 or 2 additional consoles." My house isn't big enough for a console collection.

      If the XB2 won't play my XB1 games, forcing me to have two consoles, then the second one might as well be a PS3 (or even PS2!). If the XB2 won't play my XB1 games then it has to be far and away better than the PS3 or I won't have one (fool me once...). If the XB2 plays XB1 games then I'm almost certain to buy one, regardless of how it stacks up against the PS3, because I really don't want two consoles. I don't know how many others are like me, but it's a large enough market that Sony made the PS2 play PS1 games. I hope Microsoft is smart enough to figure this out.

      --
      If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
  2. Yes by RzUpAnmsCwrds · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Guess who purchased the company who made Virtual PC?

    They already have solid x86-on-PPC emulation code.

    1. Re:Yes by p7 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Do they have to emulate the Nvidia GPU? I was under the impression that you used DirectX for the rendering and that spoke to the GPU. Since I am not an XBox developer, I don't know how much access you had to the GPU, but I would hazard a guess that you could create a ATI driver that could replace the Nvidia driver to the graphics API. Of course this is all speculation.

  3. Hard drive? by cbirdsong64 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If this is true, then MS would probably be forced to include a hard drive in the new system in some form, whether it's built in or a removeable one. Some games use it for caching, and most companies don't bother to optimize Xbox save files for size since size is no object on an Xbox.

    1. Re:Hard drive? by JorDan+Clock · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Not necesarily. They could just make the games think there is a hard drive and save to the memory cards, or simply have a seperate cache. There are lots of options others than putting a hard drive in it.

  4. no way by Jakobud · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This isn't gonna happen for 4 reasons:

    1. Emulating an nVidia gpu that is only a few years old. There just won't be adequate processing power for this... Look at console emulation as it is right now. The best example of modern console emulation is with the original Playstation being emulated pretty well, but still not full speed with all games. The Playstation is more than 10 years old.

    2. Emulation of an nVidia chip would cause some legal problems I believe.

    3. Lack of Hard drive in XBOX 2. This has come straight from M$. How are the old games that use the hard drive going to deal with that?

    4. No White and Black buttons on the XBOX 2 controllers. According to M$, the XBOX 2 controller is going to use all the same buttons and joysticks as the current one, except they are getting rid of the black and white buttons. How are the old games that use those two buttons gonna handle that?? No more Flashlight in Halo I guess :)

  5. reasons MS can't be backwards compatible. by king-manic · · Score: 4, Insightful

    1- they changed CPU architectures.
    2- They changed GPU's and the previous GPU is hevaily heavily copyrighted.
    3- they have only 5-10 games worth playing on Xbox
    4- Emu of 3d graphics w/o glitches is a dream. Even ps2 had glitches and it included the god damn hardware.

    --
    "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
  6. Re:Ignoring the fact... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    No no no. The biggest caveat is M$ will be at "innovation territory". That's something M$ has never been able to do. They do their best work when they come in second and steal someone else's idea.

    Netscape first - IE second
    Apple Os first - windows second
    Playstation2 first - Xbox second

    I'm sorry, but why isn't it "stealing" when Netscape/Mozilla was based on WorldWideWeb; MacOS was based on Xerox's work; and Playstation 2 was based on the dozen or so consoles that came out before it?

    But, hey. It's all coming from someone who writes "M$," so we'll call it par for the course.

  7. Re:Ignoring the fact... by Dot.Com.CEO · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Netscape was NOT first, I guarantee you that, I used Mosaic much before Netscape made a name for itself. Xerox had a GUI project much before Apple, actually, Apple settled with them on that. The Playstation2 vs XBox "argument" is stupid, it proves absolutely nothing.

    --
    Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
  8. Who Cares? by Reapy · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Why do people need to do all this guesswork. Wait until an official release of the specs, then decide if you want to buy it. How does knowing if it's backwards compatable effect you now? I mean you have a 50/50 shot of being right or wrong, so you don't even get bragging rights for predicting whether it has it ahead of time.

    Well whatever, speculate on.

  9. Considering how cheap Xboxes are... by AvantLegion · · Score: 2, Insightful
    ... and how much more expensive Xbox 2's are going to be, if you have the money to buy an Xbox 2, and you haven't bought an Xbox to play Xbox games by now, then obviously Xbox games aren't very important to you.

    Many people who cry about this are very obviously PlayStation fans who have no real honest interest in the Xbox/2 to begin with.

    Backwards compatability is always nice, sure. But it's just a bonus. Anyone posing as someone as someone with hundreds of dollars in their wallet that they can blow on an Xbox 2, but haven't bought a dirt-cheap Xbox to play all those games they seem to want to play and play them between NOW and late 2005/early 2006, well, they're just bullshitting.