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Xbox 360 Backwards Compatible?
Gamespot is reporting that, on the OurColony.net 360 footage, current generation Xbox titles are viewable being played on the 360 console. From the article: "There is also a screenshot of the new Xbox Live dashboard with the words 'Xbox 1 Zone' clearly marked and an icon of the current Xbox title Fable. Finally, a screenshot of the forthcoming Xbox Live Marketplace clearly shows Halo 2 maps being offered for download. However, while such shots imply backward compatibility, such functionality is not yet official. Microsoft executives have said themselves they cannot address the issue until next Monday's media event at E3--at the earliest."
How much you wanna bet that XBox will be as backwards compatible as DirectX?
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
Good news all around for the Xbox if this is true. At least it will put off a lot of the nay-sayers here on Slashdot. (Or not.) ;)
Who cares? If you love your old XBOX games that much, just keep it and play your old XBOX games on it. This feature seems to be just another "tick" for the marketdroids to put in the box.
..er now I'll go play GTA3).
I ask this in all seriousness. The only time I used it on my PS2 was to see if it actually worked (It did! yay!
So is there a good reason for 90% of people to care about backward compatibility?
ps I don't own an XBOX yet so I'm trying to be objective here.
"My cat's breath smells like cat food." - The Tao of Ralph Wiggum.
I do wonder if the backwards compatability with the Xbox 360 had anything to do with their purchase of connectix in february\march 2003(which was mainly for virtual PC and to be able to sell windows to mac users). .
It looks like the plans were already well underway by that time to use PowerPC based procesors in the Xbox 360
I know most of the VirtualPC codebase is mac specific , but alot of it could be adapted for the purposes of the xbox 360.
I still don't see how they will manage it without some form of speed hit , if they do manage atall.
well , we shall have to wait and find out .
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
This HelloGamer article has a supposed leaked XBox Live survey that confirms backwards compatibility.
My guess is that Microsoft will do what Sony did with the PS2: if a game works, it works; if not, tough titties. (I have had plenty of PS1 games freeze on my PS2.)
Perfect Dark Zero, done by the kids who originally set the bar for console first person shooters with Goldeneye on the N64. I don't think Halo is that great, but I love playing it with my friends, and it's what all my friends have. I think Perfect Dark Zero is going to be a much better game, plus it'll be the launch title everyone gets and plays.
I drives up the price of the new console and it vastly reduces the potential resale value of the old one.
The only group of people that will benefit is the people who did not own the previous console, but do the new one, and are intrested in buying games for the old console (which will also drop in price alot slower than if backwards compatibility was not included)
Except for portable consoles (where it is invonveinient to carry around a GB, GBC, GBA and a DS) there is minimal need to include backwards compatibility, the old consoles (should) still work, its is just a phrase that the uninformed consumer likes to hear.
oxymoron of the day - Xbox gamer
But didn't Sony hire a bunch of emulator authors a while back? Who is to say microsoft didnt do the same thing, but more hush hush than what sony did. The emulation scene saw more than a few projects discontinued this year alone due vague reasons. At any rate, having the option for anti-ailsing, higher resolutions, or things like 2xSai for textures might be nice to have, implemented in Microsoft's machine or Sony's.
Instead of emulating everything, I bet high-profile games and games that are in the platinum selection will simply be ported over to the new architecture. I mean, unless the game used a lot of assembly, the code should pretty much compile from one platform to the other, except for the shader code. So the only thing you have to do is put the old Xbox game in, the 360 reads the DVD header, realizes it's Forza, downloads a game update for it that replaces the executable. Now, when the 360 detects that game, is boots the 360 executable version from the HD or memory card instead of the version from the DVD. After all, all the content can be reused. Only the actual executable and dynamic libraries need to be ported.
1: Halo 2
2: Splinter Cell Chaos Theory
3: Unreal Championship 2
4: Forza Motorsport
5: The xbox specs are a 733 mghz P3 processor with 64 MB of RAM, while the xbox 360 specs are 3 3.2 GHZ IBM processor with 512 MB of RAM.
How can they not be able to make a decent emulator with that kind of technological buffer?
Beyond the Polygons : Because 50,000 polygo
Xbox games are written in a high-level language, typically C++, and they are written towards a high-level API for graphics, sound, user input, etc. If Microsoft decides to change the hardware, the API and language stay mostly the same, so porting to the new console is a relatively easy task as the feature set on the new Xbox is a strict super set of the feature set on the old Xbox.
Most people don't know this, but the original Xbox went through several revisions, which made significant changes to the firmware, chipsets, and other hardware used inside the box. These changes were significant enough to break certain lower-level unofficial programs such as BIOS loaders and modchip BIOSes.
My point is that the new Xbox is most likely not backwards compatible in the traditional sense. However, Microsoft designed the development tools in a way that allows easy porting to other Microsoft platforms, assuming developers use good programming practices.
1.So I can play what I missed (I've seen others play) from the xbox 1 generation: Fable, Unreal Championship 2, Shenmue II , etc.
2.On launch, xbox games will be much cheaper and abundant than xbox 360 games.
I feel the need to do a Nelson.
With a controller that doesn't contain the black and white buttons found on the Xbox Controller-S (and nothing added to replace them), how would one be able to play a game designed with those buttons in mind?
To me, that was always the major clue as to whether the system would allow you to play original Xbox games. Of course, the controller design could be slightly changed, but as it stands now, all other arguments aside, I don't see how it could happen.
I am sure they will figure out a way to deal with the nVidia legal issue.
Xbox360 will be backwards compatible for:
1. They want to sell a lot of xbox360 before PS3 launches.
2. Many good games are coming for the current xbox before the holiday season (I am waiting for Lockdown, Godfather). They want to sell those games also. They don't want to give a choice to parents between a $150 system that can keep a child occupied for at least 1 year with the current library and a $298+ system that has a few games available (maybe $50+).
Why not buy the new system that can play all the current Halos and SplinterCells as well.
3. Xbox production rumored to be in its last stages. The last thing they would want is xbox hurting the sale figures of xbox360.
It WILL be backwards compatible if these games release for current xbox, which looks like the most probable case.
I really doubt it is backwards compatible. I am leaning more towards some popular titles being recompiled and worked on enough to run on the 360.
A dual 2.7GHz G5 can't even run Windows at a great speed, and there is no support for 3D hardware! The 3core CPU in discussion here is most likely in order and possibly slower in raw power than the dual 2.7s are.
Now I'd love for it to be backwards compatible, but it seems rather unlikely. Old versions of VPC had 3D support once though, so perhaps they could do it with very specific hardware? And keep in mind we're going from different shaders, too.
People have posted about how many users don't care about backwards compatibility, well guess what? microsoft does and its target base do. 1)Microsoft always has been losing money on the Xbox hardware itself, but the software, not only from their own games(Halo2) but also from royalties that they get from the developer, they make money from the games. If they make it backwards compatible, they can kill the production of hardware, and yet still keep getting money from game sales. 2)Microsoft wants to reach into the game market and grab more market share. They have sold only 20 million Xbox compared to over 60 million PS2s. They want to recapture their old market, and add on, so they want to appeal to people who don't have an Xbox, but will get an Xbox360.
Save as...didn't work for me. Just click it:o lony_v1_750k.wmv
http://msxb.wmod.llnwd.net/a274/o2/ourcolony/TheC
Personally, I did not see anything telling about the video. Firstly, while they do show some games being played, it does not show the 360 running them at all. No one in the video says they are running on the 360 either. Granted, one would suspect that they would only show game clips from actual 360 games, but perhaps the games they showed will have 360 versions of them available at launch. I don't know how popular that other game mentioned in the article is, but Halo 2 is/was a huge success for the Xbox. It would make perfect sense for it to be available on 360 in some format. (Either via backwards compatibility or just a 360-specific version.)
Furthermore, the Fable icon doesn't tell me anything either. Look at the ending credits and you'll see "Fable 2". The Fable icon on the 360 UI is the only place I saw any reference to Fable or anything that remotely looked like a Fable-related game. Therefore, I would deduce not that the 360 is backwards compatible, but rather that Fable 2 will be available on XBox 360.
I'm not saying that the 360 won't be backwards compatible (I hope it is) but this video does not imply what the article states.
Can I still play my DDR on it? I know that is hooks up to the controller port, so if the '360 is wireless, can I still play? That would really tick me off.
If you actually pay attention while watching the video, you'll clearly see the games shown are being played on regular Xbox's with the black controller S. As for the Live screen showing Halo2 and such, more than likely it's just an update for the original Xbox's Dashboard, so they can interact with Xbox360 users better, and have access to the marketplace(If you consider that a lot of people will still be playing on the original Xbox, it makes since that to make the marketplace a success, they'd port it to the original Xbox as well).
The Xbox360 might be able to emulate a 733Mhz PIII ok, but the first Xbox(180 degrees?) is MUCH more than just that one chip - It's a tightly integrated GPU-chipset-memory-CPU setup with LOTS of specific hooks and tweaks and Nvidia copy-righted whiz-bang that games were highly optimized to.
The Xbox360 CPU must emulate the whole machine, not just the PIII part. The Nvidia graphics stuff will not be able to be offloaded onto a very different ATI chip, for legal and technical reasons. The whole platform must be emulated.
Now a high-end Dual-G5 can emulate a PIII at ~600Mhz, WITHOUT 3D graphics. Factor in how much less efficient CPUs are a with graphics rendering (ever try playing HL2 or Doom3 with a software renderer?). An example of this are N64 emulators and MAME: All 3D is done with the CPU and it takes a really fast machine today to play stuff from last generation. Current gen stuff runs like a slide-show, if at all.
If they pull this off, MS deserves a golf clap.
"Cheeze it!" - Bender
Are you implying they're going to rerelease old Xbox games compiled for the Xbox 360? This seems highly unlikely.
My guess is no or limited backwards compatilibity. I think if it was fully backward compatible they would have annouced it around their craptastic MTV launch. My guess is they want to hold off on the backwards compatibily annoucement as long as possible so it doesn't take down any of the buzz until enough has been generated that it won't make a big impact. Hell, they might even wait until preorders are in before annoucing it. At best they might have backwards compatibilty for new games that used a certain SDK and did not use any customized code. Just a guess.
Xbox Live dashboard with the words 'Xbox 1 Zone' clearly marked and an icon of the current Xbox title Fable.
Seems like that might just mean that XBox Live will maintain backward compatibility for people who still have XBox1.
From TFA:
If you look at the video carefully, although it does show these games being played, it does NOT show them being played on the Xbox 360.
Halo 2 is shown at 00:45 and 4:22, but you can't see what console they are playing it on.
MX vs. ATV Unleased is shown at 1:09, but you can clearly see they are playing on a regular Xbox.
Sign the make Xbox2 backwards compatible online petition, over 30,000 signatures so far!
I heard that it would be BC for only the popular games (Halo, Fable etc). It's not yet clear.
If the XBox360 is backward-compatible why MS is not PR about that.???
It's obvious they don't have it now and still working on it.