Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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...
You don't get it. Every game hits the hardware in different ways. Some games won't touch certain APIs at all. Other games might use an API extensively. Others might run through middleware like Renderware or Unreal. Microsoft does not have the source code to the majority of these games and can only figure out what each game uses by profiling it. Making an emulator which supports all games in existence out of the gate is virtually impossible.
Clearly MS targetted a handful of games (perhaps aided by game source) and made them work first. Then they wash rinse and repeat. At each stage they target certain featuresets and disparate games that use the same features all suddenly work.
Even Sony which has put considerably more effort into BC than MS only has 75% compatibility in the EU version. And that's with hardware assistance. While I don't think MS has made much effort with their BC, it is clearly a non trivial exercise.
Yes. Both use DirectX, though it's an optimized version for each the xbox and xbox 360 platforms. It's not the vanialla version you get if you go install DirectX on your PC.
Just because a game is written in DirectX doesn't mean that features that work on one video system will work equally well on a different video system though. Take for example any game written for DirectX version 3 which looks great on video cards from that era. In modern versions of DirectX occasionally you could get some "artifacts" (read glitches) because modern DirectX handles some routines differently. Usually it's just a frame missing or a polygon out of place, but occasionallly it can be much much worse. And that's on a version of DirectX that was optimized for compatibility across lots of hardware and lots of video systems.
Think about that for a second, and you can guess that our "optimized for xbox" version of DirectX is probably going to have some SERIOUS problems rendering graphics on anything but the original hardware it was written for.
I would be willing to speculate that all xbox games will run on an xbox 360 with errors. If this is so, Microsoft has chosen to "hide" those problems with a compatibility list of games that do work with few or no errors. As they release patches to DirectX and/or patches to the game, we get "newly added games" to our compatibility list.