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XBox (Games)

Halo 1 And 2 In Hi-Def On 360 48

Posted by Zonk from the presents-from-the-bungie dept.
Bungie has confirmed via one of its weekly updates that Halo 1 and 2 will be playable on the 360. Moreover, they'll look even better as gamers will have the option of watching in 720p as opposed to the original console's 480p. From the article: "But here's another bonus - the hardware in the 360 can do a lot of nifty stuff, and specifically in the cases of Halo and Halo 2, it can display the graphics in wide screen, at 720p, with full scene anti-aliasing. And it doesn't look kludgy, artifacty or smeary like an upscanning DVD player. The best way to describe it is that both games look like they're running on a PC at those resolutions."
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Halo 1 And 2 In Hi-Def On 360 More

Halo 1 And 2 In Hi-Def On 360

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  • Wow, newer 3D chips are faster? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by the_maddman ( 801403 ) on Thursday November 10, 2005 @06:31PM (#14002612)
    So, they're saying the newest 3D renderer can run the engine at a higher resolution? I never would have guessed on my own. Looks like the "Patch" to make Xbox games run on the Xbox 360 might just be replacing the engine, rather than trying to emulate x86.

  • Just Like A PC (Score:5, Funny)

    by Chrismith ( 911614 ) on Thursday November 10, 2005 @06:33PM (#14002641)
    "The best way to describe it is that both games look like they're running on a PC at those resolutions."

    To further maintain this illusion, Microsoft has said that the games will randomly crash to a faux "desktop" and occasionally display a Blue Screen of Death, requiring the system to be restarted.

    In related news, MS recently announced the addition of Clippy to the multiplayer modes. "It looks like you're trying to pwn n00bz..."

    • Good god. I hate to be a sour-puss here but how is this funny?

      Clippy and BSOD jokes? This is 2005 right?

    • Re:Just Like A PC (Score:3, Insightful)

      by NanoGator ( 522640 )
      "To further maintain this illusion, Microsoft has said that the games will randomly crash to a faux "desktop" and occasionally display a Blue Screen of Death, requiring the system to be restarted."

      You're saying it's retro, too? Neat!!
      • You see, Nintendo plans to support games from all their past consoles on the Revolution, to counter that MS will support all errors from all their past OSes...

  • Well. (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Brantano ( 908473 )
    Have you ever taken an older game, and forcefully applied AA and AF to it, and then set it to the highest resolution it can go? It normally looks worse than without AA and AF.
    • Umm, no, they usually don't, especially when the developers provide a patch to support the new settings rather than a user forcing it.

      Go back about as far as you can in the 3D spectrum to glQuake. That's about as far back as you can go on modern hardware. Now, crank up the res, apply AA, and AF. It looks like... you increased the resolution and applied AA and AF. How does it look worse? I mean, the textures are sharper at distances, the jaggies are gone, and everything is just sharper in general due to the
      • Umm, no, they usually don't, especially when the developers provide a patch to support the new settings rather than a user forcing it.

        Go back about as far as you can in the 3D spectrum to glQuake. That's about as far back as you can go on modern hardware. Now, crank up the res, apply AA, and AF. It looks like... you increased the resolution and applied AA and AF. How does it look worse? I mean, the textures are sharper at distances, the jaggies are gone, and everything is just sharper in general due to the
        • Tell ya what, those textures will be stretched anyway when you get close to them. Just they now use trilinear filtering so they look blurry instead of blocky.
        • You can have the engine re-render eveything at a higher rez but you can't re-patch all the textures so esily so it will look a bit fuzzy simply because the textures will now have to be upsized (stretched). It will beb etter on a big TV becaus eyou can now see mroe detail but it will suffer from a bit of fuzzyness

          Actually, no. Textures are the same as before, exactly. Things are not fuzzier, they are exactly the same. The only difference is the number of pixels used to make up the texture. If the texture is
  • My problem with consoles is that I like FPS games and I just can't play a FPS with my thumbs. Can I plug a usb mouse in an use that to play halo?

    • Re:Mouse Please? (Score:3, Informative)

      by interiot ( 50685 )
      Answer: yes [gamespy.com]

      The biggest limitation they talk about is not being able to instantly do a 180, but that seems semi-realistic anyway.

  • Still no XBL play for Halo 1. If they can do it on XBC, why can't Bungie and Microsoft work soomething out?
    • Becuase to add Xbox Live support they'd have to recode parts of the game to add Live. Xbox Connect is basically a hack that makes your Xbox think it's on a LAN with another Xbox, it doesn't modify the game itself to say add voice and friends support actaully into the game itself. It isn't clear if the Xbox 360 version even touches the game code, if might just be running the game in an emulator. Even if it is recompiled[1], it's doubtful they'd want to spend the resources to adding (and debugging) new featur
  • "The best way to describe it is that both games look like they're running on a PC at those resolutions"
    720p is 1280x720.

    1080p is 1920x1080 and many PC games can run at or above 1600x1200.
    • Key word: "at those resolutions".

      The point they were making was that some manufacturers might take a normal 480p game, with 480p textures, and simply upscale it to 720p, and claim it outputs 720p, but the game would have fuzzy textures, and fuzzy edges.

      But they're not simply upscaling, the game is actually rendered at 720p, so it will have sharp edges, and sharp-to-semifuzzy-textures. It will look just as sharp as a PC playing at 1280x720.

      • Re:720p vs PC (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Ford Prefect ( 8777 ) on Friday November 11, 2005 @07:09AM (#14006538) Homepage
        But they're not simply upscaling, the game is actually rendered at 720p, so it will have sharp edges, and sharp-to-semifuzzy-textures. It will look just as sharp as a PC playing at 1280x720.

        It looks a bit odd, though. Take this screenshot [bungie.net] as an example - there are some really lumpy pixels on the cables and archway to the left of the picture.

        Actually, I've just spent the last ten minutes making some rubbishy animated GIFs comparing differences between screenshots.

        Here's one comparing Xbox and Xbox360 shots [hylobatidae.org] - there's definitely a difference, but there are horrible jagged pixels on the wires to the left on both of them.

        Here's another comparing Xbox and Xbox360 shots again [hylobatidae.org] - go on, tell me which one's which. ;-) One of them is slightly better, with anti-aliasing on a lot of edges, but what's going on with Sarge's holster? Chunky pixels!

        And finally, my favourite. Comparing the 1280x720 image with a version scaled down to 640x360 and back again [hylobatidae.org]. Here I chucked away three-quarters of the information in the screenshot (I did a nearest-neighbour scale down to 640x360 in The GIMP, a cubic scale up to 1280x720 and applied 40% sharpening). First of all, try to tell them apart - there are some slight differences on near-horizontal lines, but otherwise the 1280x720 image might as well have been rendered at 640x360 then scaled up to the larger size.

        Either these are extremely bad screenshots (they did mention having to grab the video), or there's something very strange going on. I hope it's the former, but there still isn't much improvement over the original Xbox...
    • Which games do > 1600x1200?
      Neither FEAR nor Quake4 run at 1920x1200, my monitor's native resolution.
      They're capped at 1600x1200.
      Same with remote-desktop :(
  • Nintendo says some old (nes-era) games might be updated. now THAT would be a better look than the origional!

  • Is this really impressive? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "And it doesn't look kludgy, artifacty or smeary like an upscanning DVD player"

    Are they really trying to make something out of nothing? I personally have not worked with a modern gaming console, but (being that these systems are, unlike a PC, typically designed around 1 or 2 standard resolutions) wouldn't it make sense to have the Resolution controlled by the system's API? Even if it wasn't, it would be trivial for the 360 to recognize a XBox game and reject it's settings for Resolution, Anti-Alaising and A
    • yeah, it was a pretty lame comparison. It's like saying, "it will actually run at a higher resolution, not all crappy like when you resize a 320x240 .avi to full screen! Behold the technology!"
    • You have to compare apples to apples. The improvements made by the Xbox 360 on running Halo 1 and 2 are to be compared to what enhancements did the PS2 when running PS games. Bungie is busy working on Halo 3 to counter the Ps3 launch. Microsoft is busy launching the 360 worldwide. I am personaly very happy they took the time to enhance the halo games to 720p, as it is what I hoped for since the time when I heard they were doing a new xbox.

  • What? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Gogo0 ( 877020 ) on Thursday November 10, 2005 @07:13PM (#14003019)
    And it doesn't look kludgy, artifacty or smeary like an upscanning DVD player.

    What kind of shit hardware does this guy use to "upscan" (upconvert) his movies?
    I guess the whole home theatre community obsessed with picture quality has been wasting hundreds of dollars on upscaling DVD players, because apparently they look kludgy, artifacty, and smeary -not better.

    • Its the difference between rendering at the target resolution and "blowing up" the image to the target resolution. One yields a higher quality image than the other.

  • PC? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Admiral Frosty ( 919523 )
    The best way to describe it is that both games look like they're running on a PC at those resolutions.

    Heh, imagine that. A console that looks as good as last years PC. What will they think of next?

    • Heh, imagine a PC that you don't have to upgrade for about five years, where newer games look better than older ones on the same hardware? :-) :-) :-)

      But PCs will always have th graphical edge, but I personally keep on getting the impression you need to be in a near-constant upgrade cycle if you want to keep your PC near the cutting edge. I don't plan to buy a next generation console until it's about £150ish (and I can see which one has the best games). I doubt I'll get my PC up to a reasonable gaming
  • Wait...isn't the Xbox essentially a computer? I would HOPE it would look at LEAST like that.

    Yet another reason why most PC FPS fans won't buy Halo.

  • Ok, and? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Chowderbags ( 847952 )
    I don't know what games other people are playing, but high-res Halo is maybe up to the scale of PC games, if we were back in 2002. Seriously, there's no comparing X-Box 360 graphics with the mainstream computer graphics of today. Take a screenshot of Half Life 2 and compare it to Halo 2, and Halo 2 will be blown out of the water, hands down. Seriously, consoles haven't been cutting edge in graphics since what, the Atari? Even with all of Microsoft's muscle, there's only so much they can fool people into th
  • But in order to play Halo, do you need the hard drive for the 360?

    I would suspect that you do (I thought I remembered reading that backwards-compatibility required the hard drive), but I'm not sure.
  • ...the multiplayer map pack? Will that be installed on the HDD the same as before and will it be able to be accessed in the same way? Would there be effectively a compatibility zone on Xbox 360 HDs to let Xbox games still feel at home with the bigger HDs?

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