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Microsoft Announces Xbox One Backward Compatibility
dotarray writes: Mike Ybarra is head of Platform Engineering at Xbox, and today he told the gaming world all about one of Microsoft's best-kept secrets — after more than a year of saying it couldn't be done, the Xbox One really is backwards compatible, so you can play all your Xbox 360 games on your next-gen console.
These newfangled games are lame. I tried ET once, never again.
Apparently, MS wants to pick up additional sales of XBox One. Smart move. They should have done this at release time. Better late than never. Now, 360 users will have a reason to upgrade as they should be able to play most games on the One.
From "DRM EVERYWHERE, required internet access, and no backwards comparability" to "No more DRM then before, offline whenever, and play all your old games". They should have called the Xbox One the XBox 180.
How is that even possible without a hardware chip?
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
From: http://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox...
Banjo Kazooie: N n B
Banjo-Kazooie
Banjo-Tooie
BattleBlock Theater
Defense Grid
Geometry Wars Evolved
Hexic HD
Jetpac Refuelled
Kameo
Mass Effect
Perfect Dark
Perfect Dark Zero
Small Arms
Super Meat Boy
Toy Soldiers
Toy Soldiers: Cold War
Viva Piñata
Viva Piñata: TIP
sudo mod me up
Nintendo's hand held gaming dates back even further then that. Gameboy Color supported classic Gameboy games (yup, the GBC had an upgraded processor, not just color). The GBA fully supported any GB/GBC game. And then of course the DS supported all GBA titles.
It looks like it really is as simple as just putting your old disc in your new console and away you go. No need for updates (although we might have heard him say something about downloads), and overall, a seamless experience. And the best thing? It's free! You've already bought the games once, you don't need to buy them again.
I would have assumed an update to enable this would be required, even if it literally only changed a 1-bit flag somewhere to turn it on...
What's more shocking to me is that not once in all this time has anyone with an Xbone tossed a 360 game disc in the thing, be it for shits and grins or even statistically by accident.
Shouldn't it have worked if the feature has been enabled all this time?
I've had a 360 since launch (technically three if you count the replacement motherboards) and I would have got the One if it had backwards compatibility, even to the standard that the 360 could play original Xbox games by using most of the on disc assets but having a recompiled native engine for the PPC chip in the 360. This doesn't look quite like that unfortunately but I'll watch with interest as I'm not sure how much longer my 360 will survive and there are still games on it I would like to play through again. If it does support enough of the games I already own (the list currently has none) then I may well add an Xbox One to go with my PS4.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
So now I can play both originals and remasters! Hurray!
A few months back I was picking a new console to replace my 360. XBox One would have been a slam dunk if it would have kept playing all the kids' games. Instead, we traded them all in and bought a Wii U.
Backwards compatibility is a huge feature for building up a user base across generations... but introducing it years after console launch, after pretty much saying they wouldn't, after a good percentage of your users have already switched to something, seems really uh... non-optimal.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
I should have been a no-brainer for Microsoft to sell an XBOX One to. I bought the original XBOX shortly after it came out; I followed up with an XBOX 360 purchase as well. I'd never purchased any other console brand, and had been a faithful XBOX user from day one. But Microsoft XBoned its launch with a bunch of boneheaded, anti-customer moves like over-the-top DRM, always-required internet access and a refusal to provide backwards-compatibility, requiring extra shelf space and an extra input on my TV just to keep my existing games.
Sure, they have backpedaled on all of this by now, but it's far too little, too late. I haven't forgotten how Microsoft made clear to me that they saw me with disdain, and they've lost me for good. This promise of backwards-compatibility comes only out of desperation because they're being outsold more than two to one by Sony. There is zero chance I will ever consider an XBone, and the chances of me even considering their next next-gen console are slim to none unless Sony does something even more boneheaded.
They've lost the battle *and* the war, and yet now they've decided to actually put up a fight once it's already too late. It's laughable, really...
In the firmware there was a section of code..
If older_game then block_it();
now it's
if older_game then revenue();
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Ars Technica:
For some reason, I find the second quote much likelier.
When someone says, "Any fool can see
A few things to note about nintendo portable backwards compatibility.
1: They tend to drop support for games from older generations. The game boy micro and later don't support GB/GBC games. The DSi and later don't support GBA games.
2: The DS doesn't have a link cable port so while you can play GBA games you can't use link cable (or wireless, see below) in them
3: The DSi and later don't have a GBA style cart slot, so game features that rely on that slot (for example transferring pokemon from GBA versions) can't be used on the DS.
4: There is no hardware abstraction on the wireless. This means that a GBA game can't use the wireless on the DS at all. It also means only games that were released after the DSi can use WPA, older games are stuck with wep or no security.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Straight from the horse's mouth:
http://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox...
So an x86 based system is backwards compatible with programs compiled for PowerPC? In what corner of the multi-verse? The only way for this is emulation. Which is a bit hard to believe they would be able/bother to do.
Many of my save games are locked to my 360 and not portable.
Although I will say this has moved my thoughts on purchasing an XBone from not likely to possible.
Games are still the deciding factor for me and I'm still working through my backlog of 360 titles although none of them are on the initial list.
and quite an advantage over PS4.
Shesh dude.... There ARE ways to make that "off the shelf" Western Digital laptop drive work in your 360.... You have to get the right drive, but it's not that hard.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Are there plans for an Xbox 360 emulator on Xbox One?
SAVAGE: There are, but we’re not done thinking them through yet, unfortunately. It turns out to be hard to emulate the PowerPC stuff on the X86 stuff. So there’s nothing to announce, but I would love to see it myself.
http://www.kotaku.com.au/2014/...
For those who seek perfection there can be no rest on this side of the grave.
They were treating video game consumption as an addiction. They believed that their users were so addicted to new content that they could not resist the new console, and that once they had it any inclination to play the old content would result in buying the new sequels.
What they learned was.....people will happily stay with the old-but-still-works console, and will happily play more games on other platforms (including steam, which offers the best prices on games by far, now with refunds if you don't like the game you just bought).
So, their bid for profit was driving their clients to their competition. The fact that they did not foresee this shows just how out-of-touch they are with their target audience.
That last bit is the root cause of their error. Being greedy is fine...and knowing your target audience gives you what you need to fulfill that greed.
The initial batch of supported games is small and, really, not that exciting. It's a software-based solution, and even the games supported from the start have a laundry list of known issues.
This is not true native backward compatibility; for native backward compatibility, see the Nintendo platforms since the original DS, and to a slightly lesser extent, the PS2 and original PS3 hardware (some games didn't work/had substantial issues, but for the great majority of titles, it worked out of the box).
Given that the Xbox One is AMD based and Xbox 360 was PowerPC, it has to be a 'software-based solution' - either a PowerPC emulation layer, or a PowerPC VM. Either of which would slow things down, given the resources that the emulation would require. Given the extreme performance that games require, not sure why MS is even contemplating this.
One possibility - since the AMD has 8 cores, can't they create 7 virtual PowerPC CPUs on each of the x64 cores, and use the remaining CPU just for administration & management? The recompilation solution - there's just one problem w/ it - wouldn't the customer have to have a copy of the recompiled game, or do they download a recompiled game for which they had original PPC binaries?
given their revenue, i'm sure quite a few companies would love to be half as obsolete as MS.
MS has the source code for all the titles. You are asserting that it's impossible for MS to recompile a PPC game into x86, given "ownership" of the source code.
Learn to love Alaska
I see a lot of cynicism in this thread - much of it entirely deserved. However, from a broader perspective, this is undoubtedly a good thing - and not just in terms of "yay, I can play more things on my new console".
Why? Because it goes some way towards mitigating what was looking like a real risk of a "lost generation" of console games.
As older platforms have gone out of circulation, PC emulation has generally been there to keep titles playable. Hell, when my first-gen back-compatible PS3 died on me and I had to replace it with a non-back-compatible slim model, I was able to carry on playing my PS2 games from the original discs via PC emulation.
But there is currently nothing like working emulation of the 360 and PS3 and, given those platforms DRM measures and general hardware eccentricity, it seems reasonable to suppose that we are years, if not decades, from actually seeing it (if we ever do).
Neither 360 nor PS3 hardware was of the highest quality. The early builds of both consoles had high failure rates - legendarily so in the case of the 360 - and while later iterations improved matters somewhat, there's no getting around the fact that they both remained essentially disposable and short-lived devices built as cheaply as possible.
So at some point in the not-too-distant future (within5 years maybe? Certainly within 10) working 360s and PS3s are going to get harder and harder to find. And with no emulation for them, there is a good chance that a good chunk of the (huge) catalogue of games for those platforms is going to end up inaccessible to everybody bar specialist collectors.
Now, a good chunk of the library for both consoles is basically disposable junk anyway. Does it matter massively if a few iterations of Madden and FIFA end up lost to posterity? Not really. In other cases, games are being "rescued" via "HD remasters" for current generation platforms (which can, admittedly, feel like a rip-off), as has happened with The Last of Us and and as will soon happen with Gears of War and Uncharted. In other cases, developers looking to make money from their back-catalogue may put out PC ports. We've seen this rescue a few absolute classics like Valkyria Chronicles, as well as some more... shall we say... eccentric choices like the Hyperdimension Neptunia games.
But that still leaves a lot of games - including those which were subject to exclusivity agreements but didn't sell well enough to merit an HD-remaster - stranded. There are some good and noteworthy games here; Lost Odyssey, Vanquish, Eternal Sonata and so on.
Now, if the Xbox One has back compatibility all of a sudden, that means that we have at least a temporary stay-of-execution on all three of those games I just mentioned. Plus the fact that they're running on PC-like hardware keeps alive the prospect that we might see them running on "proper" PC hardware at some point further down the line. And if you care about preserving an unbroken history of gaming's development, then this matters. If you don't think that keeping that chain intact matters, then just ask the BBC how they feel about all of those Doctor Who episodes they threw into the trash.
Of course, we still have some PS3 exclusives that are essentially marooned; and that Cell architecture is going to render any kind of emulation, whether on general PCs or on current or future Sony console hardware, a bitch. That leaves some excellent games (the PS3-era Ratchet & Clank games were superb and a lot of Japan's output for the latter half of the last console cycle was PS3-exclusive) still stranded. But maybe this step from MS will put some pressure on Sony.
Hopefully, the PC-like architecture of the current generation will make back-compatibility less of an issue going forward, though there are still issues about the extent to which many games are essentially dependent on PSN or XBL network architecture.
I play a few marquee titles per year - all single player. I have a handful of titles I really love and love to play on console. Coincidentally, my 360 finally started failing after 7 or so years of faithful service a few months ago as I was running through all of the Dragon Age games again in prep for Dragon Age 3. If they can get my favorite games working well with the DLC and such, I'd probably buy one a One - I can replace my 360 and another major console in the current gen in one system. Attractive proposition, particularly if I get a deal on one this holiday season.
I suspect the publishers won't enable backward compatibility for titles they've "remastered" or think they may remaster in the future. Or it could be mostly titles that lean on DirectX and XNA calls for everything, rather than coding against the metal, because that's easier to port. But if it doesn't turn out to be a joke, this could be a good thing.
A few things to note about nintendo portable backwards compatibility.
1: They tend to drop support for games from older generations. The game boy micro and later don't support GB/GBC games. The DSi and later don't support GBA games.
2: The DS doesn't have a link cable port so while you can play GBA games you can't use link cable (or wireless, see below) in them
3: The DSi and later don't have a GBA style cart slot, so game features that rely on that slot (for example transferring pokemon from GBA versions) can't be used on the DS.
4: There is no hardware abstraction on the wireless. This means that a GBA game can't use the wireless on the DS at all. It also means only games that were released after the DSi can use WPA, older games are stuck with wep or no security.
While the cart slot might not take the older games anymore, the handheld is still hardware compatible with those systems. Which is why we can take a VC (Virtual Console) game (GBA, DSi) and inject a different GBA or DSi into it and it still runs (providing you use the same side rom). Currently we have a CFW (Custom FirmWare) called Pasta that allows the GBA & DSi to be run.
As for the GBA using wireless, the GBA never used wireless, so not using the DSi or 3DS wireless isn't even a surprise.
tl;dr 3DS hardware is still compatible with GBA/DSi, hackers got those games to work on the 3DS.
Be seeing you...
If I had to guess, and I do because there's no explicit statements about how it works anywhere, I'd guess that these are actually ports from the 360 to the 180, and the "download" mentioned in passing is the game binary. That's how it worked on the 360, which it pretty much had to do. But it was able to provide that (for a selection of games, anyway) because of the inherent design of the system; after all, it's just Windows and DirectX. That's what's responsible for the rash of cross-platform PC/Xbox games to begin with.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Given that the Xbox One is AMD based and Xbox 360 was PowerPC, it has to be a 'software-based solution' - either a PowerPC emulation layer, or a PowerPC VM. Either of which would slow things down, given the resources that the emulation would require.
No, based on the article it seems it isn't emulation or a VM otherwise all games would just work without MS having to do anything except install the emulation/VM.
"Moving forward, it apparently is a matter of developers simply saying "yes" to backwards compatibility - Microsoft will do the heavy lifting and make sure the game's properly playable on the new hardware."
Given that the developer just has to say "yes" (presumably that means providing MS with the source code if they don't have it already) and what you download is a new executable for the game with the game content on the disc it seems pretty clear this isn't emulation or a VM and is just recompiling the game binaries for the new architecture.
Game programmers also use a lot of intrinsics that are basically C macros around assembly calls. And these are very tied to the CPU architecture. They also do a lot of things based on cache line sizes. Making sure that structures or multiples of structures fit inside cache lines. Or play around with using a structure of arrays instead of an array of structures, or visa-versa it all depends on what turns out to be faster on the architecture, or CPU multi-threaded loading, or the cosmic rays hitting the box at the time. If a game team has a good set of optimizers on it they'll beat anything a compiler will do, and it will tie the performance of the game to the CPU and ensure you can't just recompile. Recompile will just throw error after error.
The CPU architecture is completely different. Pipeline depths, branch prediction, it uses SSE for its vector unit instead of the one in the xbox360. And that's all fairly custom code almost in the assembly level to force the use of the vector units. The GPU is different though I think they were both AMD GPUs so it shouldn't be too bad for the code to run on it, and it should be using Direct Draw 9.0c as the API so it shouldn't matter what the GPU is.
Microsoft also loves to change their APIs between SDKs, something compiling for June 2010 may not compile in June 2012. The only thing they guarantee is that something compiled on June 2010 of the XDK will run on June 2012 version of the flash. And only on the production boxes. I remember a few times where older games compiled for launch did not run on the latest flash on the dev kits. The dev kit flash was filled with lots of things to make development easy, so they stripped out deprecated functionality. They also stripped out the deprecated functionality to ensure that people didn't use it, because game developers would find a way to get at it if they really needed to, if it was in the flash they'd find it.
Also MS may only have source code for Microsoft Studios' games. They don't have the source code for any of the third party games. When submitting for certification and publishing all they cared about for the xbox360 was the ISO image. They may not even have the source code from their own studios available. Especially from the early games, the Xbox360 has been around longer than most companies store data. The company I worked for only kept the source code around for 5 years. That would put the earliest game to have published in 2010. They may not go back this far for their compatibility but it does cut out the earliest games.
I think they've finally got a Xbox360 PPC emulator that is fast enough to emulate what the xbox360 could do without dropping too much in the way of performance. And that wasn't ready at the launch of the Xbone.
Software Engineer & Writer of Military Science Fiction and Fantasy Blog: petermwright.com Twitter: WrightPeterM
Hrm...looks like it is a form of emulation after all and the executable you have to download is a patch to the original game to make it work in the emulation layer, presumably it isn't a full emulation of the 360 console otherwise downloading the game wouldn't be necessary as it should just run.
why also add and X86 vm for the 1st xbox games as well? X86 VM + redirecting video calls should work.
Nintendo handhelds were always technically inferior to competition (like Sega and Atari in GB days) so they figured out that backward compatibility will get them a heads start so each of their new (technically inferior to competition) handheld console would launch with broad game library and convince current users to switch. In my opinion it is a smart move but also induces some (minor) technical limitations. Nintendo has a tradition of one gen backward compatibility (in some way) for each of their systems and launch. Sony and MS should learn from that. MS is learning. :)
It is obvious by these limitations that Nintendo uses backward compatibility to ease up prev to next gen transition for users and thus drive up sales. The later editions as Game Boy Micro and so on are usually released some time after initial launch in time that game library is large enough for the new system that they can sell it. Also Nintendo is known for making revised editions to - again - drive up sales. Like the new versions of devices on which only few exclusive titles use the full potential of the hardware. And the new exclusives are not backward compatible (which is sane from a marketing point of view).
In 90s game consoles were significantly cheaper, easier to use and more stable than computers of the day. Now you can get a steam machine for $499 or find a deal on a gaming PC at or below price of consoles. Just hook it up to TV, get a controller, run steam Big Picture and enjoy access to same games as consoles, plus many hundreds of PC-only games, frequently for $10 a pop. I can still "emulate" my Windows XP games on Windows 10 without jumping through hoops.
If there is future in console gaming, it's cheap boxes and hdmi sticks that can play casual games with a remote or do local network/cloud streaming of more demanding titles.
why also add and X86 vm for the 1st xbox games as well? X86 VM + redirecting video calls should work.
Well one reason is you would have to include the original XBox OS with drivers for the newer hardware - or a virtualized device for the hardware - but also the original XBox had a fixed function graphics pipeline which the 360 and One have done away with so that would need to be emulated too. It could be done but it's probably not really worth the effort.
I think that its great that you get a compatible digital copy. I have tons of digital PS3 games that currently do not work on the PS4. With sony's acquisition of Gaikai and this PS Now thing, why can't Sony do the same instead of trying to get me to rent/stream a PS3 game I already own? Really hope this gets sony thinking
A lot of game programmers will drop down to assembly to do some things as fast as possible.
I only use inline assembly for atomic operations myself. For inner loops, I write them in C++ and check the disassembly to confirm that the compiler did roughly what I had in mind.
Neither cache affinity nor intrinsics are as bad as you are thinking. With cache, you just arrange your data in the order it is used and generally cache will be good to you, you don't need to know the exact stride most of the time. Intrinsics mostly have an equivalent between platforms, SSE registers are 128 bits long for a reason, so it can operate on a whole row or column of a 4x4 matrix, other platforms will be based on the same requirement. If not, just use floats. Alignment is fairly consistent too, loading from register with length X should be done be done on X bit boundary. Otherwise, how would you get so many cross platform games?
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
Somehow I expect that it was always supposed to be backwards compatible and it hit a horrible programming schedule snag.
No! It's a *SIG*. Keep the Special Interest Groups away! (Con joke!)
As for openness and compatibility, at least Microsoft allows you to use standard usb sticks for storage.
So does the PS4, FAT and EXFAT both supported, why did you think it doesn't?
SHIELD is kind of that way too, in that it's just Android plus some NVIDIA stuff
How well does "some NVIDIA stuff" remedy the audio latency problems associated with Android? I tried playing games on an OUYA console (Tegra 3-based Android box), and the keypress-to-audio latency was distracting even when the TV was in game mode.
So an x86 based system is backwards compatible with programs compiled for PowerPC? In what corner of the multi-verse?
During the first years of the Apple Intel transition (late Tiger, Leopard, and Snow Leopard), Mac OS X had an emulator to run PowerPC apps on an x86 CPU. I think it was called "Rosalina" or something.
And there are still console exclusives.
With an SACD-capable PS3 and a PS4, you can play PS1, PS2, PS3, and PS4 games, including those not ported to PC. But you still can't play Nintendo 64, Dreamcast, GameCube, Xbox, Xbox 360, Wii, Wii U, or Xbox One games. So unless you plan to catch 'em all, you have to weigh a particular console's exclusives against the vast library of PC exclusives. That is, unless The Unfinished Swan is an adequate substitute for Splatoon.
It also means only games that were released after the DSi can use WPA, older games are stuck with wep or no security.
Local network play on DS games uses Nintendo's proprietary network layer, which the homebrew community called "Ni-Fi", not IP. Pre-3DS games lost all online capability when Gamespy died and took WFC with it. So when Gamespy died, that was the last straw for me to switch all routers to WPA.
Until I can get a USB adapter and hook my steel battalion controller to the Xbox One, no deal...
They may not even have the source code from their own studios available. Especially from the early games, the Xbox360 has been around longer than most companies store data. The company I worked for only kept the source code around for 5 years.
I think this is a compelling argument that copyright should only last 5 years. If the source is not worth keeping after 5 years, then copyright has served its purpose by that time and should be terminated.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
But you still can't play Nintendo 64, Dreamcast, GameCube, Xbox, Xbox 360, Wii, Wii U, or Xbox One games.
Thank you Captain Obvious.
So unless you plan to catch 'em all, you have to weigh a particular console's exclusives against the vast library of PC exclusives.
Why are you being such a Captain Obvious.
That is, unless The Unfinished Swan is an adequate substitute for Splatoon.
Not everyone has an interest in Splatoon, or vice-versa for the unfinished swan. Just because I have a PS3/PS4 doesn't mean I have to find the equivalent to Smash Bros for the PS3/PS4.