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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."

5 of 28 comments (clear)

  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. 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
  3. 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..."
  4. 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?

  5. 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?