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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.'"
If Apple can whip out a way to make the PPC software run at near-native speeds on their new intel boxes, with ENTIRELY different chipsets and such, how come Microsoft with all their crazy engineers cant do something similar to get the i386 code to run on the PPC and work out some sort of translation layer to translate the nVidia to ATI instructions?
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Let's say the consumer has old XBox game A. He loves to play A a lot. This guy buys an XBox 360; he heard it also plays original XBox titles. The fact that it only plays certain titles slips by him, and the marketing on the box is too slick to put enough emphasis on this fact. He tears open the box and tries to load his game. If he gets a message that says his game isn't supported, he'll scream and throw the new system out the window. If the game starts to load, and is playable (but only to a point, with lots of glitches/slowdowns/whathavyou), he'll get a serious bad impression of the 360. If the game loads but encounters a fatal error consistently during gameply, he'll scream even louder and throw the console through TWO windows.
Emulation sucks. When consumers get backwards compatibility, they expect 100%. That's what they've been getting so far. Partial compatibility will have buyers a little sore, and if Microsoft isn't VERY diplomatic about the gamer's experience, they might become downright angry, and lots of windows are going to get broken.
And just think; this ugly PR nightmare could all be solved by simply not attempting backwards compatibility. It's all or nothing, folks.
Why not port the titles? I don't know how large the games are, but you could have the developer port and recompile the game engine onto the XBox 360. Connect to XBox Live, insert your original game disc, have the XBox identify the disc for you and then download the new game binary (if available) onto its hard drive. Suddenly, the game runs perfectly. :-)
It's a fair bash.
I picked up an ad for the 360 from a local store (Hastings). The ad promoted the system's backwards compatibility with older, Xbox games. If only a handful of games are actually backwards compatible, that's verging on false advertising.
Of course, it's only Microsoft's "fault" if they actually advertise it as such or suggest that retailers do.
Anyway, I'd even be happy with 90% compatibility, but if the blurb is even halfway correct (and who the hell knows these days) then claiming that the device is backwards compatible is pretty much a lie.
I doubt we will every know how much some form of Xbox backwards compat is going to cost MS since it will just be part of the larger losses for the division.
Paying engineers to retrofit existing games and the infrastructure to test and distrubute the patched executables is going to be fucking expensive.
Not only is the upfront cost of actually going through fixing most games in the Xbox library very expensive, but this isn't a situation like MAME where it is something you are downloading for free and can't demand that games work flawlessly. If the Xbox games that are hacked to run on the 360 don't work just like they did on the Xbox MS is going to have a PR disaster on their hands.
I don't know why MS didn't just stick to saying backwards compat just isn't something they see as important/vital. This has got to be a nightmare for the Xbox team.
They mind as well do a xbox-updates website like windows-update.
The day a new game console requires a windows-update-like web site is the day I go back to playing my Atari 2600 exclusively.
From the article:
Sony, of course, gained major kudos for the addition, showing up Nintendo, which never made its consoles backward compatible (though it reversed that trend with GBA).
Nintendo made the GameBoy Color backwards compatible long before the PS2.
Usually, games that go "above and beyond" to get extra performance do so by making their code lower-level and more system-specific. If anything, it would make these particular games harder to emulate, as they would be less tied to the D3D API and more tied to the specifics of the Xbox GPU.
So either I completely missed the author's logic, or he's got it 100% backwards.