How Xbox Games Look On The 360

Gamespot has a piece looking at how original Xbox titles look on the 360. From the article: "When the game you want actually makes it onto the supported games list, get ready for a little HD treat. The Xbox 360 will run Xbox games in 720p or 1080i. The games will also get a good dose of antialiasing to get rid of "jaggies" or stairstepping effects found on the edges of characters and scenery. This is nothing new for those of you familiar with a PC. Turning up the resolution and enabling antialiasing are the first things you do to improve image quality in PC games. We went ahead and took screen captures of a few Xbox games on both the Xbox and the Xbox 360 to compare how they looked on both systems. Unsurprisingly, the Xbox 360 screen captures look much better. Higher resolutions combined with antialiasing tend to make just about everything prettier."

Comments

TFA is websensed

[nickj6282]

Did anyone read it? Does Half Life 2 look better on the 360 than it does on the Xbox?

so here's the summary

[lubricated]

hmm, higher resolution and anti-aliasing improve visual quality. well, I'll be damned.

Updates?

[LordNimon]

We tested Jade Empire on November 29 and found it nonfunctional. A scant day later, the game worked just fine.

Was a software update downloaded between those two dates? If the answer is no, then it looks like the testers just did something wrong on the 29th.

Re:Updates?

[ReverendLoki]

Was a software update downloaded by them, or with their knowledge, between those two dates? If the aswer is no, then perhaps it is set up to update without your permission... or, maybe the testers did something wrong.

Re:Updates?

[MorgyTheMole]

No. X-Box backwards compatibility requires X-Box Live and a Hard drive for more than one reason: there is compatibility information that needs to be downloaded when you actually pop the game in for the first time. Compare it to how Bleem!cast worked. There was no set emulator, but configured data WITH software to enable emulation. Should that data change, the 360 updates it.

Re:Updates?

[HoneyBunchesOfGoats]

I would think it's just downloading the game's executable recompiled for the Xbox 360 architecture.

Re:Updates?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's rather doubtful, since if you don't have Live, you can download and burn a 2.4 MB file to a CD and boot up with it to enable the backwards compatibility.
So, unless you think the recompiled binaries of all the 200+ games on the list can fit in 2.4 MB, it would appear to be a general purpose emulator with a whitelist that they stick games in as they pass QA, perhaps also indicating any special flags that need to be enabled on the emulator.

More information on backwards compatibility is available.

not much difference.

[Sox2]

yep, big woop.

Re:so here's the summary

[El_Muerte_TDS]

Except for the Hulk I hardly see any differences (except for the brightness). In the Hulk there's an extra water tower thingy.

They must have had some time on their hands

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course they start trying xbox games on their 360, in order to play the 360 games you need a 3 week fire supression course, and the console just hasn't been out that long.

Re:so here's the summary

[Mithrandir86]

Look closer. What you are looking for is the absence of jagged lines. Take, for example, the woman's ear in the Halo 2 screenshot. It is not something that you would be explicitly aware of, but it would enhance the overall visual experience.

My question

[Guppy06]

Is Sony going to follow suit this time with the PlayStation 3? Will PSOne games at least look better?

Sony had the option of doing something similar with the PlayStation 2 (think Bleemcast), but then they were faced with the prospect of PSX games looking just as good as first-generation PS2 games. I suppose Microsoft is venturing out into this because they have the compatability far more restricted than the PSX/PS2 list was.

If my PlayStation library looks better on a PS3, that might make it worth the price of the console (that, and if the memory-card dongle isn't too expensive).

Re:My question

[oGMo]

Is Sony going to follow suit this time with the PlayStation 3? Will PSOne games at least look better?

Sony had the option of doing something similar with the PlayStation 2 (think Bleemcast), but then they were faced with the prospect of PSX games looking just as good as first-generation PS2 games.

Huh? "Follow suit?" The PS2 did texture smoothing for the PS1 (and also faster disc speed), which you can turn on from the PSX menu option on bootup. (Although, annoyingly, you have to set it every time.) Setting these options break compatibility with a few games (and are thus optional), but on the whole it's a major improvement. Dragon Warrior 7 looks like utter crap if played normally; with texture smoothing on it looks quite nice (as PSX games go).

As for "looking as good as first-generation PS2 games", this is a joke. Even today's PSX emulators (which work quite well) that can do resolution boosting and antialiasing don't look as good as PS2 games... simply because the polygon count and texture resolution is low. They do look a hell of a lot better though.

In any case, hopefully the PS3 will offer further load time improvements for PS2 games (though this is not really a problem with modern games), and possibly antialiasing in various forms (texture AA would be the most welcome). I'm not sure how high-level this data is processed, though, or whether this would be possible.

Re:My question

[PhotoBoy]

Yep, I was very disappointed with the PS2's backward compatibility as well. I thought the "texture smoothing" just made the whole image look blurry. Considering what you could do back then using PC emulators it was quite a let down. Today you can do some quite awesome stuff with the plugins to clean up the image. The N64 has it even better with the ability to create hi-res texture packs for the games.

I would rather have the limited backwards compatibility of the X360 and better graphics than the blurring of the PS2's backwards compatibility. Here's hoping Sony do a better job with the PS3.

Re:My question

[Guppy06]

"As for "looking as good as first-generation PS2 games", this is a joke. Even today's PSX emulators (which work quite well) that can do resolution boosting and antialiasing don't look as good as PS2 games."

I specified "first generation PS2 games." From back in the days of "It can do Toy Story 2 in real time! Oh yeah, and here's Gradius." I think a PSX game with a little make-up can top that.

And the resolution boosting and such that you mention was possible back when the PS2 first came out, in PSX emulators for both the PC and even the Dreamcast (of all platforms).

Re:My question

[Prophet of Nixon]

Hey, this might be a dumb question, but how do you get to the bootup menu when playing a PS1 game?

I just got a PS2 a few months ago, but I do have R-Type Final and Einhander, so it would be awesome if it could upsample them a bit or something.

Re:My question

[oGMo]

Hey, this might be a dumb question, but how do you get to the bootup menu when playing a PS1 game?

I just got a PS2 a few months ago, but I do have R-Type Final and Einhander, so it would be awesome if it could upsample them a bit or something.

Hmm, don't have a PS2 on me right this second, but I think when you boot up there is "Browser" and "Settings" or something. At the bottom of the screen, it also says you can hit triangle for some other stuff. Hit triangle, and there should be an option about PS1 emulation or similar. You can toggle smoothing and disc speed from here.

The thing to look for if you're not sure what's happening with smoothing is to check out the textures pre and post. Without any smoothing, you will notice that you can see each "pixel" (or texel or whatever) as a square. With smoothing, the texture should be smoothed, no hard edges on the pixels.

Some translation issues are still there, but I believe this is due to precision limits on the PS1... not something you can easily get around, regardless of how powerful your hardware is.

Re:My question

[oGMo]

I specified "first generation PS2 games." From back in the days of "It can do Toy Story 2 in real time! Oh yeah, and here's Gradius." I think a PSX game with a little make-up can top that.

Then you have a bad memory, or you weren't there. First, no one from Sony ever claimed it could render Toy Story. If you think otherwise, I suggest you find a real quote; all the pre-launch articles are still around, it should be somewhere.

Second, Gradius V is actually a later-generation game that looks pretty cool. It's great fun if you want a 2-player game, I highly recommend it.

Third, first generation games included Dark Cloud and SSX, whose screenshots I have conveniently linked. If you think they look like PS1 games I recommend you have your eyes checked. (Also, check out the videos, which can be more telling for things like texture and motion.)

Re:My question

[Guppy06]

"First, no one from Sony ever claimed it could render Toy Story."

Really?

"Second, Gradius V is actually a later-generation game"

I was referring to Gradius III & IV, a PS2 launch title (complete with $50 price tag). And, yes, a PSX game could look better than that.

Re:My question

[oGMo]

"First, no one from Sony ever claimed it could render Toy Story."

Really?

Yes, really. "Sony claims" is no better than your original quote. Find an actual quote from a Sony spokesperson that claims this. Otherwise, it's just someone saying Sony claimed that. (The original story, from what I've heard, is that the quote is actually from an XBOX engineer about the capabilities of an XBOX, pre-release, which somehow got shifted to Sony making this claim about the PS2. I don't have any quotes to back this up, though, so it's just as apochryphal.)

I was referring to Gradius III & IV, a PS2 launch title (complete with $50 price tag). And, yes, a PSX game could look better than that.

OK, this isn't exactly fair, since these were originally SNES games, and were just ported, not remade. I mean, you could point at NES ports to the GBA and say "wow, look at those 3rd-generation GBA games, the NES could do that". Yeah, sure, but it can and has done better, too; see the links to the games I posted which are also first-gen games.

Re:My question

[KDR_11k]

Start the system without a disc in the drive. Press triangle to access the hardware settings, select Playstation Driver, press triangle again. You can set the disc speed to fast and the texture mapping to smooth (bilinear filtering).

Re:so here's the summary

[lubricated]

well, I think the text at the bottom of the hulk is much more clear, on the 360. Also the ridge line is cleaned up a little. However, you are right, the Hulk is the one that is better on the 360 by the least amount.

There's a patch involved

[Jim Hall]

TFA mentions that in order to play these XBox "Classic" games on the XBox 360, "you need to have Xbox Live and the Xbox 360 hard drive accessory. When you first insert an Xbox game that is compatible with the Xbox 360, the system will download an update from Xbox Live and store it on the hard drive; it's functionally equivalent to a patch for a PC game."

And in fact, it is a patch. So it's no surprise that the game looks better on the 360 - it's been intentionally patched (probably with a few up-res textures) to look good.

Re:There's a patch involved

[Fred Or Alive]

I doubt games journalists actually know how it works. They said "functionally equivelant", ie: the emualtor has the same effects as a patch, not it being one itself.

Considering that the emulator currently supports 200-odd games, and the current update availible from the website is about 3MB in size, I kinda doubt it contains anything much for each induvidual game, it's almost certianley a generic emulator that has some sort of database of working games (and perhaps what game specific tweaks are needed to get them working). None of the screenshots look like any of the resources (models, textures etc.), just some anti-aliasing etc., which is similar to what PlayStation and N64 emulators can do on PCs without adding new data.

Re:There's a patch involved

[Anonymous Coward]

i don't believe there was any added content, being that the update was a scant meg or two to support a hundred or so games.

Re:There's a patch involved

[Babbster]

The games don't look better because they've been "patched" (the word "patch" in this context is about the emulator, like going from MAME 0.5 to MAME 0.6). They look better because they're running on more powerful hardware, just like on PC if you went from an Nvidia Geforce 5200FX to an ATI x800 - nothing changes in the game yet it can still look better.

How would Microsoft manage such a feat of "patching" all these games with new textures and the like anyway? They would have to replace executables (to access textures from the hard drive instead of the DVD - at the minimum), test them and then have the space on the hard drive to hold them. Even more important, it would take more than a few seconds to make it happen over Xbox Live (textures are already big and would be bigger if they were higher resolution).

If nothing else, this gives Sony something to shoot for. Whatever graphical improvements were applied to PS1 games on the PS2 were so tiny that no one cared (I never saw them myself). If Sony can do for PS2 games on the PS3 what Microsoft has done for Xbox games on the 360, it'll be pretty damned cool.

Re:There's a patch involved

[nathanh]

They would have to replace executables (to access textures from the hard drive instead of the DVD - at the minimum)

A softmodded Xbox accesses everything from the hard drive instead of the DVD, including textures, and game executables don't need to be replaced or patched. I think your reasoning is Basil.

Re:There's a patch involved

[Babbster]

A modded Xbox will also ignore the Xbox's DVD security features. Somehow, I don't think Microsoft is going to toss out their copy protection/DRM features in order to provide emulation.

So, yes, you're technically correct that it's possible for Microsoft to make the games run from the hard drive. However, the idea that they'd do so is very Lenny.

Re:There's a patch involved

[DeadScreenSky]

No, they are apparently just emulator profiles. Originally MS stated that you would actually download a ~5 meg emulator for each individual game, implying some kind of heavy customization. But playing a Xbox1 title for the first time only takes a few seconds to load, so there's no way it is grabbing anything that large. Presumably as the emulator (currently up to version 1.1) is upgraded you will need to redownload it (this can also be done via a PC and CD-R, incidentally), but right now I am almost positive it is just new game profiles.

I've tested a fair number of Xbox1 games on the X360 and I have yet to see any textures that appear to be new.

And you need the hard drive anyway because Xbox1 games were designed around the idea that one would always be present.

Re:There's a patch involved

[imperator_mundi]

Patches for higher resolution don't sound so new... if you, for instance, plug a vga box into your xbox (e.g. x2vga) you will most probably have to patch by hand some executable (usually some default.xbe files) with an Hex editor in order to make a non negligible amount of games work in progressive scan. Your console must, of course, allow you to do that (he that hath ear to hear...). Basically such patches consist in changing the way the video mode is initializated (read this post for some further informations).

I suppose that the XB->XB360 patches do nothing but alter the calls of set video mode functions and add the initialization the anti aliasing stuff (which, as xbox doesn't perform any antialiasing, simply do not exist in the original game code).

Re:There's a patch involved

[Anonymous Coward]

A modded Xbox will also ignore the Xbox's DVD security features. Somehow, I don't think Microsoft is going to toss out their copy protection/DRM features in order to provide emulation.

That's because it's modded, duh. Microsoft could trivially have arranged for XBox360 to be able to read data from the hard disk without disabling a single security feature. They apparently didn't, but that doesn't mean it's impossible.

Re:There's a patch involved

[(A)*(B)!0_-]

"probably with a few up-res textures"

There is zero chance that that statement is correct.

I don't see much difference

[DigitalBubblebath]

"The 360 gives the game a huge increase in clarity; the easiest place to spot the difference is in the red wooden window frames."

So...not a "huge" enough increase for it to be immediately apparent.

Honestly, with the exception of the Halo screenshot, the before/after shots look identical. It looks more like some kind of analogue conversion/interference with the original Xbox shots rather than the result of lower resolution textures.

Re:I don't see much difference

[thebdj]

Honestly, with the exception of the Halo screenshot, the before/after shots look identical.

The clarity improvement seems quite clear to me. Details are better, edges are better defined, and text is often clearer. It isn't that hard to see a difference, but seriously I hope you weren't expecting world altering changes; it is what it is.

Re:I don't see much difference

[DigitalBubblebath]

Heh, I don't think you got my point. Of course they look different, but I was suggesting that the reason they look different is because of analogue conversion. Spelling it out: Xbox360 has a digital video out, Xbox doesn't. Maybe that's why? The games will undoubtedly look better if you have X360 and an HDTV, but on a normal television there will likely be no difference.

And while we're on it, I actually think the X360 shots look *worse*; the brightness is way too high and there's not as much contrast.

I wasn't expecting "world altering changes", I don't even own an xbox. I thought the article was flawed and overzealous.

Re:so here's the summary

[RoadDoggFL]

"Except for the Hulk I hardly see any differences"

He means that The Hulk is the only game he notices a difference in. It's probably best to ignore to remarks of a troll.

Re:so here's the summary

[badasscat]

Look closer. What you are looking for is the absence of jagged lines.

Yeah, but the point is it's just not that big of a difference. I felt the same way as the parent poster, even though I *did* see the lessening (not "absence" - check DOA3 again) of jaggies.

It looks like the difference between running a PC game at 640x480 vs. 1024x768. It doesn't even look truly HD, even though GameSpot says the X360 shots are at least 720p. Part of the problem may be that they appear to have upsampled the Xbox shots and downsampled the X360 shots. It would have been more informative seeing full-resolution X360 shots (and if these are full resolution as they are, then they're not HD).

I don't really see any improvements other than the increased resolution. There's no additional detail that I can see in any of these shots. Textures look the same, lighting looks the same, etc. Not that I necessarily expected anything more - it's just backward compatibility after all - but a lot of people have been making a big deal about how much better Xbox games look on the 360 (including this article) and I just don't see it. The games are being played at a higher res and that's about it.

Too bad...

[rbarreira]

Too bad the article guys don't know how to use the onLoad event in order to preload the images which appear when you place the mouse cursor over the image area... *HINT* *HINT* *HINT*

Neat

[billybob]

I was wondering when I would finally see some screenshots of this. It won't turn your old games into next gen games, but they do look noticably better (anti-aliasing in particular).

Re:Neat

[Mr.Dippy]

Yes you can see a difference but it is slight. It's a nice feature to have but it doesn't compel me to go out and buy a xbox360.

They DO NOT look better

[imunfair]

Yeah sure, they're clearer, but with the exception of the first one - with the woman in the white suit - they all look *worse* with more clarity. I bet even the first one would look worse if they weren't so close to the figure.

Think of the images as a picture - which look more realistic? In the 360 shots they took a step back as far as realism. The reason is that the slight blurring brings all the objects together into a cohesive image - if you clarify everything its obvious that the objects just aren't quite lifelike, and the main character tends to stand out as obviously not 'part of the picture'.

Personally I don't think either one will make a difference while actually playing the games, it's just something for fanboys that gloat over numbers - but if you really want photorealism then a little blurring will usually help cover up your mistakes, because it's very unlikely we'll see photorealism with clarity any time soon in games.

Re:They DO NOT look better

[Koiu Lpoi]

Yeah, and what about Ansiotropic filtering, huh? A little ansio can go a long way to kill off mipmapping artifacts, which I still spot in the 360 pictures. Those bug me MUCH more than aliasing. Of course, my games are usually 1280 on the PC.

Framerate

[skyman8081]

What TFA did NOT cover was the fact that the framerate drops on occasion with the current emulation on the 360. I've seen this myself, and it was the most noticable when playing Ninjanauts on Backwash. This experience could well be anecdotal, and there could be an update that fixes this. So take this with a grain of salt.

Re:so here's the summary

[nexex]

Sooooo, what I think everyone wants to know is -- will DOA Volleyball be a whole `new` game?

Re:so here's the summary

[bigman2003]

I wouldn't expect anything different.

Same number of polygons. Same textures...I would assume it would look the same, but just a bit clearer.

We'll have to wait until Xbox 360 specific games come out (not the initial crop) to see a bigger difference.

But when I was playing through Halo 2 on my Xbox, I noticed the jaggies they pointed out. But not on the main characters (Master Chief, aliens) they looked a lot better than the humans.

Yes but....

[techstar25]

Sure they look better, but are they any more fun to play? No.

Re:so here's the summary

[Golias]

Sooooo, what I think everyone wants to know is -- will DOA Volleyball be a whole `new` game?

DOA eXtreme Beach Volleyball, (a.k.a., the Greatest Game Evar!) is not on the compatability list.

This is 90% of the reason why I have not purchased an X-Box 360 yet. I can live with being a year behind Playstation owners on the GTA franchise, but no DOAX is a deal-breaker. I gots ta have my Yuri Sentai dating sim with the bolted-on volleyball game, or life loses all meaning.

Yes, I live alone... Why do you ask?

Re:so here's the summary

[TheWickedKingJeremy]

I think you are discounting this a bit too much. This is somewhat unprecedented - that previous generation titles actually improve graphically on next generation consoles. Yes, I realize that is accomplished by upping the resolution and doing some anti-aliasing, and yes, we in the computer world are used to this by now... but it is still a welcome change for consoles, and I give the xBox360 credit for enabling the feature.

Of course, there may be a downside to this in some cases... I could imagine an atmospheric game like Resident Evil 4 perhaps looking worse if the resolution got bumped up too much. The fog effects that contributed so heavily to the atmosphere look very realistic, but a large part of that is because it is rendered at a low, almost blurry resolution. Bumping up the resolution might in fact decrease the net effect...

What's the problem?

[!an Den!se]

I don't understand what all the complaining is about. To me the games look better. I'm not looking for the games to be absolutely immaculate, I'm just looking for them to be a little more pleasing to the eye. And as a side note, playing an xbox game on a 360 makes it much easier for me to enjoy myself without having to switch between consoles. So again, what's the problem?

Re:so here's the summary

[Breakfast Pants]

Yep, and unless the text is actually sent out as higher res than the screen can handle, or is rendered through vectors, higher res isn't going to do much for text in games.

Re:so here's the summary

[lubricated]

Generally text looks like crap in games and on tv. HDTV and progressive scan really do quite a bit to help text look sharp. Looking at a dvd in 480i and 480p shows the huge difference. especially with something like the andromeda series where there is text at the begining of every episode. Wathching the dvd in 480p the text looks much sharper and clearer with well defined edges.

Strange..

[cluke]

Why would *text* be clearer in the XBox 360 shots? That doesn't make a lot of sense to me... Can anyone enlighten me?

Re:so here's the summary

[Breakfast Pants]

Ah but, the original xbox runs 480p on nearly every game. I can assure you that for pixel based text designed to be displayed at that resolution, scaling it up to HD will make no change at all.