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Xbox 360 Gets Backwards Compatible, Final Fantasy
databeam writes "The official Xbox 360 press conference was Monday evening, and an AP article has news that the 360 is backwards compatible, and that Square Enix will be releasing Final Fantasy XI for the console." Coverage also available at Gamespot. From the article: "Along with a firm release date and price point, the other big question surrounding the 360 was backward compatibility with the library of games from the original Xbox. Robbie Bach, senior vice president and chief Xbox officer in the Home and Entertainment Division at Microsoft, made Xbox fans around the world happy when he announced that the 360 will indeed play Xbox games." Mostly. Gamasutra points out that backwards compatibility will be selective, with most but not all of the top selling games supported. Kotaku and the Guardian Gamesblog have firsthand accounts from the event, and to watch the conference for yourself Xbox.com has the footage. Update: 05/18 20:49 GMT by Z : Of course, not all the people there were people, if you catch my meaning.
PS3's backwards compatibility is simple: In addition to the Nvidia-driven gfx and hardware of the PS3, it has the PS2 emotion engine circuitry built-in. And since the PS2 had the PS1's circuitry built-in, you get 2 generations of backwards compatibility.
Xbox is more or less a P3+Geforce4 design. Somehow I don't see it being feasible for Microsoft to miniaturize the xbox logic and slap it onto the Xbox360 motherboard. Xbox360 will probably require a xbox-live download for emulation instructions that allow it to play whatever selected Xbox game you want to run.
Nintendo revolution's backwards compatibility is relatively simple as well: From all accounts, its architecture is an extension of the gamecube's architecture: GC had a custom IBM Power chip called "flipper", and a simple yet powerful gfx solution by ArtX (later acquired by Ati) that uses embedded 1T-SRAM. Revolution is supposed to have an IBM Power-based cpu and an Ati gfx solution that, surprise surprise, uses embedded gfx memory as well. I'm betting the new hardware's just a superset of the old.
------- "From bored to fanboy in 3.8 asian girls" ----------
Most European friends say meh to XBOX 360 apparently.
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http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid
E3 Opinion: Xbox 360 is outgunned and outclassed by Sony's PS3
http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=5
Xbox 360 fails to convince in LA
What, like the infamous phantom console?
After modding the original Xbox I have:
...and I may be missing a few. The Playstation emulator sucks a bit but everything else works like it should. I gives the option to play almost all the games of the past...and that's more that I'll probably ever play.
ColecoVision/Adam Emulator
Apple ][ emulator
Atari 800/5200/130/320/XL/XE Emulator
Intellivision Emulator
Nintendo64 emulator
Laserdisc Arcade Emulator (Dragons Lair, Space Ace)
Sega master system Emulator
Game Gear Emulator
Sega CD
Sega 32X
Nintendo
Super Nintendo
Gameboy / Gameboy Advance
Killer Instinct 1 and 2 arcade
Turbo Graphics 16
Atari Lynx
Mame
NeoGeo CD
NeoGeo Pocket Color
Wonderswan
Playstation
and
Scumm (Lucas Arts Games)
My Xbox Live Gamer Card
Although I don't have the figures to hand, I'm pretty sure that Nintendo were a close third place with Sony in 1st and M$ only just second. Also, it's also worth pointing out that of the three, Nintendo is the only one who also makes money selling the consoles. For both Sony and M$ the console is a loss leader.
Because the corporations that produce the games really aren't into re-writing a game for nothing to satisfy a few people who will use the backwards compatibility.
You still want to run all xbox games? keep an xbox, hey they'll be going dirt cheap anyway soon. Much like ps1's are now, I found it cheaper to buy a ps1 second hand with 9 memory cards rather than buy a memory card to replay ff7.
+----------------- | What is the question!
The NextGen systems are looking like there's not gonna be enough room (in the budget or the design) to support this concept. I'm looking at Sony to have the best option (finally fixing the antialiasing hardware bug!!!) and that the games will have improved graphics and load times like they did on the PS2.
Not since Marie-Antoinette played milkmaid has looking simple and honest been so fake and complicated.
Microsoft purchased Virtual PC a few years ago to tackle this very problem. Remember how they had hundreds of labs set up with g5's? Everybody saw this coming, that is, everyone except ignorant fucks like you who can't take off their Microsoft bashing glasses long enough to get a fucking clue.
[ ...the games companies won't have lost thier source, can't they just recombile for for the PowerPC... ]
You never worked for a game company before, have you?
The game industry moves so fast that in many companies by the time a gold CD ships, the team is already broken up and working on other projects that are late with nobody left over to tidy up.
VPC is slower under the G5 than it was under the G4 -- the G4 can flip its byte ordering to match the x86.
I've got a 1ghz G4 ibook, and benchmarking some of my own code under VPC show it running at about 750 mhz equivalent. This is fast enough, btw, that apps compiled with the MSVC compiler can run faster under VPC than they do compiled natively with the GNU compiler, and before you flame about compile options, neither the MS nor GNU compilers were using any aggressive optimization options -- the point is that the CPU emulation (at least on the G4) is good enough that it falls into the noise category.
The IBM-sourced G5 in the new macs doesn't support the byte-order flag, and working around this causes a huge performance hit. What is still unknown is if the XBox360 version of the PPC supports the byte-order flag -- if they're serious about the emulation then it may well.
What *really* sucks about VPC are 1) the graphics emulation -- it currently emulates an old dumb S3 chipset, and 2) it takes a little bit before he's got a good working set loaded into his translated code cache, which means it can be sluggish for awhile. Hopefully VPC is getting much better graphics emulation capability for the next version.
emember, Live is now part of the system package, available to everyone for free.
A very limited Live Silver package is for free - you get game updates and can buy/sell on the "micromarket". For Live gameplay you need to upgrade to a paid subscription - like today's Live.
for the PS2, the entire PS1 circuitry was located away from the emotion engine, and tucked away in the peripheral IO processor.
Do a little research before making baseless accusations of baseless assertions.
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From the numbers I've seen in NPD, the Xbox has about 2x more total units sold in the US than the GC. It has roughly half the installed units as the PS2.
I didnt have the old information on hand, but some web searching pulled up the information.
NPD sales numbers for January 2005
PS2 - 488,000
Xbox - 241,000
Gamecube - 114,000
NPD sales numbers for February 2005
PS2 - 533,000
Xbox - 212,000
GCN - 116,000
NPD sales numbers for March 2005 (through April 2nd)
PSP 620,000
PS2 495,000
XBX 227,000
GC 94,000
NPD sales numbers for April 2005
PSP = 351,000
PS2 = 332,000
Xbox = 153,000
GCN = 63,000
Hunt your preferred prey at Aliens vs Predator MUD. Join the war at avpmud.com port 4000
If you buy an Xbox you'll need to get a mod chip and a larger hard drive and install it. That's about all there is to it. You'll also have a controller to use on all your games.
As far as the emulation goes, I would say that the NES and Genesis are 100%. I think the SNES is pretty much 100% other than maybe a games with custom chips that don't work properly. They all run at full speed with sound. Even Surreal64 (emulating the n64) has many games that run at full speed w/ sound. MameoX is working really well now that they added in virtual memory support. It worked great before but it couldn't load the larger roms on the Xbox...now it can. Almost all of the emulators you can get for the Xbox are ported from their Win version so you can expect about the same results on the Xbox.
As an added bonus to your "ultimate console" you can use Xbox Media Center and stream movies, music, photos, etc, from a network share. And if you decide to get some Xbox games to play but can't get online to play them because Xbox Live bans you for having your Xbox modded you can get XLink Kai http://www.teamxlink.co.uk/ and play on it for free. They even wrote a firmware update for the Linksys WRT54G (which is what I use) so you don't have to use a PC to setup games online. It's all done through XBMC.
My Xbox Live Gamer Card
3 G5 procs (PPC) and a 733Mhz Celeron (X86) in such a tiny case? That's one heck of a kludge, and then you'd have to deal with two kernels. In the case of the PS2, the PS1 chip actually handles some IO functions, so it's not just sitting around.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Actually, worldwide sales indicate xbox is in 2nd place and gamecube is in third. Not exactly a distant 3rd, but 3rd nonetheless. Worldwide Hardware Sales (End of 2004) PlayStation 2 - 81.39 million Xbox - 19.9 million GameCube - 18.03 million Game Boy Advance - 65.74 million Nintendo DS - 2.84 million Sony PSP - 0.51 million N-Gage - 1.3 million PSone - 101.73 million North America PlayStation 2 - 32.86 million Xbox - 13.2 million GameCube - 10.11 million Japan / Asia PlayStation 2 - 19.47 million Xbox - 1.7 million GameCube - 3.78 million Europe / PAL PlayStation 2 - 29.06 million Xbox - 5.0 million GameCube - 4.13 million Worldwide PlayStation 2 - 81.39 million Xbox - 19.9 million GameCube - 18.03 million All Three Consoles North America - 56.17 million (47.08%) Japan / Asia - 24.95 million (20.91%) Europe / PAL - 38.19 million (32.01%) Worldwide - 119.32 million source:http://forum.pcvsconsole.com/viewthread.php ?tid=8498&page=2