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.

Comments

Why now and not at release time.

[ITRambo]

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.

Re:Why now and not at release time.

[Totenglocke]

That's not what this is though. If you heard their actual announcement, it's not backwards compatibility. What they're doing is that if you have a 360 physical game, you can redeem it (no details yet on HOW, sounds like you'll put the disc in the Xbone and it'll auto-redeem) a digital copy. So this will only work for 360 games that are on the Xbone's digital store (they're stating around 100 by Christmas).

Re:Why now and not at release time.

[suutar]

thanks; TFA is misleading. (and drat. I was suddenly hopeful that I could just replace my 360 with the aging dvd drive with an xbone. Oh well.)

Re:Why now and not at release time.

[unrtst]

Of course it's a bid for profit, whether immediate or long term. Why they thought it'd give them more profit has a bunch of reasons too, which may or may not pan out.
* make people buy the new console for the new games - check, though that may not have got as much market as they hoped
* hidden feature to later steal market share (ps4 lacks backward compat... which, IMO, is dumb... xbox can enable it easier due to less significant architecture changes).
* As said below, this is NOT enabling all games to work. It doesn't even use your old game - it just uses it to verify you have it so it can get you a digital copy of the xbone version. This is not backward compat in any way - it's a port they'll give you for free, and only for ones where all the red tape is cleared and they have a copy (ie. AAA titles could refuse to port to force repurchase; small titles may not have the means; etc).

AFAICT, this is smart, though misleading, marketing, and nothing more.

Wow

[WoodburyMan]

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.

Compatibility List

[jrmcferren]

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

Re:Summary is rather misleading

[darkain]

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.

All your games

[Translation Error]

The summary and article:

you can play all your Xbox 360 games on your next-gen console.

Ars Technica:

Much like the Xbox 360's limited support for the first Xbox's games, more 360 games will be added to the backward compatibility list over time--and there's no guarantee that a favorite 360 game will ever be brought forward to work on Xbox One. Nonetheless, Microsoft promises over 100 titles to start, with hundreds more coming in the future.

For some reason, I find the second quote much likelier.

Re:Whatever, I only play Pong

[JMJimmy]

These newfangled games are lame. I tried ET once, never again.

It's probably a good thing because the article is misinformed. It's not ALL titles and you don't play the disc. You put the disc in and will be given a version you can download for free (presumably recompiled for x86). The only problem is the initial compatibility list is very sparse at ~100 titles with "more being added" which could mean another handful or hundreds but doubtful that you'll get all you games - especially those they think they can re-monetize.

Good

[RogueyWon]

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.

Re:Summary is rather misleading

[Durrik]

You're assuming that that the games are all strictly a high level language like C, C++ or C#. A lot of game programmers will drop down to assembly to do some things as fast as possible. When I was in the industry I had to do that a few times, never for the xbox360 though so it may not be as big of an issue.

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.