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Xbox 360 Backward Compatibility Finalized
News for nerds writes "Microsoft has finally announced the list of the 213 Xbox 1 games playable on Xbox 360 at launch. A software emulator is required for each original Xbox game, which means you need an HDD for these games to work on Xbox 360. While it is expected that the list will grow in future via Live update, as of now it lacks first-party titles such as Project Gotham Racing, and other popular titles such as DOAU/X, Doom 3, Far Cry, KUF, Panzer Dragoon Orta, the Splinter Cell series, and the SW: Battlefront series." Xbox.com is also featuring an interview with Todd Homdahl about the quest for compatibility.
i'm currently playing far cry and battlefront 2 on my xbox, i guess i'll have to keep it for a little while longer... damn you microsoft, damn you to hell, if apple devs can bust out with universal binarys why cant you.
Looks like the entire thing will be (as expected) run off of software emulation. Really, considering the technical challenges involved (I know, software emulation isn't impossible, but the fact that it can run the system at full speed on a completly different hardware type is nice) I'm pleasently surprised at the number of games already available. I also like the fact that the system will run all your old games in HiDef and add a layer of FSAA (almost like the old Sega 32x).
"Risc is good..."
The could offer some sort of trade-in program where you could get the new version of the game on the cheap if you turned in your old disk. Of course most of these games are non-Microsoft products, so such a program would need to be offered by lots of different companies. In the long run this would probably have been cheaper than trying to implement backwards compatibility. Many times the best solution to a technical problem isn't technical.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
Xbox.com: What criteria do you use in choosing which Xbox games will be backward compatible on Xbox 360? How far back into the Xbox game library are you going to go?
Todd: When we say Xbox library, we mean the entire Xbox library. This ranges all the way from our launch in 2001 up to games that haven't even shipped yet.
If they can do 241 games in a few months, including writing the emulator, I don't imagine the rest will take that long. In the meantime, you'll just have to be content with running your Xbox games on your Xbox, tough as that is.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
I was more curious if it would run xbox media centre :)
It's a shame that MS doesn't embrace that project - it's the only thing that would make buying a 360 worthwhile for me right now. Games are fine and all, but a media player that's constantly evolving and compatible with all major formats is an easy-sell.
Microsoft really should partner up with the XBMC folks and just offer free updates of it over xbox-live. Would generate sales from people like me. Heck, I'd probably even buy a few games for it too if I already had one.
I didn't bother buying an xbox until modchips (and more importantly, software like DVD-HD loaders, emulators and XBMC was available). Knowing console manufacturer paranoia, I'm imagining that MS will have locked-up the 360 hardware to insane levels.
Shame really, guess I'll have to wait...
N.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
In the interview, he mentions that people who don't have the Live service will be able to download the new binaries to their computers, burn a cd, put that in their 360 and it'll update. I predict that this is the exact mechanism that will initially be exploited to allow arbitrary code to run on these things. Just a hunch...
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
The first Xbox was an nvidia chip, the new one is ATi - some games contain hardware specific optimizations, and nVidia refused to license them to emulate their hardware, for anyone that actually read up on the issue.
They could've just included an XBOX subsystem inside the 360, just like the Commodore 128 had a C64 subsystem. 99.9% compatibility guaranteed. And didn't the SNES have (to be bought separately) a NES adapter? Didn't the PS2 play PS1 games? Can't the Gamecube play GBA games?
Frankly I can't understand why the decision of software emulation. But well, this is Microsoft.
Although I agree that casual gamers will be most interested in backwards compatability, I find it rather hard to believe that someone would put down the money for a system, then not commit to at least one game. Why buy a system at all? Do you buy a DVD player then play CD's in it for a month until you find a dvd you want to watch?
So what incentive does the developer have to actually write a 360 game? They can just write for the XBox, following the emulator guidelines, and then have a game that will run on both the XBox and the 360.
What, me worry?
Since your two biggest competitors (Sony PS3, Nintendo revolution) have announced that feature? And that it was one of the major reasons the Dreamcast was hurled into obscurity and securing the Playstation's spot as market leader?
So in your mind, the history of game consoles starts in 1999?
The PS1 was obviously not backward compatible with anything and it did pretty well. Same deal with the original Xbox.
Hardware manufacturers made the mistake of putting too much stock in backward compatibility in 1982-1983 too (the Atari 5200, Mattel Intellivision and Coleco Vision all featured adapters that were compatible with the Atari 2600). You know what happened? Every single one of them - every single company making systems at that time - lost so much money with that strategy that they exited the industry within a year. (And probably directly because of that strategy, because it allowed developers to continue dumping poor-quality, obsolete Atari 2600 cartridges on the market, taking attention and shelf space away from the new systems and diluting the market.)
Atari came back in 1987 with the 7800, which was compatible with the 2600 out of the box. You know what happened? The NES - which was not backward compatible with anything - blew it out of the water.
Neither Sony nor MS could even exist in the video game industry if backward compatibility was a requirement for success. They came very late to the party when established makers dominated the industry, and their all-new products did pretty well, I think you'll agree.
Can you say "formula for success"?
No. The results of backward compatibility in the marketplace are mixed at best. For every success (the Game Boy, the PS2) there are probably a half dozen failures. And for every successful console that did feature backward compatibility, there are half a dozen other successful consoles that didn't.
I'd say the record pretty much proves that backward compatibility is mostly a non-issue. There's no "formula" for anything contained in this one feature. It is just a feature. Some people want it, some people don't care, just like some people want a hard drive and some people don't care or some people want custom soundtracks in their games and some people don't care. Is it probably a good thing to include if you can, as simply another feature to attract a subset of gamers? Sure, but if you focus so much on that one feature at the expense of everything else, your console will be a failure. By the same token, if you decide early on that backward compatibility will be too difficult to implement, and you instead work on nailing everything else about the system, then your console will be a success. But success or failure does not hinge on this one feature and history has proven it time and time again.
Note that I am not predicting that the Xbox 360 will be as popular as the PS3; I don't think it will be. But it's not because I think a bunch of people are going to be spending $400 on a PS3 to play their old PS2 games. There are a variety of reasons why I have this opinion, but none of them have to do with the 360's backward compatibility.
So in your mind, the history of game consoles starts in 1999?
It's nothing to do with history. It's to do with what the current compatition are doing. And they are both going to be backwards compatible.
Neither Sony nor MS could even exist in the video game industry if backward compatibility was a requirement for success.
MS is neither here nor there because they didn't win the last console war. Sony did, in no small part because of it's backwards compatibility to the winner of the previous generation. The only console that MS beat was the GC which also wasn't BC. Sony PS1 obviously wasn't BC, but then it wasn't competing against a system that was.
But it's not because I think a bunch of people are going to be spending $400 on a PS3 to play their old PS2 games.
Few people want to lose access to the bunch of games they already have sitting on their shelf, and few except hardcore games geeks want to have more than one console plugged into their TV or to have to swap consoles over when they want to play a different game. So given the choice of a next gen console, they are more likely to pick one that is compatible with the games they already have than one that isn't.
If an emulator must be specifically coded for every title, it doesn't sound backwards compatible at all. It's a bit like calling a wintel box "commodore 64 backwards compatible" since you can code an emulator, but worse since each game needs separate work and a piece of non-standard hardware (the optional hard drive) to work at all.
Metal Gear Solid (can freeze at end of credits due to interrupt desync in the kernel, only happens on early emu versions, as later versions have a patch)
Final Fantasy VIII (fails cheat cartridge check on the first emulator version, so won't boot; subsequent emu versions fixed - also, graphic corruption in some areas)
Chrono Cross (timing's too tight for some versions, FMV bitrates are slightly too high, so can cause skipping (set to Fast and the problem mostly goes away) and the AKAO sound kernel can bug out owing to the slightly different filtershape of the PS2 SPU reverb, because sound was carefully engineered for PS SPU reverb only)
Metal Gear Solid: Special Missions (EU release of VR missions - fails completely, because of an incompatibility with the disk checking and the PS2's drive mechanism - you can perform a runtime patch of this with the right cheat code hardware, or you can burn a copy of the disc which starts the PS-X EXE that's not in the root, but in the folder on the disc; that will directly run the game, skipping the chainloader, so you don't need to play swapsies for it to work)
There's four more right there from my own personal collection.