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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."

9 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
    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.

  3. 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 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.
    2. 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.)

  4. 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).

  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?

  6. 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.