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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."
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.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Damn this is the LAST thing I was thinking Microsoft was going to do. What would you expect a marketing company to do? Market the hell out of the backwards compatibility, then when you finally get them to buy the product, you slow the porting waaaaaaaay down, to just enough so you can say "we're working hard to get these games playable".
This seems entirely out of Microsoft's ordinary character. What is the world coming to?
The CPU is the easy part of the equation. It's the GPU that is the problem. XBox used nVidia, XBox360 uses ATI. There is a world of technological difference between the two and both encumbered by their own list of patents which prevent them from reimplementing the technology. If a particular game uses a particular set of features it will be more difficult to port. Using a third-party GPU is normal; Playstation 3 uses nVidia and Wii uses ATI. If Sony decides to jump ship from nVidia in Playstation 4 then they will be in the same exact boat.
This is also a matter of quality control. Sony effectively throws out a blanket compatibility statement without really testing and lets a myriad of games simply not work. Sony built a Frankenstein of a system including all of the older hardware so they could get away with further compatibility. However, in the EU release Sony removed that hardware and fell back to software emulation, like the 360, breaking a lot of compatibility. In Microsoft's case, if the game hasn't passed their compatibility standards they don't permit it to work. These compatibility updates, in whole, are no larger than a few megs so most of it is probably stating, "yep it works, let it play" while a few probably have a set of instructions to the emulator.
It's less like VirtualPC and more like Cedega, and Cedega obviously doesn't run on a G5 Mac either.
If you remember, the xbox360 uses a different video system based on an ATI card than the original xbox which was based on an nvidia system. It's not the processor code that is difficult to emulate, it's the hooks to the video system which have to be re-written essentially from scratch to work on the new system.