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Microsoft Updates Xbox 360 Back Compat Again
liquidzero4 writes "Earlier this week, Microsoft patched in another of their regular backwards compatibility updates. This one is fairly important; not only does it add a number of titles to the official back-compat list but several of the new old games are fairly popular. The likes of Panzer Dragoon ORTA, Jet Set Radio Future, Mercenaries, Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee, Soul Calibur 2, and Star Wars Republic Commando are sure to make some 360 owners happy."
I clicked on this and it mentioned initially that there was nothing for me to see here and then magically came up. Did I miss something?
I always wondered where this setting was...
It's great to see Microsoft continuing to add backward compatibility. I'm really looking forward to playing JSRF again, but unfortunately if looks like it doesn't work on PAL systems yet :-(
If you have a sufficiently high constitution, wade through the discussion at http://forums.xbox.com/11825595/ShowPost.aspx.
For all the hit and miss, why wouldn't you just buy an original xbox and guarantee backwards compatibility?
You can get dirt cheap final stock clearance items now.
Same goes for ps3, with the ps2 at $120 it makes no sense to buy the ps3 for backwards compatibility reasons, since the ps2 is still selling extremely well an its so cheap you could get one of those too.
Am I the only one who finds it somewhat amusing that every time /. posts a story illustrating how Microsoft has continued to improve backwards compatibility, there are less and less posts from people abusing them, stating they'll never update backwards compatibility anymore, etc.. etc...
/. community.
Seems this post has hit the pinnacle (or rock bottom, depending on your point of view).
It's kind of sad that so few congratulate Microsoft on so far sticking to their word; just as corporations deserve to be criticized and condemned for their "sins", it'd be nice to see people offer their thanks when they do the right thing. Even for a corporation so intensely hated as Microsoft by the general
How does the game of the year several times over take so long to be made compatible for the 360?
Check the Elder Scrolls boards, tons more people would buy Morrowind if it were 360 compatible.
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So far as I know, they build replacement PPC binaries for specific games. There's no general-purpose Xbox emulator; just specific code to run specific titles.
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Soul Calibur 2? The 360's been able to play that for a while. I brought to my friend's house to play on his 360 several months ago and it worked flawlessly.
Because every game is hitting the system in different ways, on top of which they have emulate the XBox hardware architecture. I expect it's non-trivial.
and if they properly emulated their own hardware they wouldnt have that problem.
explain to me how they can design their own console, make their own sdk and release their specs for it, but can't emulate their own sdk!
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microsoft designed the sdk (xdk) by which all games interact with the console hardware, and the idea they can't properly emulate an sdk they developed themselves is the most spectacular example of stupidity i've ever seen.
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sdk is the wrong word.. development environment is more proper, considering the games as compiled are designed to replace the dashboard/os and run the console as well.
they developed the environment on which it runs.
sure, their hardware is off the shelf, but the game system is still theirs, because if it were not they would have no power to use the DMCA hammer on homebrew xbox emu developers.
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vpc 7 could emulate a 1 ghz p3 on a g5 with twin 2.7 ghz chips.
the ppc architecture in the 360 is much more powerful.
the idea they cant run x86 code at circa 700 mhz on it is rather odd.
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So you mean you couldn't care less, then? Saying you "could care less" implies you care a great deal, contradicted by your post itself.
(Yes, this drives me up the wall.)
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Thats because the 360 doesnt have the same hardware as the original!
that makes sense i suppose.
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I guess they could to a lot worse, I mean Sony's PS3 has actual hardware in it (well in the US and Japan anyways) to be able to play PS2 games, yet it doesn't work with all PS2 games...
(Yes, this drives me up the wall.)
Really, we could care less
I don't think that's true. When people have questioned "why did you add support for ??" The response has usually been "It was a side effect of adding support for a different title. They were so similar, that the emulation just happened to support them both."
They also changed video card vendors, and from my understanding, shaders in video cards use different code for different vendors. There's really a lot of reasons that it's hard for a Xbox 360 to emulate an OG Xbox game.
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This news bit is actually 3 days too late and most of us knew about this! I read the headline thinking that they fixed the update from the 19th for users who own the JSRF/Sega GT combo disc. Thanks for ruining my day with old news Slashdot...
I tried playing Sega GT only to have it run exceptionally slow. But overall I know the reason behind the backwards compatability issues. They are not only emulating the old game but they are also instilling full time AA. Personally I'd like to see and option to turn off the AA for those wonderful games like Sega GT which overload the GPU on the 360 and cause a slowdown in the game. I'd also love to be able to play my Rally games on the 360. Rallisport, Colin Mcrae, etc. There was a number of great driving games out on the xbox that I loved and would love to see brought to the 360 which would fufill my reason enough to buy one.
So you mean you couldn't care less, then? Saying you "could care less" implies you care a great deal, contradicted by your post itself.
If his caring is like exp(-x) on the real number line, then no matter how little he cared, he could always care less.
Still no Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball.
And don't tell me it's "only graphics with no gameplay", that's what most games are these days.
Or the gp was using a shortening of the phrase "(As if) I could care less." This is one of those rare phrases that keeps the same meaning when negated. I use the negated form because I was taught in the way you say, but users of English have many phrases to choose from to get their point across.
There are issues with a bunch of existing titles on that list that haven't been fixed. Silent Hill: The Room, for example, has massive great black cracks appearing on the faces of the character. And Star Wars: KOTOR - one of the first games to be made backwards compatible - has problems with the frame rate dropping and the sound breaking up.
Great I thought. I can play JSRF again. No said Xbox 360 - not unless you unplug the TV and use scart. Meh i thought. JSRF back in attic.
We're still waiting for one of the best selling titles... I personally may have never switched to a 360 had I known ... and Oblivion is no substitute...
I'd be giving up Morrowind.
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Waiting.. waiting.. waiting some more..
:/
I want to play PGR and Morrowind on my 360. I was hoping they would add them soon, but I guess no joy yet.
*quietly fires up the old xbox while the shiny and nice 360 sits idle*
We have enough youth, how about a fountain of SMART?
While this guy was silly enough to use the "could care less" english abortion his opinion is not entirely validated to the levels of troll people
If a company promises backwards compatibility it shouldn't be selective.
On top of that, even if one is to let that slip under the ASSUMPTION things will get better the least they can do is tell the truth consistently.
In regards to B/C MS has not done that - I specifically recall the line "all new Xbox 1 games released after the X360 is released will be B/C as of launch date"
Give this dude a break, it might not be +5 but the -1 troll moderation should be left for harsher posts.
or that he just cares a little bit... it doesn't have to mean that he cares 'a great deal'...
Also, see here for some history on the figure of speech
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Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING. Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING. Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING. Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Actual PS2s (new ones) can't play all PS2 games. They dropped some compatibility to be able to drop the price... ...which seems 1000x better than what Microsoft had to do. (Kill the original Xbox ASAP so they would stop losing money on it.)
Nope, The 360 definately uses an emulator. Each game has an "emulation profile" that enables/tweaks the standard emulator to be able to play that game. Think of it as a sort of patch for the emulator thats specific to the game. These are the files that came on your 360 hard drive, that you download automatically the first time you put a supported game into your 360, or that you install from the downloadable CD ISO they make available for each back-compat update.
This is actually one area in which Nintendo lags behind. Each Virtual Console re-release is a Wii executable containing the system emulator and the ROM in one package. If you've got 3 downloaded NES games, you've got 3 NES emulators. This is really silly when you think about it, These older systems have been emulated stably for many years with a single executable, and for some NES/TG16 ROMS, the emulator alone is several times larger than the ROM itself.
Despite the wasted space from the per-ROM emulators, I haven't heard any widespread complaints about filling the Wii's 512MB of storage space. Granted, the SD card storage option is only good for backing up games, and playing a game stored on an SD card requires that you copy it back to the Wii, but still, people seem happy with the status quo on that account.
I'd wager there's a reason they chose the route they did. I can think of a few.
Perhaps it was easier for them to take one emulator and tweak it in source to work best for a specific game rather than trying to support profiles with enough flexibility to do what they wanted. Remember that those general purpose emulators you're talking about are the result of many years of hard work on the part of their authors, and they still don't get a hundred percent compatibility.
Perhaps they wanted the guarantee that tweaks made to the emulator to make one game work wouldn't break any other games. After all, once you purchase a VC game, it can't be allowed to stop working simply because Nintendo rolled out a new version of the emulator that fixes some other game. They likely need each game's emulator to be static for reliability reasons.
Perhaps they're pulling some crazy tricks on a per-game basis, and they don't want that code in the emulator being used by other games. At least some (or maybe all?) N64 games render at 640x480, four times the resolution of the N64 (which was 320x240). Some games have features added or removed. That might have been done through patching the ROM, or through the emulator. Different games interact with the hardware in different ways. Some mainstream emulators have enormous lists of per-game tweaks to get everything working, and often still have to resort to trickery to get games working "well enough". There's also the vast quantity of different hardware to support, all those umpteen accelerator chips that were put into various SNES carts, for example, or the different mechanisms that different games used for saves.
Regardless of the reason, I think the guarantee of a game that works now will always work to be a big benefit of having one emulator per ROM. If I buy a VC game today, I know it's always going to work. While PC-based emulators are great, they can't promise that a future patch won't break (or change the behaviour of) games.