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Halo 1 and 2 On The 360
Next Generation is reporting on possible graphical improvements for Halo 1 and 2 on the 360. The source? The folks at Bungie mentioned some surprises in their most recent update. From the article: "Some better anti-aliasing would be a nice touch, though more computationally intensive. While we're asking for pie in the sky things, some up-rezzed textures for use in the now higher resolutions might also be a great addition, though this would require content resources (e.g. real money spent on games that aren't likely to continue selling to 360 owners) so this is even less probable than the previously mentioned upgrades. Also, those textures would either have to ship on the hard drives (very unlikely) or be downloaded via Live (more possible but still unlikely)."
Better anti-aliasing isn't pie-in-the-sky for the XBOX-360. It's a given.
First of all, it's not a matter of "better", Halo 1/2 didn't have ANY. As for it being a pie-in-the-sky idea, the 360 was designed from the ground up to run FSAA on every single game. The GPU has specific on-chip cache to accelerate anti-aliasing. So turning on AA in the backwards-compatibility patch is a no-brainer.
As for higher-res textures, it's not such a crazy idea. As I understand it developers often produce media at higher resolution than the final in-game res, and then scale it down. So the media probably already exists, meaning it's not a major monetary investment to produce it. The problem is of course, as mentioned, distribution. Selling a high-def content pack isn't out of the question. Throwing it online could work, but we are talking about a fair chunk of data here. A few gigs most likely. Certainly possible, Valve has proven that by pushing multi-gigabyte games through STEAM, but it might not be practical on a console like it is on a PC.
Something else to keep in mind is that the 360 ships with an overpriced 20GB drive, so there isn't exactly a lot of room there. Before you point out that it is a notebook drive, you must understand that it is overpriced even for a notebook drive. For $100 US, I expect an 60GB 4200RPM notebook drive, considering that such drives cost about $90 US at marked-up retail. Anyhow, if you throw a few gigs onto that drive, right off the bat you're eating up a pretty hefty chunk of the drive for one single game.
ignorance.
Backwards compatibility is the ability to play the last gen games on the current gen systems, NOT to upgrade performance. You start adding little tweaks and stuff you start risking problems with the game. It's entirely possible that when everyone puts in their precious halo they will crash the compatibility engine, what a fine way to start the launch of a new system.
Sadly the fact is that Microsoft is trying to get people into the Xbox 360 for all the wrong reasons. They want people to play just Live enabled "mini" games, they want them for backwards compatibility, they want it to be the entertainment system.
Last I checked the PSX tried to do all of this and it didn't come to america. Why because that isn't a game system. Making two different console versions isn't a game system. Pushing stuff like this will only cause issues with compatibility. If not now later. Even if this works flawlessly every time, it wastes resources of the programmers, You can put a really bitching functionality in but it needs the Hard drive, now you decide if you exclude some gamers/versions of the console (and go against Microsoft's promises... as Microsoft has said this will not happen), Do you make it optional (thus making the optional hard drive now a way to divide people) and take more time making sure the game works fine on BOTH versions of the console, or do you exclude the idea all together.
The idea of variety is good to the consumer, but you have to realize testing will take longer if you try to utilize the optional hardware, it'll also be more expensive, you'll have to waste resources on making everyone compatible with BOTH systems, and it'll be a basic waste overall. Companies like EA constantly make games for multiple systems.. but they have the staff for it, Companies like Rockstar, or Insomniac don't really want to program for multiple systems at a time, some are willing to port.
Adding this functionality to Backwards compatibility just is the same as wasting resources and risking problems in which games will lose compatibility, or gamers will become disenfranchised.
A PSX game on the PS3 should play the same as it did on the PS2 and the PSX, If there's a way to avoid crashes or faster loading, great, but it should be essentially the same experience, this is the way it always is. If you want an updated version to be released sell a add on or a new game for 20 or 30 adding in the required functionality, you're fans will pay that money, MGS2 Proved that, Dynasty Warriors has proved that 2 times already and a third time is coming up, Rabid fans of FF7 has shown they will pay for a 3d updated versions if it came out, Zelda fans went crazy to get emulated sets of the series games. The money gained from this pays the cost of the changes and allows people to choose which experience to have.
Microsoft is going against the grain thinking it will make them different. Sony has proven they know their history, Nintendo of course remembers the SegaCD and Sega 32X debaticles and wouldn't try something like that. But Microsoft has easily put them into a place where they will get hurt.. and when, not if (though this is a long when, it can even be the gen after this) it happens it's going to be hard and probably stop it.
And you've just shown yours. The 360 has no backwards compatibility whatsoever. However they are porting the executables (not the data) of some of the more popular games to give the illusion of limited backwards compatibility. So it's not like they're patching up the existing executables to add new functionatlity, they're just new executables loading the data from the XBOX 1 discs.
Send lawyers, guns, and money!