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Xbox2 With Virtual PC For Backwards Compatibility

Posted by Zonk on from the thank-the-maker! dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The next Xbox may use Virtual PC for backwards compatibility for original Xbox games. According to reports from Geek.com's Apple insider section the reason for the delay of Virtual PC 7 is because Microsoft has given it exclusively to the Xbox team. The reason hinted at: Xbox will include an IBM PowerPC 970, and current Xbox game developers are shipped G5 PowerMac."

28 comments

  1. hardly new rumours. by gl4ss · · Score: 1, Insightful

    and thin on facts.
    what about the hd?
    nvidias properiaty gfx chip stuff?

    yes, a true tech "journalist"(forum-boy) takes couple of facts and extrapolates from there to an "obvious" conclusion. doesn't make it a fact though.

    --
    world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
  2. Old news by FLAGGR · · Score: 1

    Has been posted before on /., although there a few new details

    1. Re:Old news by BandwidthHog · · Score: 1

      And it will be posted here again a few more times as this worms its way to market.

      Sing it with me now, the next time it comes around on the submission queue!

      --

      Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
  3. Mac Compatibility by BandwidthHog · · Score: 1

    Okay, so what will be the mechanism keeping games from being easily ported to the Mac?

    I'm not saying that an Xbox running a G5 would mean you could simply copy binaries off the CDs and run them on your iMac, but it would seem to me that this would remove most of the larger technological barriers that keep Carmack's crew from simply emitting Mach-0 executables at the flip of a switch.

    The obvious one that springs to my mind is the lack of DirectX, but since they have obviously got the Xbox version of it running on a G5, that's not too much of a roadblock.

    So what am I overlooking, other than licensing?

    --

    Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
    1. Re:Mac Compatibility by gl4ss · · Score: 1

      libraries.

      the same thing that's keeping windows->macosx ports 'hard' now, or windows->linux for that matter.

      *DirectX, but since they have obviously got the Xbox version of it running on a G5, that's not too much of a roadblock.* it is if you can't ship those libs..

      --
      world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
    2. Re:Mac Compatibility by polyp2000 · · Score: 1

      What might also be interesting to speculate is porting the other way around? Would it technically be possible to create OpenGL / Mac games and port to XBox2 (assuming relevant GL libraries were included?) This could significantly help any potential homebrew developers.

      nick ...

      --
      Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
    3. Re:Mac Compatibility by Corngood · · Score: 1

      You are overrating the hardware similarities. I work on cross platform titles, and so little of the code is hardware specific, much more depends on the platform specific software (Win32, DirectX, Sony libs).

      It'll still be easier to port a Win32/DirectX application from x86 windows to xbox than from osx/ppc. Considering the whole XNA thing, it also looks like they are going to be making it even easier.

    4. Re:Mac Compatibility by Hast · · Score: 2, Insightful

      First off, what stops you from taking a XBox2 games and playing on a G5 is the same which stops you from playing normal Xbox games on a PC. Different architectures. While it may be a pretty standard processor, graphics chip and sound chip they are put together in quite a non-standard way. Sooner or later you will be able to run the programs (barring encryption) on standard PCs but by then it will no longer look as hot. (Typically you need "next generation" stuff to emulate a console.)

      If anything I imagine XBox2 will be harder to hack than current generation.

      And furthermore, since current gen Xbox is basically a P3 I'd say that having it G5 compatible will make it relatively harder for homebrew people. Virtually everyone has Wintel compatible (and including X86 Linux and you have even more people) computers. The number of G5 developers is quite small in comparison.

      But in case you haven't noticed there is quite a large XBox homebrew market. You still need a modded XBox to use it, and that is not likely to change with XBox2. It will probably take a while before you can run unlicensed code on it.

  4. How the hell ?! by quantax · · Score: 1

    I am really unsure as to how this would run the games at any respectable speed that they could be played. Unless VPC's performance has been massively increased since I last used it, it would be rather painful to play just about any 3D game on this type of emulation. This seems more like something that might work in theory, but when it comes to real-world performance, forget about it. As it is, normal desktop performance with VPC isnt the greatest for obvious reasons, let alone full-fledged 3D gaming engines. If this is in fact true and is realistically possible, then Mac gamers have much to rejoice for...

    --
    "What can a thoughtful man hope for mankind on Earth, given the experience of the past million years? Nothing." -Bokonon
    1. Re:How the hell ?! by Visigothe · · Score: 2, Interesting

      well, considering the Connectix Virtual Game Station played Playstation games at full speed using hardware from 1997/8. (You could run all the games using a first revision iMac (233MHz G3).) It's not too difficult to emulate the small bits of logic it takes to run a game. It is much more difficult to make *anything* fast. This is why VPC is still quite slow, even on very fast hardware when running "normal" applications. Also, I imagine most stuff is offloaded to the GPU

      --
      Blocklevel: Practical Information Architecture
    2. Re:How the hell ?! by OmniVector · · Score: 1

      if the rumors are true, i'm pretty sure 3 dual core 3.5ghz ppc 64bit chips can emulate the power in a 700mhz celeron currently in the xbox.

      --
      - tristan
    3. Re:How the hell ?! by hai.uchida · · Score: 1

      Yeah but this would be an extremely streamlined version of VPC, designed to do a single function-- emulate games between two specific processors.

      There wouldn't be many of the things slowing VPC down on the Mac-- for example you wouldn't have a complicated OS within another complicated OS (XP within OSX is obviously torture, but NT or 98 emulated on a new dual-boot 1.25 DP G4 running OS 9 is fast, enough to play modern games.)

      --
      my password is private, but unchanged.
    4. Re:How the hell ?! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah but that was a different matter. The PSX and Mac ran similar big-endian RISC processors. The Playstation only ran at 33 Mhz.

      An XBOX runs at 800 Mhz (or is it 1 Ghz?) and is a completely different processor architecture.

      It's not too difficult to emulate the small bits of logic it takes to run a game.

      Bahahaha... Right. Go talk to the MAME developers and see how easy it is. Take a look at some of those arcade machines running 15-30 Mhz RISC processors and they run like crap even on a 3.6 Ghz Pentium machine. It ain't that simple.

    5. Re:How the hell ?! by dstillz · · Score: 1

      The Xbox is 733MHz, AFAIK, and it's a Celeron.

    6. Re:How the hell ?! by antime · · Score: 2, Informative

      As opposed to MAME, this emulator wouldn't need to be cycle-accurate, and all library calls can be intercepted and run natively (including the actual rendering).

    7. Re:How the hell ?! by Corngood · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Why do you think that? How are multiple processors going to significantly help emulation of a single processor?

    8. Re:How the hell ?! by MyGirlFriendsBroken · · Score: 1

      Well, there is always the posibility that one processor could concentrate on dynamic binary translation, which can improve performance Transitive anyway, and another run the translated code.

      --
      If you read a speed reading book, does it take you less time to read the second half?
    9. Re:How the hell ?! by AlexMax2742 · · Score: 1
      Think about it. They are probably tailoring Virtual PC to ONLY play old Xbox games, which had a very specific configuration (not even truely a PC), and only on this particular chipset. Sure, they might make some breakthroughs, but they are going to take advantage of the fact that they are working with two very specific chipsets and get the absolute best transition one could get.

      So although the main VPC product might see some carried over improvement, I wouldn't get too excited.

      --
      I'm the guy with the unpopular opinion
    10. Re:How the hell ?! by Corngood · · Score: 1

      I suppose you could do this, but usually you'd translate code when you need to run it, so the other CPU would have to wait anyway. The other (and probably better) option is to do all the translation at load time, and just cache it on the mass storage (assuming it exists).

  5. Just more speculation... by polyp2000 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    There has been plenty speculation already here and on various other sites. Although it looks likely there is nothing concrete anywhere that specifically states that XBox 2 will use virtual PC (or derivative) for emulating XBox 1. What is clear though is if the XBox 2 is to retain backwards compatibility with XBox 1 there are only two ways to do it

    a) include an x86 processor

    (assuming no need to emulate nvidia chips as the direct x / 3d layer should mean ATI would work as well - assuming game developers behaved themselves)

    or

    b) use emulation
    (speculation about VPC would be the obvious choice - although does not lend itself well to directX / 3D)

    Question is how cheap are 700mhz x86 chips these days?

    Nick ... (See ... I can speculate too!)

    --
    Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
    1. Re:Just more speculation... by Corngood · · Score: 2, Informative

      The question is not how cheap the actual processor is, but how expensive it would be to integrate it into the system. PS2 does a huge hackjob of this with the PS1 processor, and it's much, much simpler than xbox.

    2. Re:Just more speculation... by Zangief · · Score: 1

      a) include an x86 processor

      (assuming no need to emulate nvidia chips as the direct x / 3d layer should mean ATI would work as well - assuming game developers behaved themselves)

      I don't think all developers have respected directX. Yeah, all those PC ports probably do, but some exclusive titles most probably try to get all the juice from the nvidia chip, doing things that will be very hard to emulate on the ATI. If you want an example, take Halo. The PC version needs a computer WAY more powerful than a Xbox, probably due to the fact that Bungie fine tuned Halo for the Xbox. I guess that most of the killer apps for the Xbox are in the same situation (Ninja Gaiden, etc).

      On the other hand, I don't think Microsoft would go to all the trouble to provide backwards compatibility, just to have to exclude the most popular title for their console.

      Question is how cheap are 700mhz x86 chips these days?

      Not much cheaper, unless you buy them used. Moore Law says that you can make a processor twice as powerful as the one you did 18 months ago. But doesn't say that you can make a processor of half the power at half the cost.

  6. Total Bullshit by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 1, Interesting
    XBox is still "up-north"

    VPC team is in Silicon Valley - tied to MS Mac Apps team, and close to Cupertino.

    The barest attempt to research publicly available info will reveal this.

    The VPC Mac folks have alot of former Apple, Taligent and Kaleida folks - none of whom would be big on going to WA, nor would the XBox guys be able to touch them on processor internals, etc.

    --
    "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
    Never been known to fail..."
  7. Backwards compatability with no HD? by DreadPiratePizz · · Score: 3, Interesting

    How exactly would the Xbox 2 be able to emulate a game like Halo, which copies map data to the hard disk, when the Xbox 2 will NOT have a hard disk?

    1. Re:Backwards compatability with no HD? by WoTG · · Score: 1

      Just a guess, how about a half-gig of RAM?
      There had to be some sort of upper and lower limits to how much hard drive space a game was allowed use on an Xbox? Perhaps the lower limit is now in the realm of what would be reasonable with cheap (i.e. last generation) RAM?

    2. Re:Backwards compatability with no HD? by SuiteSisterMary · · Score: 2, Informative

      Based on what I've seen, there's not only a size limit, there's a time limit.

      First time I played Ninja Gaiden, it took a long time to load the first level; pre-caching all sorts of crap. After that, level loads are zip zip zip.

      After not playing the game for several months, the first time I popped it back in...same dealie. Long load time on the first load, then zip zip zip.

      --
      Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
    3. Re:Backwards compatability with no HD? by Allison+Geode · · Score: 2, Informative

      actually, the way it works, from what i've been told: the xbox loads game files onto the hd when needed, and caches them there. it saves caches for three seperate games, and when you play a fourth game, it wipes the oldest cache in favor of the newest one. (quick way to test this: when you play dead or alive 3, the first time you run it, it displays a terms of use agreement. you only see this the first time: subsequent plays don't display it again. however, if you play 3 other games, and then put doa3 in, it will display the terms agreement again (because its 'installing' again.)

  8. The real point of the Xbox 2 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The real trick of the Xbox 2 has nothing to do with the processor, backward compatibility or media.

    The Xbox 2 is a Trojan horse to bring MS into the home entertainment market. What if the Xbox 2 is a set-top box that inclueds not just games, but a DVD player, DVD burner, and Tivo capability through a variant of the Media Center version of XP?

    Heck, throw in a built in Cable Modem, wireless base station, and a USB 2.0 port to connect a portable MP3 player, and now you have a portal to MSN's forthcoming digital music store, and Xbox live becomes part of MSN. The wireless could connect to speakers, and or maybe a vonage style box to offer VOIP service. Now MS has the entertainment hub - buy digital music, store it on the HD, transfer it to the portable player, play games (online), play music, watch movies, record TV, burn recorded TV to disc?