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What Xbox Games Will Be Backwards Compatible?
alvinrod writes "IGN has whipped up a nice article about how and which Xbox games will be compatible with the Xbox 360. The article explains that Microsoft is using emulation to play old Xbox games rather than including the chipset from the original Xbox. From the article: 'Xbox 360 compatible games are going to be decided on a case-by-case basis. Microsoft's engineer's are, right now, figuring out which games are compatible, and which are less than compatible. Thus, at the 360 launch, only a few games, let's speculate that number is somewhere between five and 20, will be backward compatible.'"
It's one thing to write a system call compatible graphics library. It's much more difficult to handle programs that directly access the graphics hardware, and there are often compelling reasons to directly access the graphics hardware in high-performance applications.
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While I do appreciate your point of view and you make a very valid point for how this sort of partial compatibility could be very frustrating to the consumer, please don't take it out on our dear friend emulation.
Emulation doesn't suck; what about MAME and ZSNES? In fact, emulation is a great way to ensure near perfect ports of the games, as long as you have the processing power to do so. Moreover, if you have the spare processing power, you can use it to make the games nicer, such as the various stretching / smoothing routines available in ZSNES; your old games actually look better emulated.
The problem seems to come from the difficult to emulate GPU, not emulation itself. As such, it sounds like what Microsoft might be doing is some ad hoc driver system, where each game has a specific driver that handles the GPU calls in such a way as to work for a particular game. Either that or they are actually going to try and emulate the GPU instructions on a piecemeal basis, fixing the most common first, and then releasing version patches over XBox live while enabling games that are "friendly" (IE, emulate well, using the article's vernacular) under the successive versions.
This former does sound kind of flakey, but the latter sounds like a true emulator. Most emulators go through this kind of compatibility shakedown phase since certain instructions are used a lot, whereas other instructions are used much more rarely. The upside is that if they do this, it's possible it will eventually emulate all XBox games, possibly with some graphics enhancing options. I guess only time will tell how well their backwards compatibility really works out.
I *believe* what the XBox SDK does is add the DirectX (8.0 I think?) libraries, and at compile time link them staticly. So it's almost like coding to the hardware in a sense that the directx layer is at the SDK level ONLY, and in the actual games it uses these compiled in libraries to hit the metal. There is no directx libraries on the xbox harddrive (although I often wonder why they didn't do that).
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MS didn't do that because it'd allow them to update the library in the SDK without having to make sure all shipped games work 100% with the new library.
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