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

Good move.

[keiferb]

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.

Re:Good move.

[Rick the Red]

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.

Yes

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

Guess who purchased the company who made Virtual PC?

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

Hard drive?

[cbirdsong64]

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.

Re:Hard drive?

[JorDan Clock]

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.

no way

[Jakobud]

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 :)

reasons MS can't be backwards compatible.

[king-manic]

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.