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XBox (Games)

Xbox2 With Virtual PC For Backwards Compatibility 28

Posted by Zonk from the thank-the-maker! dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The next Xbox may use Virtual PC for backwards compatibility for original Xbox games. According to reports from Geek.com's Apple insider section the reason for the delay of Virtual PC 7 is because Microsoft has given it exclusively to the Xbox team. The reason hinted at: Xbox will include an IBM PowerPC 970, and current Xbox game developers are shipped G5 PowerMac."
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Xbox2 With Virtual PC For Backwards Compatibility More

Xbox2 With Virtual PC For Backwards Compatibility

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  • hardly new rumours. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by gl4ss ( 559668 )
    and thin on facts.
    what about the hd?
    nvidias properiaty gfx chip stuff?

    yes, a true tech "journalist"(forum-boy) takes couple of facts and extrapolates from there to an "obvious" conclusion. doesn't make it a fact though.

    • Total Bullshit (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Jeremiah Cornelius ( 137 )
      XBox is still "up-north"

      VPC team is in Silicon Valley - tied to MS Mac Apps team, and close to Cupertino.

      The barest attempt to research publicly available info will reveal this.

      The VPC Mac folks have alot of former Apple, Taligent and Kaleida folks - none of whom would be big on going to WA, nor would the XBox guys be able to touch them on processor internals, etc.

  • Has been posted before on /., although there a few new details
    • And it will be posted here again a few more times as this worms its way to market.

      Sing it with me now, the next time it comes around on the submission queue!
  • Okay, so what will be the mechanism keeping games from being easily ported to the Mac?

    I'm not saying that an Xbox running a G5 would mean you could simply copy binaries off the CDs and run them on your iMac, but it would seem to me that this would remove most of the larger technological barriers that keep Carmack's crew from simply emitting Mach-0 executables at the flip of a switch.

    The obvious one that springs to my mind is the lack of DirectX, but since they have obviously got the Xbox version of it run
    • libraries.

      the same thing that's keeping windows->macosx ports 'hard' now, or windows->linux for that matter.

      *DirectX, but since they have obviously got the Xbox version of it running on a G5, that's not too much of a roadblock.* it is if you can't ship those libs..
      • What might also be interesting to speculate is porting the other way around? Would it technically be possible to create OpenGL / Mac games and port to XBox2 (assuming relevant GL libraries were included?) This could significantly help any potential homebrew developers.

        nick ...

        • Re:Mac Compatibility (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Hast ( 24833 )
          First off, what stops you from taking a XBox2 games and playing on a G5 is the same which stops you from playing normal Xbox games on a PC. Different architectures. While it may be a pretty standard processor, graphics chip and sound chip they are put together in quite a non-standard way. Sooner or later you will be able to run the programs (barring encryption) on standard PCs but by then it will no longer look as hot. (Typically you need "next generation" stuff to emulate a console.)

          If anything I imagine
    • You are overrating the hardware similarities. I work on cross platform titles, and so little of the code is hardware specific, much more depends on the platform specific software (Win32, DirectX, Sony libs).

      It'll still be easier to port a Win32/DirectX application from x86 windows to xbox than from osx/ppc. Considering the whole XNA thing, it also looks like they are going to be making it even easier.
  • I am really unsure as to how this would run the games at any respectable speed that they could be played. Unless VPC's performance has been massively increased since I last used it, it would be rather painful to play just about any 3D game on this type of emulation. This seems more like something that might work in theory, but when it comes to real-world performance, forget about it. As it is, normal desktop performance with VPC isnt the greatest for obvious reasons, let alone full-fledged 3D gaming engines

    • Re:How the hell ?! (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Visigothe ( 3176 )
      well, considering the Connectix Virtual Game Station played Playstation games at full speed using hardware from 1997/8. (You could run all the games using a first revision iMac (233MHz G3).) It's not too difficult to emulate the small bits of logic it takes to run a game. It is much more difficult to make *anything* fast. This is why VPC is still quite slow, even on very fast hardware when running "normal" applications. Also, I imagine most stuff is offloaded to the GPU
    • if the rumors are true, i'm pretty sure 3 dual core 3.5ghz ppc 64bit chips can emulate the power in a 700mhz celeron currently in the xbox.

      • Re:How the hell ?! (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Corngood ( 736783 )
        Why do you think that? How are multiple processors going to significantly help emulation of a single processor?
        • Well, there is always the posibility that one processor could concentrate on dynamic binary translation, which can improve performance Transitive [transitive.com] anyway, and another run the translated code.
          • I suppose you could do this, but usually you'd translate code when you need to run it, so the other CPU would have to wait anyway. The other (and probably better) option is to do all the translation at load time, and just cache it on the mass storage (assuming it exists).
    • Yeah but this would be an extremely streamlined version of VPC, designed to do a single function-- emulate games between two specific processors.

      There wouldn't be many of the things slowing VPC down on the Mac-- for example you wouldn't have a complicated OS within another complicated OS (XP within OSX is obviously torture, but NT or 98 emulated on a new dual-boot 1.25 DP G4 running OS 9 is fast, enough to play modern games.)
    • Think about it. They are probably tailoring Virtual PC to ONLY play old Xbox games, which had a very specific configuration (not even truely a PC), and only on this particular chipset. Sure, they might make some breakthroughs, but they are going to take advantage of the fact that they are working with two very specific chipsets and get the absolute best transition one could get.

      So although the main VPC product might see some carried over improvement, I wouldn't get too excited.

  • Just more speculation... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by polyp2000 ( 444682 ) on Sunday September 26, 2004 @01:51PM (#10356072) Homepage Journal
    There has been plenty speculation already here and on various other sites. Although it looks likely there is nothing concrete anywhere that specifically states that XBox 2 will use virtual PC (or derivative) for emulating XBox 1. What is clear though is if the XBox 2 is to retain backwards compatibility with XBox 1 there are only two ways to do it

    a) include an x86 processor

    (assuming no need to emulate nvidia chips as the direct x / 3d layer should mean ATI would work as well - assuming game developers behaved themselves)

    or

    b) use emulation
    (speculation about VPC would be the obvious choice - although does not lend itself well to directX / 3D)

    Question is how cheap are 700mhz x86 chips these days?

    Nick ... (See ... I can speculate too!)
    • The question is not how cheap the actual processor is, but how expensive it would be to integrate it into the system. PS2 does a huge hackjob of this with the PS1 processor, and it's much, much simpler than xbox.
    • a) include an x86 processor

      (assuming no need to emulate nvidia chips as the direct x / 3d layer should mean ATI would work as well - assuming game developers behaved themselves)

      I don't think all developers have respected directX. Yeah, all those PC ports probably do, but some exclusive titles most probably try to get all the juice from the nvidia chip, doing things that will be very hard to emulate on the ATI. If you want an example, take Halo. The PC version needs a computer WAY more powerful than a Xbo

  • Backwards compatability with no HD? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by DreadPiratePizz ( 803402 ) on Sunday September 26, 2004 @02:19PM (#10356255)
    How exactly would the Xbox 2 be able to emulate a game like Halo, which copies map data to the hard disk, when the Xbox 2 will NOT have a hard disk?
    • Just a guess, how about a half-gig of RAM?
      There had to be some sort of upper and lower limits to how much hard drive space a game was allowed use on an Xbox? Perhaps the lower limit is now in the realm of what would be reasonable with cheap (i.e. last generation) RAM?

      • Based on what I've seen, there's not only a size limit, there's a time limit.

        First time I played Ninja Gaiden, it took a long time to load the first level; pre-caching all sorts of crap. After that, level loads are zip zip zip.

        After not playing the game for several months, the first time I popped it back in...same dealie. Long load time on the first load, then zip zip zip.

        • actually, the way it works, from what i've been told: the xbox loads game files onto the hd when needed, and caches them there. it saves caches for three seperate games, and when you play a fourth game, it wipes the oldest cache in favor of the newest one. (quick way to test this: when you play dead or alive 3, the first time you run it, it displays a terms of use agreement. you only see this the first time: subsequent plays don't display it again. however, if you play 3 other games, and then put doa3 in

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