Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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.

1 of 94 comments (clear)

  1. 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 :)