Microsoft Updates Xbox 360 Back Compat Again

liquidzero4 writes "Earlier this week, Microsoft patched in another of their regular backwards compatibility updates. This one is fairly important; not only does it add a number of titles to the official back-compat list but several of the new old games are fairly popular. The likes of Panzer Dragoon ORTA, Jet Set Radio Future, Mercenaries, Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee, Soul Calibur 2, and Star Wars Republic Commando are sure to make some 360 owners happy."

First post?

[pasamio]

I clicked on this and it mentioned initially that there was nothing for me to see here and then magically came up. Did I miss something?

JSRF

[mqmatt]

It's great to see Microsoft continuing to add backward compatibility. I'm really looking forward to playing JSRF again, but unfortunately if looks like it doesn't work on PAL systems yet :-(
If you have a sufficiently high constitution, wade through the discussion at http://forums.xbox.com/11825595/ShowPost.aspx [xbox.com].

Re:

[electrosoccertux]

Damn this is the LAST thing I was thinking Microsoft was going to do. What would you expect a marketing company to do? Market the hell out of the backwards compatibility, then when you finally get them to buy the product, you slow the porting waaaaaaaay down, to just enough so you can say "we're working hard to get these games playable".

This seems entirely out of Microsoft's ordinary character. What is the world coming to?

Re:

[British]

This seems entirely out of Microsoft's ordinary character. What is the world coming to?

They are trying to beat the snot out of Sony in the video game field. If you want to go into more detail, they are trying to outdo Sony's backward compat. with PS2 games.

Re:

[ivan256]

. What would you expect a marketing company to do? Market the hell out of the backwards compatibility, then when you finally get them to buy the product, you slow the porting waaaaaaaay down, to just enough so you can say "we're working hard to get these games playable".

It's been 18 months since the system came out. How much slower do you want them to go?

Re:

[oberondarksoul]

So you mean you couldn't care less, then? Saying you "could care less" implies you care a great deal, contradicted by your post itself.

(Yes, this drives me up the wall.)

Re:

[FasterthanaWatch]

Or the gp was using a shortening of the phrase "(As if) I could care less." This is one of those rare phrases that keeps the same meaning when negated. I use the negated form because I was taught in the way you say, but users of English have many phrases to choose from to get their point across.

Re:

[Drantin]

or that he just cares a little bit... it doesn't have to mean that he cares 'a great deal'...

Also, see here [alt-usage-english.org] for some history on the figure of speech

Re:

[AbRASiON]

While this guy was silly enough to use the "could care less" english abortion his opinion is not entirely validated to the levels of troll people

If a company promises backwards compatibility it shouldn't be selective.
On top of that, even if one is to let that slip under the ASSUMPTION things will get better the least they can do is tell the truth consistently.

In regards to B/C MS has not done that - I specifically recall the line "all new Xbox 1 games released after the X360 is released will be B/C as of la

Re:

[bigman2003]

I don't understand the big deal behind backward compatibility.

I bought tons of games on the original Xbox. I played them, and then I am essentially done- never to play it again.

Same with the 360. I play a game to death, then I am tired of it. Unless new DLC comes out, I'll never put the game back in.

The ONLY exception has been Halo 2- because they are still the best multiplayer multi xbox split screen, not split screen, Live/System-link, WHATEVER the combo is, game.

Still no Morrowind?

[Travoltus]

How does the game of the year several times over take so long to be made compatible for the 360?

Check the Elder Scrolls boards, tons more people would buy Morrowind if it were 360 compatible.

Re:

[jZnat]

Hmm, I just got that game (still only have an Xbox), and that's nice to know. I know that I'll be keeping my Xbox for Xbox games for quite some time since Microsoft can't get the ball rolling and support most of the Xbox game library. Hell, I expect that the Xbox emulator projects (I know of two) will surpass Microsoft in compatibility in no time at all, and they don't even get access to the SDK documentation!

Re:

[MogNuts]

i totally agree with u! i was thinking this for the longest time, and when i saw the new list recently, morrowwind was the first thing i looked for. :) my advice, go buy it for the pc. I've seen it used for like $7 on amazon. I don't think it'll ever be released, probably a ploy by bethesda so that ppl will buy oblivion instead. I went this route because i recently got a new box. Its got an entry level ATI x1300. plays it fine, so u should be ok. (I was originally wanting Morrowind for the 360 because befor

Re:

[MogNuts]

P.S. Only meant to recommend it for the pc because u probably already have one, and there is no sense in buying a used original xbox for 1 game. I don't mean to play platform favorites. ;)

Re:

[PoderOmega]

Unless you already own Morrowind for the XBOX I'd say go for the PC version. You can run it decently on a couple year old PC even with (some) integrated video chipsets, and decently with any non-integrated 3d video card released in the last couple of years. Mainly because of the number of Mods and addons out there that you will miss out on the XBOX, and I can't imagine playing Morrowind without a mouse.

Re:

[Babbster]

It's obvious that Morrowind is probably a harder compatibility job thanks to its complexity. It's only slightly less obvious that Marrowind may be an incredibly hard compatibility job thanks to its bugs. I don't know how patching on the Xbox ended up, but the last time I played the game it still had show-stopping bugs that cropped up. This one may not be Microsoft's fault - except, of course, in the sense that they let Bethesda ship a buggy game.

Re:

[fimbulvetr]

Agreed. It took me a while to give up on the game, but I should have known better when I could cook an entire meal during the loading screen. What a terrible waste.

Re:

[elrous0]

I'm still waiting on a patch for "The Warriors." It was one of my favorite Xbox 1 games, and still no joy on the 360.

Re:

[MarkAyen]

Morrowind was barely compatible with the Xbox. Making it compatible for the 360 may well prove impossible.

Re:

[seebs]

So far as I know, they build replacement PPC binaries for specific games. There's no general-purpose Xbox emulator; just specific code to run specific titles.

why? vpc7 could emulate a 1 ghz p3 on a g5

[plasmacutter]

vpc 7 could emulate a 1 ghz p3 on a g5 with twin 2.7 ghz chips.

the ppc architecture in the 360 is much more powerful.

the idea they cant run x86 code at circa 700 mhz on it is rather odd.

Re:

[hbp4c]

If you remember, the xbox360 uses a different video system based on an ATI card than the original xbox which was based on an nvidia system. It's not the processor code that is difficult to emulate, it's the hooks to the video system which have to be re-written essentially from scratch to work on the new system.

Re:

[Watson Ladd]

Didn't the Xbox use DirectX? Doesn't the Xbox 360 also use Direct X?

Re:

[hbp4c]

Yes. Both use DirectX, though it's an optimized version for each the xbox and xbox 360 platforms. It's not the vanialla version you get if you go install DirectX on your PC.

Just because a game is written in DirectX doesn't mean that features that work on one video system will work equally well on a different video system though. Take for example any game written for DirectX version 3 which looks great on video cards from that era. In modern versions of DirectX occasionally you could get some "artifacts"

Re:

[seebs]

The CPU in the 360 is higher-clocked, but it's in-order; it's not actually as powerful as a G5.

That said: I am pretty sure that Microsoft bought VPC specifically for this project.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think that's true. When people have questioned "why did you add support for ??" The response has usually been "It was a side effect of adding support for a different title. They were so similar, that the emulation just happened to support them both."

Re:

[ravyne]

Nope, The 360 definately uses an emulator. Each game has an "emulation profile" that enables/tweaks the standard emulator to be able to play that game. Think of it as a sort of patch for the emulator thats specific to the game. These are the files that came on your 360 hard drive, that you download automatically the first time you put a supported game into your 360, or that you install from the downloadable CD ISO they make available for each back-compat update.

This is actually one area in which Nintendo la

Re:

[Guspaz]

Despite the wasted space from the per-ROM emulators, I haven't heard any widespread complaints about filling the Wii's 512MB of storage space. Granted, the SD card storage option is only good for backing up games, and playing a game stored on an SD card requires that you copy it back to the Wii, but still, people seem happy with the status quo on that account.

I'd wager there's a reason they chose the route they did. I can think of a few.

Perhaps it was easier for them to take one emulator and tweak it in sou

Because Microsoft didn't own the Xbox IP

[tepples]

its absolutely incomprehensible that they can't design a proper emulator for a game system they themselves released.

This happened because Microsoft did not own unrestricted rights to the trade secrets, patents, and copyrights involved in the original Xbox platform. This hindered Microsoft's ability to shrink the process of the Xbox hardware, which in turn limited the room for Xbox price cuts. Microsoft did not make the same mistake with the Xbox 360.

the xdk is microsoft proprietary.

[plasmacutter]

microsoft designed the sdk (xdk) by which all games interact with the console hardware, and the idea they can't properly emulate an sdk they developed themselves is the most spectacular example of stupidity i've ever seen.

correciting myself..

[plasmacutter]

sdk is the wrong word.. development environment is more proper, considering the games as compiled are designed to replace the dashboard/os and run the console as well.

they developed the environment on which it runs.

sure, their hardware is off the shelf, but the game system is still theirs, because if it were not they would have no power to use the DMCA hammer on homebrew xbox emu developers.

Re:

[unfunk]

When was the last time you tried to play an XBox-quality game in a PC emulator? Consider trying to run Far Cry on a PowerMac in VirtualPC as an example, and see how far you get. This isn't exactly Wine/Cedega we're talking about here..

Re:

[plasmacutter]

this also isnt exactly the mac variety of g5 were talking about here either.

incidentally vpc7 was able to emulate a 1 ghz p3.. which iirc is roughly 270 mhz more powerful than the chip they put into the original xbox.. and this was a a twin 2.7 ghz machine built for general purpose code.

not only does ms have a much more powerful chip to work with, they have the exact specs of the hardware theyre working with.. after all they did design a game dev environment for it.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

The CPU is the easy part of the equation. It's the GPU that is the problem. XBox used nVidia, XBox360 uses ATI. There is a world of technological difference between the two and both encumbered by their own list of patents which prevent them from reimplementing the technology. If a particular game uses a particular set of features it will be more difficult to port. Using a third-party GPU is normal; Playstation 3 uses nVidia and Wii uses ATI. If Sony decides to jump ship from nVidia in Playstation 4 th

ok that makes sense.. mod parent up.

[plasmacutter]

that makes sense i suppose.

Re:

[DrXym]

please explain to me how you make an xbox emulator that doesn't play every xbox game?

Because every game is hitting the system in different ways, on top of which they have emulate the XBox hardware architecture. I expect it's non-trivial.

then they didnt do it right (thus my point)

[plasmacutter]

Because every game is hitting the system in different ways,

and if they properly emulated their own hardware they wouldnt have that problem.

explain to me how they can design their own console, make their own sdk and release their specs for it, but can't emulate their own sdk!

Re:

[pasamio]

The problem, as any emulator writer will tell you, is that game developers often use 'undocumented features' of consoles to get better performance out of them. Some find that if you put something into XYZ register in a certain order the system reacts in a certain manner specific to the hardware. Whilst its on one hand really useful (you have a complete reference system) but on the other hand really complicated (while specifications might be perfect, the realm outside of them typically isn't). This is what m

Re:then they didnt do it right (thus my point)

[DrXym]

and if they properly emulated their own hardware they wouldnt have that problem.

You don't get it. Every game hits the hardware in different ways. Some games won't touch certain APIs at all. Other games might use an API extensively. Others might run through middleware like Renderware or Unreal. Microsoft does not have the source code to the majority of these games and can only figure out what each game uses by profiling it. Making an emulator which supports all games in existence out of the gate is virtually impossible.

Clearly MS targetted a handful of games (perhaps aided by game source) and made them work first. Then they wash rinse and repeat. At each stage they target certain featuresets and disparate games that use the same features all suddenly work.

Even Sony which has put considerably more effort into BC than MS only has 75% compatibility in the EU version. And that's with hardware assistance. While I don't think MS has made much effort with their BC, it is clearly a non trivial exercise.

Re:

[PKFC]

Yeah I know I'm late to the party, but..

The European PS3 doesn't have the PS2's processor or graphics processor. I guess it was only a matter of time before they took it out... In theory, after 1.6 I think it was, the PS2 games stopped looking like crap on US/Japanese PS3s.. Haven't heard what it really is like in Europe.

Re:

[Blakey Rat]

They also changed video card vendors, and from my understanding, shaders in video cards use different code for different vendors. There's really a lot of reasons that it's hard for a Xbox 360 to emulate an OG Xbox game.

Re:

[cnotes999]

Thats because the 360 doesnt have the same hardware as the original!

Re:

[MSFanBoi2]

I guess they could to a lot worse, I mean Sony's PS3 has actual hardware in it (well in the US and Japan anyways) to be able to play PS2 games, yet it doesn't work with all PS2 games...

Re:

[ivan256]

Actual PS2s (new ones) can't play all PS2 games. They dropped some compatibility to be able to drop the price... ...which seems 1000x better than what Microsoft had to do. (Kill the original Xbox ASAP so they would stop losing money on it.)

Soul Calibur 2

[Anonymous Coward]

Soul Calibur 2? The 360's been able to play that for a while. I brought to my friend's house to play on his 360 several months ago and it worked flawlessly.

Re:

[Loadmaster]

You are correct. Soul Calibur 2 received an update but is not new.

Swi

Re:

[twistedsymphony]

Those aren't a list of new games, some of them are new but some of them are also "updates"

I had some issues

[GregPK]

I tried playing Sega GT only to have it run exceptionally slow. But overall I know the reason behind the backwards compatability issues. They are not only emulating the old game but they are also instilling full time AA. Personally I'd like to see and option to turn off the AA for those wonderful games like Sega GT which overload the GPU on the 360 and cause a slowdown in the game. I'd also love to be able to play my Rally games on the 360. Rallisport, Colin Mcrae, etc. There was a number of great dri

Re:

[Criterion]

Rallisport, the original, not RS2, plays on the 360 just fine.

Still missing the most important one

[Anonymous Coward]

Still no Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball.

And don't tell me it's "only graphics with no gameplay", that's what most games are these days.

Re:

[afedaken]

I'd think more along the lines of MS not wanting to cut into sales for DOAX2. I mean, why allow playback for the old version when you can ding your customers for another$60, or even $30 for the platinum edition?

Re:

[Criterion]

"And don't tell me it's "only graphics with no gameplay", that's what most games are these days."

Ok, I won't.. it's only for the bewbies.

Disclaimer.. I am female of the straight variety but it's kinda hard to miss the bewbies.. any yes, the packages on the males bounce as well ;).

How about fixing some existing issues too?

[Channard]

There are issues with a bunch of existing titles on that list that haven't been fixed. Silent Hill: The Room, for example, has massive great black cracks appearing on the faces of the character. And Star Wars: KOTOR - one of the first games to be made backwards compatible - has problems with the frame rate dropping and the sound breaking up.

Great

[ripnet]

Great I thought. I can play JSRF again. No said Xbox 360 - not unless you unplug the TV and use scart. Meh i thought. JSRF back in attic.

M O R R O W I N D

[popo]

We're still waiting for one of the best selling titles... I personally may have never switched to a 360 had I known
I'd be giving up Morrowind. ... and Oblivion is no substitute...

Where is PGR and Morrowind?

[Criterion]

Waiting.. waiting.. waiting some more..

I want to play PGR and Morrowind on my 360. I was hoping they would add them soon, but I guess no joy yet. :/

*quietly fires up the old xbox while the shiny and nice 360 sits idle*