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XBox (Games)

What Xbox Games Will Be Backwards Compatible? 164

Posted by Zonk from the besides-halo dept.
alvinrod writes "IGN has whipped up a nice article about how and which Xbox games will be compatible with the Xbox 360. The article explains that Microsoft is using emulation to play old Xbox games rather than including the chipset from the original Xbox. From the article: 'Xbox 360 compatible games are going to be decided on a case-by-case basis. Microsoft's engineer's are, right now, figuring out which games are compatible, and which are less than compatible. Thus, at the 360 launch, only a few games, let's speculate that number is somewhere between five and 20, will be backward compatible.'"
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What Xbox Games Will Be Backwards Compatible? More

What Xbox Games Will Be Backwards Compatible?

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  • Good news! (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    If you went strictly by the numbers, which is one way to interpret Microsoft's statement ("Xbox 360 will be backward compatible with the top-selling games on Xbox"), then the list is pretty easy to make. You've got Halo, Halo 2, a bunch of Ubisoft gamers, some EA games, a Tecmo game here and there, etc, etc.
    Good news! A bunch of Ubisoft gamers will be compatible with Xbox 360!
  • Begin bashing Microsoft's business practices....now.

    • Re:Ready? Set. Bash! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Sancho ( 17056 ) on Friday August 05, 2005 @07:01PM (#13254405) Homepage
      It's a fair bash.

      I picked up an ad for the 360 from a local store (Hastings). The ad promoted the system's backwards compatibility with older, Xbox games. If only a handful of games are actually backwards compatible, that's verging on false advertising.

      Of course, it's only Microsoft's "fault" if they actually advertise it as such or suggest that retailers do.

      Anyway, I'd even be happy with 90% compatibility, but if the blurb is even halfway correct (and who the hell knows these days) then claiming that the device is backwards compatible is pretty much a lie.
    • Screw that old tripe, let's get to the speculation of xbox360 worms wreaking the 'net!

  • HOld up... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Punboy ( 737239 ) on Friday August 05, 2005 @06:28PM (#13254123) Homepage
    If Apple can whip out a way to make the PPC software run at near-native speeds on their new intel boxes, with ENTIRELY different chipsets and such, how come Microsoft with all their crazy engineers cant do something similar to get the i386 code to run on the PPC and work out some sort of translation layer to translate the nVidia to ATI instructions?
    • Because Apple is full of Artiste's

      And Microsoft is full of engineers.

    • The translation layer from nVidia to ATI is called Direct3D. They probably used more direct GPU programming than that though....

      As for the emulation thing, wouldn't that be sort of similar to porting a game from PS2 to Xbox? I mean, they have the native Xbox code. Can't they just set up a translation layer a la DirectX to interpret and make it work?

      Maybe they're just lazy. We can see how long it took them to get 64-bit support out when they started before the processors were available to consumers....
    • Simple, because people using Apple's Rossetta will be running applications where the absolute speed of the program doesn't matter all that much. Xbox360 doing Xbox emulation needs to be correct, fast and smooth. The correct part is only slightly hard. The fast and smooth parts are extremely hard.

      • Re:HOld up... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Punboy ( 737239 )
        Ok, so they'd have to write a complete Xbox emulator. If I'm not mistaken, such things have /already been written/ to run on /much slower/ PC's

        Yes, they are a bit glitchy, but they dont know as much about the internals of the Xbox as MS does, as well as MS has the time and dedication to make such an emulator work.

        Emulating the 733Mhz Xbox on a far-superior triple-core 3.2Ghz PPC would be child's play.
        • Really? I can't find anywhere that people have writen emulators that run the Xbox on non x86 hardware. I found some stuff that suggests people have emulators working on x86 hardware though. This isn't the same thing though. I think that emulating hardware in software is extremely difficult (if it matters at all, I've done it for a simple FPGA design & it is not fun) - The graphics card is different, fine if you only used DX9 in your xbox game, sucky if you talked right to the metal. And I bet that

          • Re:HOld up... (Score:3, Informative)

            by oldwolf13 ( 321189 )
            I *believe* what the XBox SDK does is add the DirectX (8.0 I think?) libraries, and at compile time link them staticly. So it's almost like coding to the hardware in a sense that the directx layer is at the SDK level ONLY, and in the actual games it uses these compiled in libraries to hit the metal. There is no directx libraries on the xbox harddrive (although I often wonder why they didn't do that).

            • Re:HOld up... (Score:2, Informative)

              by KDR_11k ( 778916 )
              MS didn't do that because it'd allow them to update the library in the SDK without having to make sure all shipped games work 100% with the new library.
        • I can tell you why - because Microsoft is cheap. Makes me glad I'm not a console guy...
    • Because Apple is lying. Or rather, they're stating the truth at the unusually high optimism that we've come to expect from salesmen, marketers and other people involved in public promotions.

      • Because Apple is lying. Or rather, they're stating the truth at the unusually high optimism that we've come to expect from salesmen, marketers and other people involved in public promotions.

        Based on the transition from 68k to PPC, I'd say you're very wrong. I believe Apple can pull this off because they've already done the same thing once before (twice, if you count Mac OS 9 -> Mac OS X).

        My first Mac was a 68k machine, my second a PPC machine. All of my applications continued to run. The only ones th

    • In going from Xbox to 360, it's emulation of the i386 on a PPC architecture.
      From old Apple to Intel-Apple, it's PPC on i386 architecture.
      I'd be inclined to think things might be easier to translate one direction than the other, if Microsoft didn't already have available the Virtual PC software to run Windows XP on PPC based Macs (as found in some versions of Office:Mac)

      • Re:HOld up... (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Trepalium ( 109107 )

        'd be inclined to think things might be easier to translate one direction than the other

        Yes, emulating x86 on PPC is probably far easier than the reverse. There are relatively few features that a Pentium III varient would have that would be absent on the PPC (and as you said, Microsoft already has VirtualPC). Going in the opposite direction means you're always starved for general purpose registers, which means you have to store and load them from memory. This can kill performance quite rapidly.

        Frankl

    • It shouldn't be too difficult for MS: 1) They already have experience with the PPC (Windows NT was available for the PPC) 2) The XBox was based on Windows (albeit stripped of much of the core) 3) One of the selling points to developers was that it would be easy to port Windows games to the XBox and vice-versa indicating support for DirectX (and thus hardware abstraction) I think MS is just holding its cards close. They may be evil, but they do learn from other's mistakes (usually). I think the 360 will r

    • Levels of Abstraction (Score:3, Informative)

      by Detritus ( 11846 )
      It's one thing to write a system call compatible graphics library. It's much more difficult to handle programs that directly access the graphics hardware, and there are often compelling reasons to directly access the graphics hardware in high-performance applications.
    • I'd think it's because the 360 will cost $300 and the Macx86 will cost an order of a magnitude more.
      • No....

        The first Intel Macs will include the Mini, almost certainly at $499 for a minimum configuration. The more expensive desktop Macs (the ones that will come in $3000 configurations, an order of magnitude larger) will be the last to make the transition, up to a year after the Intel Mac Mini comes out.

        Moderate parent (-1,WRONG). Or perhaps Troll since it will be possible to spend that much, but most people will not.
    • Well, they are. That's what the article says. In fact, the guy says that the raw CPU emulation isn't really a problem in terms of performance.

      The problem seems to be the use of graphics primitives that are tailored to nVidia hardware that are hard to efficiently translate for ATI hardware.

      That's what I got from the article, anyway. Having said that, it's a confused article - for instance:

      All console manufacturers require developers to follow certain code requirements to ensure basic quality and fu

  • It will be interesting to see whether M$ is the proverbial Early Bird, or Early Worm.
    • 'Im already fairly decided what I'm getting , First a Revolution then a PS3 (when it comes down in price).
      Being fair , The Xbox's best games are either available on Computer or other consoles . So far the Xbox 2 will does not have any titles which fall outside of this category i can see no reason to buy one.
      This is one of the key problems i have noticed with the Xbox , IT has no great exclusives , well perhaps for a short time , but eventually they are ported now i not everything , but enough to make it a f

  • DON'T DO IT (Score:5, Insightful)

    by vga_init ( 589198 ) on Friday August 05, 2005 @06:33PM (#13254172) Journal
    It's not worth it.

    Let's say the consumer has old XBox game A. He loves to play A a lot. This guy buys an XBox 360; he heard it also plays original XBox titles. The fact that it only plays certain titles slips by him, and the marketing on the box is too slick to put enough emphasis on this fact. He tears open the box and tries to load his game. If he gets a message that says his game isn't supported, he'll scream and throw the new system out the window. If the game starts to load, and is playable (but only to a point, with lots of glitches/slowdowns/whathavyou), he'll get a serious bad impression of the 360. If the game loads but encounters a fatal error consistently during gameply, he'll scream even louder and throw the console through TWO windows.

    Emulation sucks. When consumers get backwards compatibility, they expect 100%. That's what they've been getting so far. Partial compatibility will have buyers a little sore, and if Microsoft isn't VERY diplomatic about the gamer's experience, they might become downright angry, and lots of windows are going to get broken.

    And just think; this ugly PR nightmare could all be solved by simply not attempting backwards compatibility. It's all or nothing, folks.

    • I agree. Why even do it. If someone loves to play A, wouldn't it be fairly safe to assume they have an XBox. And if that is the case they will still be able to play it. It's not like the old XBox is going to get jealous of the new XBox and refuse to put out anymore.
      • Duh. Same reason I'd consider buying a PS2 despite not owning a PS1... there's some games that slipped me by on PS1 (since I didn't have one) that I could play with a PS2. If somebody wanted to play Halo, but never got around to buying a Xbox, you could buy a Xbox 360 and be pretty certain that Halo will run well on it.

        Now, if you're after a less popular game (to use the example in the article, Panzer Dragoon Orta, an excellent rail-shoorter), you might run into problems-- in that case, check the list of
      • I plan on putting my Xbox away (or taking it into my office or something), and putting the 360 in the entertainment center. Then playing all of my Xbox games with my chill-colored wireless controllers, and taking advantage of all the new features on Xbox Live.

        I don't want to have two consoles there that I have to switch between, and I don't want to have to switch network cables back and forth to whichever console I want to play on.
      • Most people don't own an Xbox.

        An existing library of Xbox titles might help convince some of those people to buy an Xbox 360. After all, Microsoft does want to increase their market share with the next generation, don't they?

    • Re:DON'T DO IT (Score:5, Informative)

      by Jesterboy ( 106813 ) on Friday August 05, 2005 @07:37PM (#13254722)
      While I do appreciate your point of view and you make a very valid point for how this sort of partial compatibility could be very frustrating to the consumer, please don't take it out on our dear friend emulation.

      Emulation doesn't suck; what about MAME [mame.net] and ZSNES [zsnes.com]? In fact, emulation is a great way to ensure near perfect ports of the games, as long as you have the processing power to do so. Moreover, if you have the spare processing power, you can use it to make the games nicer, such as the various stretching / smoothing routines available in ZSNES; your old games actually look better emulated.

      The problem seems to come from the difficult to emulate GPU, not emulation itself. As such, it sounds like what Microsoft might be doing is some ad hoc driver system, where each game has a specific driver that handles the GPU calls in such a way as to work for a particular game. Either that or they are actually going to try and emulate the GPU instructions on a piecemeal basis, fixing the most common first, and then releasing version patches over XBox live while enabling games that are "friendly" (IE, emulate well, using the article's vernacular) under the successive versions.

      This former does sound kind of flakey, but the latter sounds like a true emulator. Most emulators go through this kind of compatibility shakedown phase since certain instructions are used a lot, whereas other instructions are used much more rarely. The upside is that if they do this, it's possible it will eventually emulate all XBox games, possibly with some graphics enhancing options. I guess only time will tell how well their backwards compatibility really works out.

      • Re:DON'T DO IT (Score:3, Interesting)

        by vga_init ( 589198 )
        Ah yes. :-) I do love ZSNES and MAME, and those are first class examples of first class emulation.

        If done perfectly, emulation is very poweful and reliable. I'm merely worried that not enough time and energy can be spent before the shipment date of the 360 in order to build such a great emulator. Perhaps I underestimate Microsoft, but we all know how many years of development it took for programs like ZSNES to win the sort of compatibility it has.

        Rather than saying emulation sucks, I should qualify tha

      • I agree with both of yall. I think, however, that OP might have meant that emulation from a company like MS in a case like this is a sucky way out. If you get MAME and a ROM and it doesn't work perfectly you're not likely to get more than annoyed by it. You're not out $300 and you don't have an easy target like Microsoft to blame for it. At least that's how I'd feel.
    • if Microsoft isn't VERY diplomatic about the gamer's experience, they might become downright angry, and lots of windows are going to get broken.

      Don't worry about it too much. Microsoft's Windows is already broken enough as it is.
    • "Emulation sucks. When consumers get backwards compatibility, they expect 100%. That's what they've been getting so far."

      Backward compatibility has never been flawless on consoles. The PS2 can't play every PS1 game. The GBA can't perfectly run every GB game, and the DS can't handle multiplayer GBA games.
      We don't know how well the PS3 will handle b/c, but Sony claims that it'll play both PS2 and PS1 games. Given the PS2's support, it's almost certain that not every single game will be flawlessly supporte
      • Backward compatibility has never been flawless on consoles. The PS2 can't play every PS1 game. The GBA can't perfectly run every GB game

        I remember there being lots of issues with playing PS1 games with launch PS2's, but did they ever bother ironing those out, because when I still had my PS2, I didn't find a single PS1 game that didn't run on it.

        And GB games not running on the GBA? Details please.

    • Emulation sucks. When consumers get backwards compatibility, they expect 100%. That's what they've been getting so far.

      Excuse me but, Shut Up!

      If they pull off 40% compatability The library of games for the console increases by that number AT LAUNCH. Alot of Xbox360 owners are gonna be new to consoles, And their parents probably would appreciate some AAA budget titles. Microsoft could go so far as to repackage the few that work with "360 compatible" slip-covers/Stickers.

      We do not ask Nintendo, Sony, an

    • If he gets a message that says his game isn't supported, he'll scream and throw the new system out the window.

      Uhh, no he won't. Nobody is stupid enough to throw a new console out the window because it won't play an old game. The 360 won't be cheap.

      And what person is going to buy a brand new 360, rip it out of the box, and run an old game on it? They'll want to play a 360 launch title.

      Moderators modded you up, but I've no idea why because your argument is ludicrous.

  • Can someone tell me how this is even a concern when all they have to do is probably download newer firmwares in the future. They mind as well do a xbox-updates website like windows-update.

    • Re:Firmware (Score:5, Insightful)

      by badasscat ( 563442 ) <basscadet75@@@yahoo...com> on Friday August 05, 2005 @09:18PM (#13255365)
      They mind as well do a xbox-updates website like windows-update.

      The day a new game console requires a windows-update-like web site is the day I go back to playing my Atari 2600 exclusively.
    • That would suck. First, not everyone has their xbox connected to the internet. Second, game consoles shouldn't need patches or updates; you get too many of those and you might as well just have a PC. Because then, just like with PC games, companies will be able to release buggy, broken games and just patch them later, and if you don't have internet, sucks to be you. Or maybe, like what sometimes happens with windows-update, you'll get a patch that completely crashes your system, and then you can't play
  • Ultramix 2 not mentioned :(

    That game isn't a "game". It's my workout. My daily workout.

    I don't want a 360 anymore....

    • You say that it's your daily workout, implying that you can run it now. Does buying an XBox 360 somehow break your current system?
    • Please be kidding.
      Like the Xbox360 won't see at least 4 DDR games or clones in its first year.
    • That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard.

      1) I bet DDR Ultramix gets ported quickly, since it's a non-demanding game. (It doesn't challenge the Xbox hardware in any way; even the 3D dancing characters are simplistic.)

      2) The Xbox 360 will quickly get DDR, or other dance games, because they sell really well and are popular at parties.

      3) Even if the above don't happen, you still own your existing Xbox, right? It's not like the Xbox 360 will magically make it disappear.
    • Dude, I hear that failing to buy a 360 will cause your Xbox to explode. I read it on some gaming site somewhere, so surely it's the truth, right?

      Remember, this isn't an official line, it's what IGN has decided for themselves. You can choose to believe it, just don't assume it's actually how things are going to be.

  • Isn't that forwards compatible?

  • I was glad to read in the article that

    "Emulating the CPU isn't really a difficult task. They have three 3GHz cores, so emulating one 733MHz chip is pretty easy."

    The article goes on to say that it's the proprietary routines in the GPU that will cause the problem, since those are found in the nvidia graphics chips. What I found interesting was Microsoft's own need for emulation, re-writing proprietary graphics routines much the same way that wine or other emulators need to in order to do their jobs. It

    • That's true, they "bought" the XBox core from NVidia.. but turned tail and used ATI for the 360... I'd bet NVidia is less than helpful with the porting!

      That said, they bought the people that built the x86 -> PPC emulator Macs have been using for years now... you'd think they'd be able to do much better at this. If anything, this proves MS has offically "jumped the shark". dirty laundry like this shouldn't even be out in the open. emulation SHOULD be perfect given that MS OWNS the original XBox outri

  • First of all, it's been known for a while that the plan is to have all Xbox games eventually playable on the 360. Here's confirmation of that. [majornelson.com] It's likely that a few of the more obscure cases may end up not working (the same is true for the PS2 and the GBA), but the plan is to make the emulator complete. So IGN's little "let's spread fear that Panzer Dragoon Orta won't be playable, based on no facts!" rant is silly.

    Another problem is that the authors of this article apparently doesn't understand console emu
    • Another problem is that the authors of this article apparently doesn't understand console emulation, which is why their estimated playable titles number ("let's speculate that number is somewhere between five and 20") is so ridiculous.

      It's likely Microsoft is going to need to take a less orthodox route to emulating the XBox than most game emulators take. Emulators fall into two basic categories:

      Hardware Emulation:
      Very compatible but also very slow, this is the route almost all game emulators take. The
      • "There is usually a hardware emulation layer to fall back to when a call can't be translated. Famous emulators of this type include Wine and Executor"

        I highly doubt wine has a hardware emulation layer, since a huge percentage of desktop Linux boxes are x86 or some compatible 64-bit architecture, and I doubt many servers would have the need to run windows software.

        "It's VERY unlikely Microsoft could simply emulate every chip in the XBox1, the 360's CPU is simply not that powerful. It is impossible to emu

        • Re:Terrible Article (Score:3, Interesting)

          by gabebear ( 251933 )
          "I highly doubt wine has a hardware emulation layer, since a huge percentage of desktop Linux boxes are x86 or some compatible 64-bit architecture"

          Wine doesn't really have a hardware emulation level when running on x86, but when running on different architecture

          QEMU [bellard.free.fr] can be used as a hardware emulation layer under wine.

          "I'm fairly sure a 3+Ghz chip can emulate a 733Mhz one (celeron, not PIII, by the way), especially one with a smaller instruction set like x86("

          The x86 has a MUCH larger instruction set

    • **All console manufacturers require developers to follow certain code requirements to ensure basic quality and functionality. Many of the best Xbox developers, such as Ubisoft and Tecmo just to name a few, have gone above and beyond the requirements. In fact, a few have pushed their games to the metal, squeezing out as much performance as possible from Microsoft's system. So, it's likely that the most technically superior games will be backward compatible on Xbox 360. *** not only a terrible article but ze

  • Try porting (Score:4, Insightful)

    by vga_init ( 589198 ) on Friday August 05, 2005 @06:56PM (#13254366) Journal
    Thinking about the compatibility situation, I came up with an interesting idea.

    Why not port the titles? I don't know how large the games are, but you could have the developer port and recompile the game engine onto the XBox 360. Connect to XBox Live, insert your original game disc, have the XBox identify the disc for you and then download the new game binary (if available) onto its hard drive. Suddenly, the game runs perfectly. :-)

    • Re:Try porting (Score:3, Interesting)

      by the-stringbean ( 884738 )

      This ain't gonna happen, for 2 main reasons:

      1. Developers want to get on developing titles for the 360 not mucking around with XBox titles
      2. Assuming something silly like 5% of a game is binaries or nVidia specific - 5% of say 6Gb is going to be in the region of 300Mb multiply this up by say a dozen games and you're suddenly up to 3 or 4Gb of storage just for binaries. And remember this has to be downloaded via XBL...

      Going down the recompile route is not feasible. Developers won't take the time to port gam

  • I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Almost every descision announced for the 360 or PS3 makes it look more and more like Nintendo is making the right moves with the revolution.
    • By having nothing what-so-ever announced?
    • You can speculate about the Revolution all you want, but until Nintendo shows some real specs and real games, it means nothing. If the Revolution winds up as the Virtual Boy 2, Microsoft's limited Xbox compatibility will be a non-issue.

      Nintendo's pretty safe right now because all they've announced are trivial things: retro games, WiFi support, GameCube compatibility. These things don't make or break the system. But we know nothing about the actual games. According to Nintendo execs, it'll be an improveme
    • I have no idea what Nintendo does but I want a console, all I have is nes, and I don't want to run Windows. The console won't be an XBOX, I've already had one which I didn't used due to boring games.

      So that leaves PS3 and Revolution, I might end up getting both.

  • Retrofitting Is Going To Be Expensive (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I doubt we will every know how much some form of Xbox backwards compat is going to cost MS since it will just be part of the larger losses for the division.

    Paying engineers to retrofit existing games and the infrastructure to test and distrubute the patched executables is going to be fucking expensive.

    Not only is the upfront cost of actually going through fixing most games in the Xbox library very expensive, but this isn't a situation like MAME where it is something you are downloading for free and can't de
  • I never bought an XBox, and I've been telling people I'll probably buy the 360 because it'll be backwards compatible. Now I'm not sure. The 360 games announced so far aren't enough to hold it's weight, and the small number of good XBox game isn't enough to warrant a seperate purchase. And I'm all for the sleeper hits. I think Microsoft is shooting themselves in the foot on this one. Of course, I could be wrong. M$ will just be out one 360 sale.
  • I'm surprised that Microsoft went the emulation route. IHMO doing ports would be better.

    They could whip up a wrapper environment that would ease up the task of porting XBox games to the XBox360 to the point where some games only need a recompile, then ask game developers to recompile their games with it (and fix issues if encountered, or just give up if the game is too much bother to port).

    Then, whenever an XBox game disc is inserted into an XBox360, the console would perform an online check to see if there
    • Even with broadband, a game DVD is about 4.5GB, 9 if it's dual-layer (I don't know if XBOX 1 supports this or not but...)Granted, that's mostly animations and textures, but it's still going to be a huge download for complex physics and AI engines.
      • The size of compiled code in a modern video game is insignificant next to the rest of its ressources. We're talking 20 megs tops. And that's uncompressed. So no, it's not going to be a huge download. On any half-decent broadband connection, this is virtually nothing.
    • Not that simple. Most of the content on the disc is in xbox specific formats. Some of it may work, but not much, especially with the endian switch complicating things. You'd still need full GPU side emulation to get that stuff to work (display lists, textures, etc).

      Basically you'd save having to create a CPU emulator, but getting even a few studios to port games would be hard. On top of the actual rebuilding, they'd have to go through the certification process again, and all for maybe a handful of

      • This guy had the same theory that I did. It's a good idea.

        Either I don't understand or you don't understand, but one of us is having a misundersting. When the original poster said wrapper environment, we assume that all the necessary API layers are in place. Accessing these special "xbox specific" formats would be part of the API or something in the original game source. As for GPU emulation, this is also taken care of by the API wrapper, which will make sure xbox instructions get handled via 360 routi

  • Free Xbox with every Xbox360 purchase. 100% compatibility garaunteed!
    • Sounds funny, but that's been MS tactic for BC all along with windows. When they introduce a new OS, they just throw in the binaries from all the old ones... XP was the first OS they put out trying to fix the problem with so much cruft buildup... it was success, but only with large amounts of work.

  • History Error (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Ondo ( 187980 ) on Friday August 05, 2005 @11:26PM (#13255987)
    From the article:

    Sony, of course, gained major kudos for the addition, showing up Nintendo, which never made its consoles backward compatible (though it reversed that trend with GBA).

    Nintendo made the GameBoy Color backwards compatible long before the PS2.
  • There are only 2-3 snippets of "real" information in the article, and everything in it was revealed during E3. The rest is baseless speculation and theorizing with no applicable first hand knowledge. Nostradomas would probably have done a better job writing an article like this ...
    • "Nostradomas would probably have done a better job writing an article like this"

      Holy crap... you're right!!! Century 9, chapter 56 [crystalinks.com]

      The army near Houdan will pass Goussainville,

      [The Battle of Houdan was in Operation Flashpoint and there was some speculation as to whether it would be ported to the Xbox. Goussainville... like Gaussian? Could he have predicted the technologies in the X-Box??]

      And at "Maiotes" it will leave its mark:

      [Someone's mark before literacy was usually an ''X'. Obvious reference to

  • What is it with MS doing all this half-assed stuff with the 360? It maybe is going to support HD discs through unspecified means, eventually, it is sort going to play old games. There's a vague cloud of non-gaming features they have as well (and Sony has promoting the PS3's non-gaming aspects also). This is just going to create confusion, which will cause people to either avoid the system or purchase it and then get upset and create a backlash when it turns out the feature advertised earlier isn't fully
  • I believe (I am not certain) that all XBOX games are built using the Microsoft supplied libraries.
    Therefore, microsoft could release a new compiler and libraries that are source level compatible with the old XBOX XDK libraries.
    Then, everyone would just recompile all the games to run on the 360 with the resulting exe files being distributed on XBOX 360 Live and downloaded automatically by the XBOX 360. (game data files would be pulled from the original game DVD just like they are now)
  • I have to agree with those who have pointed out that this article is terrible and full of baseless speculation. For instance, there's this paragraph...

    All console manufacturers require developers to follow certain code requirements to ensure basic quality and functionality. Many of the best Xbox developers, such as Ubisoft and Tecmo just to name a few, have gone above and beyond the requirements. In fact, a few have pushed their games to the metal, squeezing out as much performance as possible from Micros

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