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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.