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

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?

[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.

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.

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

[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.

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.

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.

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.

Yes but....

[techstar25]

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