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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.'"
Begin bashing Microsoft's business practices....now.
Spell cheek you've failed me four the last thyme!
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?
If you like what I've said here, and want to read more, go to http://www.krillrblog.com
It will be interesting to see whether M$ is the proverbial Early Bird, or Early Worm.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
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.
Can someone tell me how this is even a concern when all they have to do is probably download newer firmwares in the future. They mind as well do a xbox-updates website like windows-update.
Ultramix 2 not mentioned :(
That game isn't a "game". It's my workout. My daily workout.
I don't want a 360 anymore....
Tepp
Isn't that forwards compatible?
The article goes on to say that it's the proprietary routines in the GPU that will cause the problem, since those are found in the nvidia graphics chips. What I found interesting was Microsoft's own need for emulation, re-writing proprietary graphics routines much the same way that wine or other emulators need to in order to do their jobs. It makes me wonder if Microsoft will wind up on the other side of the gooey emulation stick.
This article tells me nothing that I haven't already known for a couple of months now.
First of all, it's been known for a while that the plan is to have all Xbox games eventually playable on the 360. Here's confirmation of that. It's likely that a few of the more obscure cases may end up not working (the same is true for the PS2 and the GBA), but the plan is to make the emulator complete. So IGN's little "let's spread fear that Panzer Dragoon Orta won't be playable, based on no facts!" rant is silly.
Another problem is that the authors of this article apparently doesn't understand console emulation, which is why their estimated playable titles number ("let's speculate that number is somewhere between five and 20") is so ridiculous. Generally you create the emulator to be fairly full featured and then test a whole bunch of games on it. Then you improve the emulation for certain games that you are targetting. As compatibility for these games (like Halo 2) gets better, those improvements will automatically apply to a huge number of other titles as well. It's not like you have to do the same amount of work for every game to get it functional - a huge portion of games end up compatible for 'free'. Because of this there's simply no way you can guess how many titles will work at launch. The only way I could see the number being that low is if MS' emulation testers don't have enough time to check enough games. It would be nice if the 360 has some kind of secret feature to force an emulation attempt, but I rather doubt that.
Last I heard MS had excellent developers working on the emulator (including some MAME and VirtualPC devs) so I expect good things. We admittedly don't know much yet. But this article is just all silly guesses with an implication that there is actually solid information behind much of it. That's BS.
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. -- Francis Bacon
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. :-)
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Almost every descision announced for the 360 or PS3 makes it look more and more like Nintendo is making the right moves with the revolution.
In Soviet Russia, backwards is everything.
As if MS needed any more reasons for people to not buy their new xbox...
Just to sum up just what a bunch of boneheads are running the xbox project up in Redmond:
1) First they dig themselves into a hole by thinking they could just slap some commodity x86 pc parts in a box and call it a console. Five billion dollars in losses later they might have clued in as to why that was a idiotic thing to do
2) Because of 1) they lacked the ability to control the technology to implement BC and are stuck with BC being at the mercy of one of their former suppliers - who they managed to generate nothing but ill will with during their time in business together
3) Because of 2) they start downplaying BC in the press and the mantra spreads among the diehard MS/xbox crowd that who gives a shit about BC.
4) Because of 3) everyone is reminded of just why no one cares about BC for the first xbox - the almost entirely worthless library of games that make up the bulk of the xbox aisle.
5) The console geniuses up in Redmond decide that as E3 approach they want to claim to have BC - so they lie about the 360's BC support and try to plant the idea in the console press that the PS2 didn't really have very good BC support(see some of the regular MS/xbox astroturfers here on Slashdot who 'mysteriously' started claiming all sorts of BC problems with their PS2s they 'really own')
6) What the hell BC does the 360 actually have now becomes a constant thorn in any sort of discussion of the console.
If you have ever had met the dopes running the xbox project none of this would be surprising in the least. Basically a bunch of badass retards who work there for a while before being replaced by some new badass retard.
Repeat after me: apostrophe does not mean "here comes an s"
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.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I think that Microsoft doesn't really understand why backwards compatibility is so important. By being backwards compatible it encourages people who didn't purchace their last generation system to buy their new system. Honestly, if I didn't buy a Gamecube, knowing that Super Mario Sunshine, Zelda: Wind Waker, Zelda: The twilight princess, Metriod Prime and Metroid Prime 2, etc. will be playable (and affordable) on the new system makes the decision easier.
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.
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.
That's why Microsoft makes Windows...oh wait..
I never bought an XBox, and I've been telling people I'll probably buy the 360 because it'll be backwards compatible. Now I'm not sure. The 360 games announced so far aren't enough to hold it's weight, and the small number of good XBox game isn't enough to warrant a seperate purchase. And I'm all for the sleeper hits. I think Microsoft is shooting themselves in the foot on this one. Of course, I could be wrong. M$ will just be out one 360 sale.
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Nintendo fanbois? I've been sitting here at my friend's house in front of his Gamecube for about 2 years now while Nintendo attempts to release a single game that isn't a sequel to something I played 20 years ago. 2 years. At home, on my PS2, which by your standards should be less fun than this Gamecube, I have no less than 100 original masterpieces. At least.
In addition, I can't take this thing online. And the controller feels like it's made for the hands of small children. Even my 10 year old son wouldn't put up with this crap.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while playing this Gamecube, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Nintendo fan with a girlfriend, despite the slavish devotion Nintendo fanbois display. My PS2 is the reason I met my super hot wife, and my super hot girlfriend. From a sexual activity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Gamecube is a superior machine.
Nintendo fanbois, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Gamecube over the superior Sony console.
I'm surprised that Microsoft went the emulation route. IHMO doing ports would be better.
They could whip up a wrapper environment that would ease up the task of porting XBox games to the XBox360 to the point where some games only need a recompile, then ask game developers to recompile their games with it (and fix issues if encountered, or just give up if the game is too much bother to port).
Then, whenever an XBox game disc is inserted into an XBox360, the console would perform an online check to see if there is a 360 port of it. If there is one, it would it then run it from the hard disc. Only the binaries would be downloaded, game ressources would still be accessed from the original game's disc.
Free Xbox with every Xbox360 purchase. 100% compatibility garaunteed!
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.
There are only 2-3 snippets of "real" information in the article, and everything in it was revealed during E3. The rest is baseless speculation and theorizing with no applicable first hand knowledge. Nostradomas would probably have done a better job writing an article like this ...
They might change the physical plug. But it's still USB, you'll just need to buy/make and adaptor.
If I remember correctly, Sony went through a lot of trouble getting (all?/most?) PS1 games to work on PS2. Early PS2 models were not 100% backwards compatible, an issue Sony later fixed. Maybe the same will happed with Xbox 360. Or maybe Microsoft just will ignore the people complaining about non-working titles and makes sure the most popular legacy Xbox titles work 100%.
I really don't see a good way out of this for Microsoft. If people's favorite games DON'T become backwards compatible, they're going to raise hell and end up not buying a 360. If, say, a game like Street Fighter Anniversary collection doesn't get ported, a great many fighting game fans will keep their X-Boxes. Sony avoided the crisis that almost came from Gran Turismo 2 not being compatible with the PS2 by releasing Gran Turismo 3. Microsoft will have to work very hard to make sure that they don't piss off their fans.
What is it with MS doing all this half-assed stuff with the 360? It maybe is going to support HD discs through unspecified means, eventually, it is sort going to play old games. There's a vague cloud of non-gaming features they have as well (and Sony has promoting the PS3's non-gaming aspects also). This is just going to create confusion, which will cause people to either avoid the system or purchase it and then get upset and create a backlash when it turns out the feature advertised earlier isn't fully supported.
It sort of seems like they don't know what to do with the system or why people are going to buy it, so they have all these parallel development efforts, and they'll throw out announcements for them now and gauge the reaction to see how they should allocate resources to make one feature happen at the cost of another. I suppose closer to launch there will be a cohesive promotion strategy, and they'll pretend the stuff being talked about now either never really existed or always was an integral part of the system.
This is crazy only some of the games what is that about if they want to be as good as sony why not have all of the games is Mircosoft that bad?
I wish I had mod points :'(
I believe (I am not certain) that all XBOX games are built using the Microsoft supplied libraries.
Therefore, microsoft could release a new compiler and libraries that are source level compatible with the old XBOX XDK libraries.
Then, everyone would just recompile all the games to run on the 360 with the resulting exe files being distributed on XBOX 360 Live and downloaded automatically by the XBOX 360. (game data files would be pulled from the original game DVD just like they are now)
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.
Microsoft was forced to retract their whole 'backwards compatible' statement - they aren't even TRYING for backwards compatibility with the existing Xbox games - they mentioned that if you want the 'xbox 1' games to work on the xbox 360 the developers actually have to recompile their game for the xbox 360 and the game players have to re-purchase the same game again.
This is not backwards compatible whatsoever in my mind, it's milking gamers for extra money for no reason other than to fill microsoft's pockets.
Nintendo and Sony know what gamers want - these days the jump from generation to generation is becoming smaller and smaller and it will be harder for companies to sucker players into buying a new console - for this reason, the backwards compatibility issue is a very large one that Microsoft is completely missing the boat on it seems.
Gekido's Lair
Sony originally said from the beginning that the PS2 would only play some PS1 games. By the time it hit the market, things had changed. I'm pretty sure the PS2 actually plays ALL PS1 games without issue. I guess the emulator they wrote was better than expected.
I would not be surprised if the XBox goes the same way. By the time it's released, they've managed to make it so that it plays all XBox1 games.
I'm perfectly happy having things be backward compatable one generation. PS3 can dump the ability to play PS1 games. XBox3 can dump the ability to play XBox1 games. As long as I don't have to get rid of my entire collection of fun games, I'll be happy.