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.'"

Comments

HOld up...

[Punboy]

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?

Re:HOld up...

[Punboy]

Ok, so they'd have to write a complete Xbox emulator. If I'm not mistaken, such things have /already been written/ to run on /much slower/ PC's

Yes, they are a bit glitchy, but they dont know as much about the internals of the Xbox as MS does, as well as MS has the time and dedication to make such an emulator work.

Emulating the 733Mhz Xbox on a far-superior triple-core 3.2Ghz PPC would be child's play.

Re:HOld up...

[WouldIPutMYRealNameO]

Really? I can't find anywhere that people have writen emulators that run the Xbox on non x86 hardware. I found some stuff that suggests people have emulators working on x86 hardware though. This isn't the same thing though. I think that emulating hardware in software is extremely difficult (if it matters at all, I've done it for a simple FPGA design & it is not fun) - The graphics card is different, fine if you only used DX9 in your xbox game, sucky if you talked right to the metal. And I bet that most good games put a lot of work into getting the best out of that specific chunk of hardware - multiple cores don't matter one little bit when you are emulating a single core machine, so you need to emulate a 733Mhz Celeron on a 3.2 Ghz PPC I really don't think that this will be child's play, otherwise MS would be shouting backwards compatibility from the roof tops. Instead all we hear is how "some games will work"

Re:HOld up...

[Trepalium]

'd be inclined to think things might be easier to translate one direction than the other

Yes, emulating x86 on PPC is probably far easier than the reverse. There are relatively few features that a Pentium III varient would have that would be absent on the PPC (and as you said, Microsoft already has VirtualPC). Going in the opposite direction means you're always starved for general purpose registers, which means you have to store and load them from memory. This can kill performance quite rapidly.

Frankly the CPU emulation is the easiest part. There are a number of tricks that the xbox crew can use for accelerating the emulation, such as shipping PPC native versions of common xbox libraries. Unfortunately, with any form of emulation there can be problems with things like timing -- code that works fine on the real machine might lock or crash waiting for an event that happens sooner or later than it expects. Take the PS1 support on the PS2, for example. You can tell the PS2 to read PS1 discs at full speed, and it works fine for some games, but others lock up or crash when you use this feature.

Next is the graphics chip. Anyone who's ever used DirectX can probably tell you that the nvidia cards do act somewhat differently from ATI cards, even though most of that is supposed to be hidden by the DirectX API. Assuming everyone used the high-level API (and that may not be a valid assumption), it's quite likely that some games rely on bugs in the API. Emulating a bug (aka Undocumented Features!) can be extremely frustrating.

Re:HOld up...

[oldwolf13]

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).

Re:HOld up...

[KDR_11k]

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.

DON'T DO IT

[vga_init]

It's not worth it.

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.

Re:DON'T DO IT

[Jesterboy]

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.

Re:DON'T DO IT

[Hikaru79]

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.

Don't worry about it too much. Microsoft's Windows is already broken enough as it is.

Re:DON'T DO IT

[vga_init]

Ah yes. :-) I do love ZSNES and MAME, and those are first class examples of first class emulation.

If done perfectly, emulation is very poweful and reliable. I'm merely worried that not enough time and energy can be spent before the shipment date of the 360 in order to build such a great emulator. Perhaps I underestimate Microsoft, but we all know how many years of development it took for programs like ZSNES to win the sort of compatibility it has.

Rather than saying emulation sucks, I should qualify that poor emulation sucks, and I hope you'll agree that we stand a chance of receiving less than ideal emulation from our friends at Redmond.

Try porting

[vga_init]

Thinking about the compatibility situation, I came up with an interesting idea.

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. :-)

Re:Try porting

[the-stringbean]

This ain't gonna happen, for 2 main reasons:

1. Developers want to get on developing titles for the 360 not mucking around with XBox titles
2. Assuming something silly like 5% of a game is binaries or nVidia specific - 5% of say 6Gb is going to be in the region of 300Mb multiply this up by say a dozen games and you're suddenly up to 3 or 4Gb of storage just for binaries. And remember this has to be downloaded via XBL...

Going down the recompile route is not feasible. Developers won't take the time to port games and you end up with a logistical nightmare when trying to distribute the ports. And then you still have to deal with the issue of shoddy ports - and yes these will happen.

The only choices are either extra hardware or emulation.

Re:Ready? Set. Bash!

[Sancho]

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.

Levels of Abstraction

[Detritus]

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.

Re:Firmware

[badasscat]

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.

Re:It's about time someone said it

[rohlfinator]

I'm confused. Are you trying to troll, or are you just masking your valid questions with troll-like whining? I can't really tell. But since you requested intelligent discussion, I'll bite. It might be long, though.

First of all, the sequel argument. You say you have 100 original PS2 masterpieces, right? A quick glance at any top-rated PS2 games list reveals dozens of sequels. Metal Gear Solid, Grand Theft Auto, Gran Turismo, Tony Hawk, Burnout, Devil May Cry, SSX, Soul Calibur, Madden, Ratchet & Clank, Prince of Persia, Tekken, Final Fantasy... I could literally go on for pages. Does that make them bad games? Of course not. For example, Final Fantasy X is drastically different from the original Final Fantasy. Prince of Persia: Sands of Time is a completely different (yet equally great) game compared to its ancestor. The same applies to Nintendo. Sure, Zelda and Mario have been around for around twenty years, but each iteration of those franchises is almost always unique. Zelda: Twilight Princess has very little relation to the original Zelda, apart from the main character and gameplay style. Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat resembles the 1981 classic only in its name. The game is a completely different experience.

Online: You're right. It's kind of a shame that the GameCube wasn't taken fully online, though one look at the Xbox division's finances will give you the primary reason. The console that's marketed as the ultimate online experience has only about 10% of its userbase playing online, all while Microsoft is losing millions of dollars supporting it. Sony also supports networked games, but from what I've seen and played, it's much less refined, and ultimately a less rewarding experience than Xbox Live. Solutions? Most GameCube owners I know use their consoles primarily for local multiplayer and single player games, opting to use computers for online games, where the concept has been far more supported than on any console.

The controller? Everyone has their own opinion, but at the time of its release, the GameCube was widely considered to have the most ergonomic controller of all three next-gen systems. This opinion may have changed once Microsoft released the Controller S, but the controller is still far from "crap". I have semi-large hands, and I've never had a problem with its size. Its button placement is unique, and superior for certain game styles. The controller was designed to make it easy to press multiple buttons with one thumb, and many games support the feature nicely. Unfortunately, a lot of developers have lazily ported games from the PS2 and Xbox without altering the control setup to support the design. As for your "10 year old son" comment, it was immature and unnecessary for an "intelligent" post, and the "fanboi" and "holy war" comments probably won't help avoid flames either.

Now, the "sexual activity standpoint", or feminine appeal department. I know several GameCube owners with girlfriends or wives, and many of them say that their significant others enjoy playing games like Animal Crossing and Mario Kart rather than traditional, violent games. Nintendo has always striven to produce games that appeal to everyone, and females are no exception to that. I hear that the recent DS title Nintendogs has had unprecedented success with Japanese women.
I also can't help but question your credibility when you claim that your wife married you for your PS2, not to mention the fact that you have both a "super hot wife", a 10 year old son, and a "super hot girlfriend". But whatever. I guarantee you that sexual activity is not the primary selling point for the majority of console owners, though.

Really, is it that hard to understand that people enjoy different types of games? Personally, I would never spend $50 on a Madden game every year, but I know that many people do. It doesn't take a whole lot of explanation. People like it, just like people like Nintendo games. Apparently the press does too, because the GameCube has been home to many of the top-ranked games of this generation. Maybe you don't see the appeal of the GC, but it doesn't take much thinking to see how someone else might.

Oh, and just for the record, this entire thread is completely off-topic.

History Error

[Ondo]

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.

Re:Terrible Article

[gabebear]

"I highly doubt wine has a hardware emulation layer, since a huge percentage of desktop Linux boxes are x86 or some compatible 64-bit architecture"

Wine doesn't really have a hardware emulation level when running on x86, but when running on different architecture QEMU can be used as a hardware emulation layer under wine.

"I'm fairly sure a 3+Ghz chip can emulate a 733Mhz one (celeron, not PIII, by the way), especially one with a smaller instruction set like x86("

The x86 has a MUCH larger instruction set than PowerPC RISC(Reduced Instruction Set Computer) CPU, you have that backwards. The Celeron in the XBox only differs from a PIII in that it has half the cache(128K vs 256K), but you are correct that it is a Celeron.

"My parents 133Mhz celeron can emulate an N64, which is much more specialised and not-computer-like than the 360 will be, and my PC can do it plus some heavy texture up-scaling and anti-aliasing)."

UltraHLE and many other N64 emulators are special cases. UltraHLE is more API emulation than hardware emulation, but this is only because the most N64 games used a VERY narrow set of instructions, any game that did anything exotic has to be specially tweeked.

"Yes, [the 360's CPU is] simplistic, but so is the xbox CPU, and I'd guess that they're limited in mostly the same areas."

HA! The PIII Celeron is still a relatively modern desktop CPU with MMX and SSE, which deals with generic code with good branch prediction and out-of-order execution. This is exactly the stuff that was left out on the 360's CPU which will need very finely tuned code to perform well.

"The reason wine devs have so much trouble making wine work is that they don't know how windows works."

Yes, Microsoft is the best qualified company to rewrite Windows, but Windows is also probably the largest collection of kludges ever. Reimplimenting just the XBox's implementation of DirectX7 100% accurately would be an amazing feat.

"$10? Is that supposed to make you seem sure of yourself?"

Nope, but a wager would make this a lot more interesting, how about it?

Ugh, what a read

[bobstevens_took_my_n]

I have to agree with those who have pointed out that this article is terrible and full of baseless speculation. For instance, there's this paragraph...

All console manufacturers require developers to follow certain code requirements to ensure basic quality and functionality. Many of the best Xbox developers, such as Ubisoft and Tecmo just to name a few, have gone above and beyond the requirements. In fact, a few have pushed their games to the metal, squeezing out as much performance as possible from Microsoft's system. So, it's likely that the most technically superior games will be backward compatible on Xbox 360.

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.