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.
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!
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.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
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.)
And tomorrow the stock exchange will be the human race
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.)