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.
..that we already had this exact story on the front page a couple days ago, i believe this whole thing is bullshit, i mean, c'mon, their demo was for the 'linux' version of Quake 3 on the Mac -- could they not choose a game which was already on the Mac?
i d= 4429
and also, i think GamesIndustry.biz said it best:
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?a
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The Xbox 2 rumour mill has turned over once again, after a Silicon Valley start-up boasted that a new piece of software emulation technology would allow the next-generation console to play original Xbox games.
QuickTransit, a piece of software originally developed by a computer science professor at Manchester University in the UK, allows the "transparent" emulation of software across different hardware platforms, its makers claim.
Revealing the software to the world, Transitive Corp demonstrated the system running Linux software (presumably compiled on different processor architecture) on Windows PCs and Apple Macintosh systems at performance which, the company says, is indistinguishable from native platform performance.
The comment that has sparked interest in the games industry, however, is a statement from Transitive CEO Bob Wiederhold, who said that the QuickTransit software will allow the next-generation Xbox to run software designed for the current console.
It's not clear whether this is meant to mean that Transitive is actually working with Microsoft on Xenon emulation technology, but a number of factors make this seem like an unlikely scenario.
For a start, the Wired article in which Wiederhold's claim appeared went on to say that Transitive has six customers, all of whom are as yet unnamed and all of whom are PC manufacturers, with no mention of any Microsoft relationship.
Besides, what works for a PC or server environment in terms of emulation isn't necessarily the same thing that will work for a console - which has limited memory, a key constraint on the QuickTransit system, which interprets recognised blocks of code by replacing them with functionally identical blocks for the native processor.
Regardless of how fast QuickTransit's code is, it will also still face major issues in translating the graphics functions of existing Xbox titles, which are written for an NVIDIA chip, into functions on Xbox 2, which will use an ATI chip - not just technical issues, but potentially legal issues as well.
Sources close to NVIDIA have previously hinted that they do not believe that Xbox 2 can play Xbox games without violating NVIDIA intellectual property rights, and that they may take legal action if the Xbox 2 does boast this functionality.
In face of this, it would appear much more likely that Wiederhold simply chose the Xbox and Xbox 2 scenario as an example of one problem which would be made easier to solve using the technology being marketed by his company.
However, the games industry at large is likely to keep a close eye on developments at Transitive in future - as any technology which allows new hardware to cheaply emulate older consoles and platforms would be welcomed by many companies in the market.
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C'mon guys, how many times have we heard of this exact claim from some unknown company, and its turned out bullshit every time!
Newsie, Moderator, www.tauniverse.com
... but thats not the point!
... quite the contrary, apart from a few un-completed ps1 games the majority of my gaming fun on PS2 has been with PS2 flavor games.
This is an interesting twist on a previous slashdot discussion.
However lets put the facts on the table. One of the nice things about Sony's console is the backward compatibility. I am a PS2 person and for me its backward compatibility with PS1 was a definite bonus for me when I bought my next console. Upgrading from PS1 to PS2 for me was a no-brainer, it meant that my old console games would still work on the new box! In retrospect though, it did not neccesarily mean that i still play ps1 games on my ps2,
However I remember thinking and discussing with freinds that if Sony were to make PS2 backward compatible with PS1 they could corner the market... Of course that was before M$ got on the scene. Im not a M$ fan and it will take some huge changes before i feel otherwise, however, from a "make it work" perspective M$ have to make XBOX II backward compatible, even if it is purely from a psychological perspective. People like to beleive that their back-catalogue of game purchases are still viable. Having said that Sony are a generation ahead, PS3 will play all games and beyond. They made some good decisions in the past and it seems that M$ would be silly not to follow suit.
It seems that transitive have an interesting technology, but what is more eye-opening is that microsoft are building on a platform that isnt x86 and that "has" to be a good thing - no matter how much I hate the swines.
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
You might be surprised. See "High Level Function Interception".