Halo 1 And 2 In Hi-Def On 360

Bungie has confirmed via one of its weekly updates that Halo 1 and 2 will be playable on the 360. Moreover, they'll look even better as gamers will have the option of watching in 720p as opposed to the original console's 480p. From the article: "But here's another bonus - the hardware in the 360 can do a lot of nifty stuff, and specifically in the cases of Halo and Halo 2, it can display the graphics in wide screen, at 720p, with full scene anti-aliasing. And it doesn't look kludgy, artifacty or smeary like an upscanning DVD player. The best way to describe it is that both games look like they're running on a PC at those resolutions."

Comments

Wow, newer 3D chips are faster?

[the_maddman]

So, they're saying the newest 3D renderer can run the engine at a higher resolution? I never would have guessed on my own. Looks like the "Patch" to make Xbox games run on the Xbox 360 might just be replacing the engine, rather than trying to emulate x86.

Just Like A PC

[Chrismith]

"The best way to describe it is that both games look like they're running on a PC at those resolutions."

To further maintain this illusion, Microsoft has said that the games will randomly crash to a faux "desktop" and occasionally display a Blue Screen of Death, requiring the system to be restarted.

In related news, MS recently announced the addition of Clippy to the multiplayer modes. "It looks like you're trying to pwn n00bz..."

Re:Just Like A PC

[VividU]

Good god. I hate to be a sour-puss here but how is this funny?

Clippy and BSOD jokes? This is 2005 right?

Re:Just Like A PC

[Elite Xizer]

I've used Windows since 1995 and the last time I saw a blue screen of death was 6 years ago.

Re:Just Like A PC

[NanoGator]

"To further maintain this illusion, Microsoft has said that the games will randomly crash to a faux "desktop" and occasionally display a Blue Screen of Death, requiring the system to be restarted."

You're saying it's retro, too? Neat!!

Re:Just Like A PC

[KDR_11k]

You see, Nintendo plans to support games from all their past consoles on the Revolution, to counter that MS will support all errors from all their past OSes...

Re:Just Like A PC

[mink]

When I got to work this morning a laptop that was sittling idle with WIN2k runing on it had BSODed overnight. It had been last re-booted the day before yesterday.

Well.

[Brantano]

Have you ever taken an older game, and forcefully applied AA and AF to it, and then set it to the highest resolution it can go? It normally looks worse than without AA and AF.

Re:Well.

[Guspaz]

Umm, no, they usually don't, especially when the developers provide a patch to support the new settings rather than a user forcing it.

Go back about as far as you can in the 3D spectrum to glQuake. That's about as far back as you can go on modern hardware. Now, crank up the res, apply AA, and AF. It looks like... you increased the resolution and applied AA and AF. How does it look worse? I mean, the textures are sharper at distances, the jaggies are gone, and everything is just sharper in general due to the higher resolution. I'm not seeing your point here.

Re:Well.

[king-manic]

Umm, no, they usually don't, especially when the developers provide a patch to support the new settings rather than a user forcing it.

Go back about as far as you can in the 3D spectrum to glQuake. That's about as far back as you can go on modern hardware. Now, crank up the res, apply AA, and AF. It looks like... you increased the resolution and applied AA and AF. How does it look worse? I mean, the textures are sharper at distances, the jaggies are gone, and everything is just sharper in general due to the higher resolution. I'm not seeing your point here.

You can have the engine re-render eveything at a higher rez but you can't re-patch all the textures so esily so it will look a bit fuzzy simply because the textures will now have to be upsized (stretched). It will beb etter on a big TV becaus eyou can now see mroe detail but it will suffer from a bit of fuzzyness

Re:Well.

[KDR_11k]

Tell ya what, those textures will be stretched anyway when you get close to them. Just they now use trilinear filtering so they look blurry instead of blocky.

Re:Well.

[Guspaz]

You can have the engine re-render eveything at a higher rez but you can't re-patch all the textures so esily so it will look a bit fuzzy simply because the textures will now have to be upsized (stretched). It will beb etter on a big TV becaus eyou can now see mroe detail but it will suffer from a bit of fuzzyness

Actually, no. Textures are the same as before, exactly. Things are not fuzzier, they are exactly the same. The only difference is the number of pixels used to make up the texture. If the texture is low-res, adding more pixels isn't going to change anything if you were already seeing it close up.

In fact, higher resolutions allow for sharper textures in the distance, because at that point you've got less pixels on-screen than in the texture. This means that you are actually gaining additional detail. And as I mentioned, close up textures are the same as before.

And, for your information, texture filtering is not "fuzzyness".

Re:BFD

[hillg3]

No, they're saying that your copy of halo 1 & 2 for the orginal Xbox will run on the 360, only better - keeping you original investment, not buying a new version. Lets see your $500 computer run full screen antialiasing in 720P on your TV :P

Mouse Please?

[oni]

My problem with consoles is that I like FPS games and I just can't play a FPS with my thumbs. Can I plug a usb mouse in an use that to play halo?

Re:Mouse Please?

[interiot]

Answer: yes

The biggest limitation they talk about is not being able to instantly do a 180, but that seems semi-realistic anyway.

And yet..

[AsiNisiMasa]

Still no XBL play for Halo 1. If they can do it on XBC, why can't Bungie and Microsoft work soomething out?

Re:And yet..

[Fred Or Alive]

Becuase to add Xbox Live support they'd have to recode parts of the game to add Live. Xbox Connect is basically a hack that makes your Xbox think it's on a LAN with another Xbox, it doesn't modify the game itself to say add voice and friends support actaully into the game itself. It isn't clear if the Xbox 360 version even touches the game code, if might just be running the game in an emulator. Even if it is recompiled[1], it's doubtful they'd want to spend the resources to adding (and debugging) new features, it would probably cost too much.

AFAIK Bungie said that the Halo 1 network code isn't that good for internet play, as it wasn't designed for it, so they'd probably want to replace that if they did an online version for one thing.

[1] Which I kinda find doubtful, as Microsoft would basically have to pursuade every 3rd party to either recompile their game, or give Microsoft the source code so they can recompile.

720p vs PC

[DeadBugs]

"The best way to describe it is that both games look like they're running on a PC at those resolutions"

720p is 1280x720.

1080p is 1920x1080 and many PC games can run at or above 1600x1200.

Re:720p vs PC

[interiot]

Key word: "at those resolutions".

The point they were making was that some manufacturers might take a normal 480p game, with 480p textures, and simply upscale it to 720p, and claim it outputs 720p, but the game would have fuzzy textures, and fuzzy edges.

But they're not simply upscaling, the game is actually rendered at 720p, so it will have sharp edges, and sharp-to-semifuzzy-textures. It will look just as sharp as a PC playing at 1280x720.

Re:720p vs PC

[rylin]

Which games do > 1600x1200?
Neither FEAR nor Quake4 run at 1920x1200, my monitor's native resolution.
They're capped at 1600x1200.
Same with remote-desktop :(

Re:720p vs PC

[Ford Prefect]

But they're not simply upscaling, the game is actually rendered at 720p, so it will have sharp edges, and sharp-to-semifuzzy-textures. It will look just as sharp as a PC playing at 1280x720.

It looks a bit odd, though. Take this screenshot as an example - there are some really lumpy pixels on the cables and archway to the left of the picture.

Actually, I've just spent the last ten minutes making some rubbishy animated GIFs comparing differences between screenshots.

Here's one comparing Xbox and Xbox360 shots - there's definitely a difference, but there are horrible jagged pixels on the wires to the left on both of them.

Here's another comparing Xbox and Xbox360 shots again - go on, tell me which one's which. ;-) One of them is slightly better, with anti-aliasing on a lot of edges, but what's going on with Sarge's holster? Chunky pixels!

And finally, my favourite. Comparing the 1280x720 image with a version scaled down to 640x360 and back again. Here I chucked away three-quarters of the information in the screenshot (I did a nearest-neighbour scale down to 640x360 in The GIMP, a cubic scale up to 1280x720 and applied 40% sharpening). First of all, try to tell them apart - there are some slight differences on near-horizontal lines, but otherwise the 1280x720 image might as well have been rendered at 640x360 then scaled up to the larger size.

Either these are extremely bad screenshots (they did mention having to grab the video), or there's something very strange going on. I hope it's the former, but there still isn't much improvement over the original Xbox...

Re:720p vs PC

[KDR_11k]

I'm not sure about FEAR but have you tried setting:
r_mode -1
r_customWidth 1920
r_customHeight 1200
in Quake 4?

Re:720p vs PC

[DeadBugs]

http://www.techreport.com/etc/2005q3/hires-gaming/ index.x?pg=1

Several games benchmarked at 2048x1536

Re:BFD

[drewmca]

I'll give you credit for trying, but that's pretty weak. Don't you mean that your $400 console looks as good as your $500 PC? If you don't want to buy an xbox then don't, but that's just weak.

What about the Rev?

[KinkoBlast]

Nintendo says some old (nes-era) games might be updated. now THAT would be a better look than the origional!

Is this really impressive?

[Anonymous Coward]

"And it doesn't look kludgy, artifacty or smeary like an upscanning DVD player"

Are they really trying to make something out of nothing? I personally have not worked with a modern gaming console, but (being that these systems are, unlike a PC, typically designed around 1 or 2 standard resolutions) wouldn't it make sense to have the Resolution controlled by the system's API? Even if it wasn't, it would be trivial for the 360 to recognize a XBox game and reject it's settings for Resolution, Anti-Alaising and Antisotropic Filtering in place of its own settings.

Seriously, I could understand 'bragging' that they used image processing algorityms to improve texture quality, or possibly that they used subdivision to improve the models, but bragging about increasing the resolution and improving Anti-Alaising?

Re:Is this really impressive?

[kaptron]

yeah, it was a pretty lame comparison. It's like saying, "it will actually run at a higher resolution, not all crappy like when you resize a 320x240 .avi to full screen! Behold the technology!"

Re:Is this really impressive?

[Saffaya]

You have to compare apples to apples. The improvements made by the Xbox 360 on running Halo 1 and 2 are to be compared to what enhancements did the PS2 when running PS games. Bungie is busy working on Halo 3 to counter the Ps3 launch. Microsoft is busy launching the 360 worldwide. I am personaly very happy they took the time to enhance the halo games to 720p, as it is what I hoped for since the time when I heard they were doing a new xbox.

What?

[Gogo0]

And it doesn't look kludgy, artifacty or smeary like an upscanning DVD player.

What kind of shit hardware does this guy use to "upscan" (upconvert) his movies?
I guess the whole home theatre community obsessed with picture quality has been wasting hundreds of dollars on upscaling DVD players, because apparently they look kludgy, artifacty, and smeary -not better.

Re:What?

[Keeper]

Its the difference between rendering at the target resolution and "blowing up" the image to the target resolution. One yields a higher quality image than the other.

PC?

[Admiral Frosty]

The best way to describe it is that both games look like they're running on a PC at those resolutions.

Heh, imagine that. A console that looks as good as last years PC. What will they think of next?

Re:PC?

[Fred Or Alive]

Heh, imagine a PC that you don't have to upgrade for about five years, where newer games look better than older ones on the same hardware? :-) :-) :-)

But PCs will always have th graphical edge, but I personally keep on getting the impression you need to be in a near-constant upgrade cycle if you want to keep your PC near the cutting edge. I don't plan to buy a next generation console until it's about £150ish (and I can see which one has the best games). I doubt I'll get my PC up to a reasonable gaming spec for that, it would probably be a squeeze to get it up to spec for the £280 an Xbox 360 is supposed to cost.

Re:BFD

[hunterx11]

In fact, the PC port of Halo was so badly done that a $500 PC won't run it much better than an Xbox.

Uh...

[Lord_Dweomer]

Wait...isn't the Xbox essentially a computer? I would HOPE it would look at LEAST like that.

Yet another reason why most PC FPS fans won't buy Halo.

Ok, and?

[Chowderbags]

I don't know what games other people are playing, but high-res Halo is maybe up to the scale of PC games, if we were back in 2002. Seriously, there's no comparing X-Box 360 graphics with the mainstream computer graphics of today. Take a screenshot of Half Life 2 and compare it to Halo 2, and Halo 2 will be blown out of the water, hands down. Seriously, consoles haven't been cutting edge in graphics since what, the Atari? Even with all of Microsoft's muscle, there's only so much they can fool people into thinking that this will be the panacea for the gap between consoles and computers, beacuse it's not.

Hard Drive

[solive1]

But in order to play Halo, do you need the hard drive for the 360?

I would suspect that you do (I thought I remembered reading that backwards-compatibility required the hard drive), but I'm not sure.

Re:BFD

[thesnarky1]

Lets see you upgrade the hard drive in your XBox in a year when you want more space. WithOUT violating the warrenty.

Re:BFD

[KDR_11k]

It can do that on a PC monitor and at 72Hz but I don't think anyone put enough effort into a TV out to have a PC send a HDTV signal.

What about...

[PKFC]

...the multiplayer map pack? Will that be installed on the HDD the same as before and will it be able to be accessed in the same way? Would there be effectively a compatibility zone on Xbox 360 HDs to let Xbox games still feel at home with the bigger HDs?

Re:BFD

[HarvardAce]

It can do that on a PC monitor and at 72Hz but I don't think anyone put enough effort into a TV out to have a PC send a HDTV signal.

Umm...maybe you didn't put enough effort into finding a solution. You have a few options:
1. Many HDTVs have DVI inputs -- you can hook this up to your DVI out on your video card (if it has one)
2. If your HDTV has an HDMI input, you can buy a converter to match up to your DVI out on your video card.
3. If your HDTV doesn't have DVI/HDMI inputs, or your video card doesn't have DVI output, you can always get a converter to go from VGA to component. A quick search of google popped this one and many, many more.

Re:BFD

[Rowan_u]

It's also worth mentioning here that the PC port of Halo 1 didn't support anti-aliasing at all. So, this will be our first opportunity to play the original with this feature. I consider this to be a MAJOR boon for the Xbox 360. If this sets a precedent for all backwards compatible games to be unconverted in this manner, it will extend their lives onto HD televisions quite nicely.

However, just like we were all abysmally disappointed with the PC port, if there are any framerate issues with Halo 1 or 2 in 720P there will be hell to pay. Especially on Xbox live. If 360 players suffer from a multiplayer disadvantage there will be uproar.