Microsoft Announces Xbox One Backward Compatibility 193
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.
Why now and not at release time. (Score:5, Interesting)
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The reason they didn't want this to begin with (i'm speculating here) is profit. They wanted to make people buy newer and more games. That didn't work, so now they have to pretend when they said it couldn't be done that they weren't lying.
Re:Why now and not at release time. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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If the feature were practical at the beginning, Microsoft would have stolen the show from PS4 by providing backwards compat on day one. More users would have upgraded immediately. That is too obvious to assume this is something they have been holding out.
It is not a port, it is a 360 software emulator [zdnet.com]. That emulator took a time to develop (right), and based on my linked article I get the sense that the emulator is tweaked per-title to focus on the performance characteristics that are specific to that gam
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Who does that work? The port, I mean? Or if it's in an emulator, who quality checks it to make sure it even runs? Don't those things cost money? At least you have to pay someone to do it. And if all the developer has to do is opt in, that's Microsoft doing the work.
Microsoft are giving you a way to play games you own, doing the heavy lifting for free, to sell more consoles. That's what this boils down to unless there's a lot more that we don't know about.
1) Get the
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> The reason they didn't want this to begin with (i'm speculating here) is profit.
Duh. And what is wrong with doing anything for profit? I guess they want more sales. Duh. It is in my opinion good for Microsoft and good for the users with large Xbox360 games library that they can get a new console and benefit from playing prev and next gen games. What is wrong with that? It is how business should be done - everybody (supplier/consumer) is happy.,
> They wanted to make people buy newer and more games.
Du
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Duh? Show me exactly where I said it was wrong to make profit asshat. For the rest... look it up yourself or post some more stupid youtube videos on your blog.
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More to the point, the CPU single-thread performance of the Xbone is also weaker than the XBOX360 clock for clock.
This sounds extremely suspect, especially since a quick search suggests that the XBox One has substantially lower clock speeds, which I would naively expect to be traded off for substantially better clock-for-clock performance, even if we assume that the XBox One favoured multithreading or GPU much more heavily at the expense of single-threaded CPU. Do you have a citation?
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More to the point, the CPU single-thread performance of the Xbone is also weaker than the XBOX360 clock for clock.
This sounds extremely suspect, especially since a quick search suggests that the XBox One has substantially lower clock speeds, which I would naively expect to be traded off for substantially better clock-for-clock performance, even if we assume that the XBox One favoured multithreading or GPU much more heavily at the expense of single-threaded CPU. Do you have a citation?
It's not just suspect, it's incorrect. I have developed apps for both and XBOne is definitely faster on single threaded code. The 1.75GHz x86-64 is faster than the 3.2GHz PPC (obviously clock rates aren't really relevant to the comparison, so his "clock for clock" is pointless) but a big part of it is a 32MB on-die cache on the XBOne CPU vs a 1MB L2 cache on the XB360.
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Re:Why now and not at release time. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Why now and not at release time. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.)
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No, I believe this is actual backwards compatibility. From Engadget [engadget.com]:
All developers need to do is approve a game for backward compatibility for it to work
Microsoft may not be able to automatically put these games on Xbox One due to legal or contractual issues. It seems the only reason 100% of games will not be available is if a publisher deems backwards compatibility to be undesirable for their business.
Also to quote Microsoft's announcement website [xbox.com]:
The digital titles that you own and are part of the Back Compat game catalog will automatically show up in the “Ready to Install” section on your Xbox One. For disc-based games that are a part of the Back Compat game catalog, simply insert the disc and the console will begin downloading the game to your hard drive. After the game has finished downloading, you will still need to keep the game disc in the drive to play.
I would have guessed that "downloading" here means disc-to-hard drive. To your credit, it is unclear.
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That makes it sound like MS will port it, or it will be emulated, but that the game maker/publisher won't need to do anything, but something will need to be done.
Re:Why now and not at release time. (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, the 360 will be software emulated [zdnet.com]. It sounds like games are not ported, but the same binary will be used.
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Wouldn't be surprised if there was some recompilation to improve the emulator. Just downloading new code would be pretty tiny compared to the assets. Or maybe all of the system libraries are x86 native. I'd be REALLY surprised if it was anything as simple as a PPC emulator running the XB360 OS.
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Wow (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wow (Score:4, Insightful)
This is why I love competition. I have never owned a Sony gaming system and I never plan to, but if nothing else, Sony's powerful existence in the space has kicked Microsoft's ass into high gear and the result is a much better Xbox One.
*All* of them?!?? (Score:3)
How is that even possible without a hardware chip?
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Smoke and mirrors.
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>Both are x86 hardware.
No, they aren't. The xbox 360 is PowerPC architecture ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] ) while the XBox One is x86 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] ).
Running PPC binaries on x64? (Score:2)
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How is that even possible without a hardware chip?
It's not possible. They really are not going to let old games play on the new hardware... What they are ACTUALLY saying is that they will let you get a ported copy of a game you currently own on 360 for something approaching free of cost. However, we don't know which games will be ported or how they will make the ported version available.
So it's same old, same old for now. We don't know what games will be ported, how they will manage access to the ported games to just users who actually own the 360 versi
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"It's not possible." ...and yet, virtual machines exist to run xbox 360 games on an x86 PC ( http://xenia.jp/ [xenia.jp] ), and they're made by people who don't have access to the documentation for the hardware. How exactly was this impossible again?
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Given that TFA is pretty light on details, can you point me to the definitive source of information that outlines this is actually what they're doing?
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Not exactly 'definitive' but a source: http://www.trueachievements.co... [trueachievements.com]
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This just restates things which are in TFA and it doesn't confirm or deny what you're saying.
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There were important differences, however, rather than hash that out I'll just give you the latest:
http://www.trueachievements.co... [trueachievements.com]
It also includes the link to an official PDF.
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Moving forward, it apparently is a matter of developers simply saying "yes" to backwards compatibility - Microsoft will do the heavy lifting and make sure the game's properly playable on the new hardware.
This tells me that there is some porting effort required, even if it's just a recompile of the original source code into an executable for the new hardware operating platform. But it doesn't tell me that the console is binary compatible with 360 games. In fact, I'd bet quite a bit of money that they are decidedly NOT binary compatible systems.
The Xbox One has a variant of Windos 8, specially crafted for the platform with another co-responsible
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Having just watched a video with one of the key devs involved (it's a featured video on the xbox one right now) they describe it as an emulation wrapper. The game itself is not "ported", rather, it's wrapped in code that completely emulates the xbox 360 and maps commands to the xbox one APIs. It even emulates the 360 xbox menu and other items.
It actually makes us both right to some degree. It's not really a port, but it's also not quite a virtual machine. They did make it clear that the chief hurdle is
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Found the video online. You can see it here: http://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox... [xbox.com]
Re:*All* of them?!?? (Score:4, Informative)
According to Mary Jo Foley [zdnet.com], this statement was provided by Microsoft officials:
What we did was essentially built a virtual Xbox 360 console entirely in software. So when you launch a game via Xbox One Backward Compatibility, you'll see that the game first starts up a virtual Xbox 360 console, then launches the title. The work is ongoing as each title requires individual packaging and validation work to enable that virtual console capability, but we're committed to continually rolling out new titles each month.
This doesn't sound like porting a game, or a game that is very similar. It's the exact same game running in software emulation.
But the emulator may be adjusted on a per-title basis to ensure optimal performance.
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Actually, it is [slashdot.org] an emulator [zdnet.com] (comment credit link, story link.) I presume that the graphics part has to be tested and/or diddled for every title, and so there will be frequent updates to the emulator. (I made the same speculation you did earlier... [slashdot.org])
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[Citation needed] - seriously are you sure?
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So pretty much like the 360s 'backwards compatibility' which they quickly dropped about a year in.
MS didn't drop the 360's backwards compatibility with the original Xbox. They put out one backwards compatibility list at launch. Then, about a year later, they put out an expanded backwards compatibility list that added additional games... The expanded backwards compatibility list is still supported on the Xbox 360. They just haven't added anything new, but the games on that list still work.
Compare that with Sony, which actually removed the backwards compatibility feature through software updates.
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Compare that with Sony, which actually removed the backwards compatibility feature through software updates.
No, they didn't. You're confusing OtherOS with backwards compatibility. Some people do that because of the Slim's, which never had PS2 compatibility or OtherOS support in the first place. PS3 capabilities depend on the model:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
ALL PS3 systems can play PSone games. This is an entirely software solution. Put the disk in, it works. You do have to create a "virtual memory card" and assign it to a "virtual slot" in an XMB to save games. You can also buy a little PS1/PS2 memo
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Compatibility List (Score:5, Informative)
From: http://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox... [xbox.com]
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:Compatibility List (Score:4, Interesting)
This is just the initial list. It sounds like all games are compatible and the only thing keeping them is a new agreement/addendum with the Publishers to distribute them there.
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That list is about 100 titles shorter than I would have expected
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I think they said "100 by the holiday season" which is presumably when the feature will be more widely available.
This seems to be titles that are on their way to being ported (the Rare titles) and other first-party or closely aligned ones.
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Again, it's just the initial list. They showed a graphic containing many more games on the stage during the announcement. Those games will roll out over time to preview members. That list will roll out to all members by holiday season.
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maybe. It could just be "if the publisher is willing to port it, we're willing to distribute it", and how hard the port is gets hidden from us.
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Secret? (Score:3)
It looks like it really is as simple as just putting your old disc in your new console and away you go. No need for updates (although we might have heard him say something about downloads), and overall, a seamless experience. And the best thing? It's free! You've already bought the games once, you don't need to buy them again.
I would have assumed an update to enable this would be required, even if it literally only changed a 1-bit flag somewhere to turn it on...
What's more shocking to me is that not once in all this time has anyone with an Xbone tossed a 360 game disc in the thing, be it for shits and grins or even statistically by accident.
Shouldn't it have worked if the feature has been enabled all this time?
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It is backwards compatibility via 360 software emulator, which has not been rolled out yet.
I tried putting a 360 game into the console a couple of hours ago just to see if it would work, and it gives a generic error stating that the disc is not an Xbox One game or DVD.
Xbox One went from a nope to probably nope (Score:4, Interesting)
I've had a 360 since launch (technically three if you count the replacement motherboards) and I would have got the One if it had backwards compatibility, even to the standard that the 360 could play original Xbox games by using most of the on disc assets but having a recompiled native engine for the PPC chip in the 360. This doesn't look quite like that unfortunately but I'll watch with interest as I'm not sure how much longer my 360 will survive and there are still games on it I would like to play through again. If it does support enough of the games I already own (the list currently has none) then I may well add an Xbox One to go with my PS4.
Good news, but too late for lots of people... (Score:3)
A few months back I was picking a new console to replace my 360. XBox One would have been a slam dunk if it would have kept playing all the kids' games. Instead, we traded them all in and bought a Wii U.
Backwards compatibility is a huge feature for building up a user base across generations... but introducing it years after console launch, after pretty much saying they wouldn't, after a good percentage of your users have already switched to something, seems really uh... non-optimal.
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A few months back I was picking a new console to replace my 360. XBox One would have been a slam dunk if it would have kept playing all the kids' games. Instead, we traded them all in and bought a Wii U.
Wii feel sorry for U...
Seriously... You may be able to play a lot of old games released for the Wii, but unless you have young kids, the set of Wii games and that motion based user interface is pretty limiting. We had a Wii (in fact we still do) and my teenagers literally never play the thing any more. They are either on the Xbox 360 or their PC. We don't have a Play Station.
Your mileage may vary, but IMHO the Wii is for kids and older adults who don't really do video games. I would have kept the 360..
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So far it's done pretty well.
My kids are all young, and they play Mario 3D World, Mario Kart, and some of the Nintendoland games. Overall, it's a better fit than the 360 for now; the only thing they were playing on 360 much was Skylanders and Happy Action Theater (which I do miss; not a lot of games can handle a room full of 5 year olds). Some of my oldest kid's friends are starting on Minecraft, but we can do that on PC.
At some point I'm sure I'll end up getting another console - but hopefully I can skip
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Some of my oldest kid's friends are starting on Minecraft, but we can do that on PC.
Exactly where we where with my youngest about 2 years ago... Once he got the Xbox 2 years ago, it was a pretty quick progression out of Minecraft, off the Wii and onto the Xbox. I think he played the Wii less than 10 times after that, but the Xbox was the new toy. Good luck and remember that once the kid's friends start moving on, you will too, for all but the very youngest kids.
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Not a lot of adults can handle a room full of 5 year olds.
Few can handle ONE 5 year old effectively. Sure you might be able to control them physically, but unless you don't mind duck tape and rope (and the unfavorable CPS attention it brings) they will out run you eventually.
Too little, too late (Score:2, Insightful)
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Well I can't speak for anyone else, but the combination of forcing you to have a paid subscription to play on the internet and making it difficult to cancel that subscription is what got me to delete my hotmail account and swear off things which require microsoft accounts. If I can't use Windows 10 without one somehow, I'll just stick with 7 until it expires... and then, who knows. Maybe by then I'll just give up on Microsoft. I have found it a nice place for gaming, though.
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I'm hoping Steam OS (or something like it) takes off. Where any OEM can build the platform, and it's basically had to support all the games I've already bought on Steam. (well, at least all the ones that support Linux)
SHIELD is kind of that way too, in that it's just Android plus some NVIDIA stuff. But I think most of us are more interested in a set-top box with a decent graphics card than with Android compatibility (which is why I would favor Steam Box for this)
ps - I keep most of my games on GOG, not Stea
Android audio latency (Score:2)
SHIELD is kind of that way too, in that it's just Android plus some NVIDIA stuff
How well does "some NVIDIA stuff" remedy the audio latency problems associated with Android? I tried playing games on an OUYA console (Tegra 3-based Android box), and the keypress-to-audio latency was distracting even when the TV was in game mode.
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Marketing BS (Score:2)
In the firmware there was a section of code..
If older_game then block_it();
now it's
if older_game then revenue();
All your games (Score:5, Informative)
Ars Technica:
For some reason, I find the second quote much likelier.
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The summary and article:
Ars Technica:
For some reason, I find the second quote much likelier.
last time they raised their voice rah-rah'ing about the 360's backwards compatibility, it was the end of their efforts-- no new titles were added. I had gone to LameStop and purchased some Xbox games for cheap that I'd never gotten to play, and still haven't gotten to play them.
I am skeptical this time around, but frankly don't care. I won't be fooled again.
linky (Score:2)
Straight from the horse's mouth:
http://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox... [xbox.com]
Great but - (Score:2)
Many of my save games are locked to my 360 and not portable.
Although I will say this has moved my thoughts on purchasing an XBone from not likely to possible.
Games are still the deciding factor for me and I'm still working through my backlog of 360 titles although none of them are on the initial list.
Microsoft said it was hard, not impossible (Score:4, Informative)
SAVAGE: There are, but we’re not done thinking them through yet, unfortunately. It turns out to be hard to emulate the PowerPC stuff on the X86 stuff. So there’s nothing to announce, but I would love to see it myself.
http://www.kotaku.com.au/2014/... [kotaku.com.au]
Good (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Hell, when my first-gen back-compatible PS3 died on me and I had to replace it with a non-back-compatible slim model,
Sony would have repaired your FAT CECH(A/B/E) PS3, no need to replace it with a Slim. I have a CECHE model that had issues (graphical glitches and lockups), sent it in, they fixed it, sent me back my same machine (exact same serial number)
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.
Yep, maybe this will encourage SCE to encourage more "remasters". Then again, they have PS Now.
Is it really emulation? (Score:2)
If I had to guess, and I do because there's no explicit statements about how it works anywhere, I'd guess that these are actually ports from the 360 to the 180, and the "download" mentioned in passing is the game binary. That's how it worked on the 360, which it pretty much had to do. But it was able to provide that (for a selection of games, anyway) because of the inherent design of the system; after all, it's just Windows and DirectX. That's what's responsible for the rash of cross-platform PC/Xbox games
What is the point of game consoles anymore? (Score:2)
In 90s game consoles were significantly cheaper, easier to use and more stable than computers of the day. Now you can get a steam machine for $499 or find a deal on a gaming PC at or below price of consoles. Just hook it up to TV, get a controller, run steam Big Picture and enjoy access to same games as consoles, plus many hundreds of PC-only games, frequently for $10 a pop. I can still "emulate" my Windows XP games on Windows 10 without jumping through hoops.
If there is future in console gaming, it's cheap
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Now you can get a steam machine for $499 or find a deal on a gaming PC at or below price of consoles.
Still not quite as good as a Xbox One or PS4 at those prices.
Just hook it up to TV, get a controller, run steam Big Picture and enjoy access to same games as consoles,
Still not quite as good or easy to use as consoles. BPM is still Windows after all. And there are still console exclusives.
If there is future in console gaming, it's cheap boxes and hdmi sticks that can play casual games with a remote or do local network/cloud streaming of more demanding titles.
You mean this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
which can use this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Still not quite as good an experience as actually running an intensive game on local hardware.
No Halo, Mario, Zelda, or Splatoon on PlayStation (Score:2)
And there are still console exclusives.
With an SACD-capable PS3 and a PS4, you can play PS1, PS2, PS3, and PS4 games, including those not ported to PC. But you still can't play Nintendo 64, Dreamcast, GameCube, Xbox, Xbox 360, Wii, Wii U, or Xbox One games. So unless you plan to catch 'em all, you have to weigh a particular console's exclusives against the vast library of PC exclusives. That is, unless The Unfinished Swan is an adequate substitute for Splatoon.
Feature that didn't work out of the box? (Score:2)
Somehow I expect that it was always supposed to be backwards compatible and it hit a horrible programming schedule snag.
Still sadness (Score:2)
Until I can get a USB adapter and hook my steel battalion controller to the Xbox One, no deal...
Re:Summary is rather misleading (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Summary is rather misleading (Score:4, Informative)
A few things to note about nintendo portable backwards compatibility.
1: They tend to drop support for games from older generations. The game boy micro and later don't support GB/GBC games. The DSi and later don't support GBA games.
2: The DS doesn't have a link cable port so while you can play GBA games you can't use link cable (or wireless, see below) in them
3: The DSi and later don't have a GBA style cart slot, so game features that rely on that slot (for example transferring pokemon from GBA versions) can't be used on the DS.
4: There is no hardware abstraction on the wireless. This means that a GBA game can't use the wireless on the DS at all. It also means only games that were released after the DSi can use WPA, older games are stuck with wep or no security.
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A few things to note about nintendo portable backwards compatibility.
1: They tend to drop support for games from older generations. The game boy micro and later don't support GB/GBC games. The DSi and later don't support GBA games.
2: The DS doesn't have a link cable port so while you can play GBA games you can't use link cable (or wireless, see below) in them
3: The DSi and later don't have a GBA style cart slot, so game features that rely on that slot (for example transferring pokemon from GBA versions) can't be used on the DS.
4: There is no hardware abstraction on the wireless. This means that a GBA game can't use the wireless on the DS at all. It also means only games that were released after the DSi can use WPA, older games are stuck with wep or no security.
While the cart slot might not take the older games anymore, the handheld is still hardware compatible with those systems. Which is why we can take a VC (Virtual Console) game (GBA, DSi) and inject a different GBA or DSi into it and it still runs (providing you use the same side rom). Currently we have a CFW (Custom FirmWare) called Pasta that allows the GBA & DSi to be run.
As for the GBA using wireless, the GBA never used wireless, so not using the DSi or 3DS wireless isn't even a surprise.
tl;dr 3DS
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It is obvious by these limitations that Nintendo uses backward compatibility to ease up prev to next gen transition for users and thus drive up sales. The later editions as Game Boy Micro and so on are usually released some time after initial launch in time that game library is large enough for the new system that they can sell it. Also Nintendo is known for making revised editions to - again - drive up sales. Like the new versions of devices on which only few exclusive titles use the full potential of the
WFC is dead (Score:2)
It also means only games that were released after the DSi can use WPA, older games are stuck with wep or no security.
Local network play on DS games uses Nintendo's proprietary network layer, which the homebrew community called "Ni-Fi", not IP. Pre-3DS games lost all online capability when Gamespy died and took WFC with it [nintendo.com]. So when Gamespy died, that was the last straw for me to switch all routers to WPA.
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Nintendo handhelds were always technically inferior to competition (like Sega and Atari in GB days) so they figured out that backward compatibility will get them a heads start so each of their new (technically inferior to competition) handheld console would launch with broad game library and convince current users to switch. In my opinion it is a smart move but also induces some (minor) technical limitations. Nintendo has a tradition of one gen backward compatibility (in some way) for each of their systems
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The initial batch of supported games is small and, really, not that exciting. It's a software-based solution, and even the games supported from the start have a laundry list of known issues.
This is not true native backward compatibility; for native backward compatibility, see the Nintendo platforms since the original DS, and to a slightly lesser extent, the PS2 and original PS3 hardware (some games didn't work/had substantial issues, but for the great majority of titles, it worked out of the box).
Given that the Xbox One is AMD based and Xbox 360 was PowerPC, it has to be a 'software-based solution' - either a PowerPC emulation layer, or a PowerPC VM. Either of which would slow things down, given the resources that the emulation would require. Given the extreme performance that games require, not sure why MS is even contemplating this.
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Re:Summary is rather misleading (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: Summary is rather misleading (Score:2)
A lot of game programmers will drop down to assembly to do some things as fast as possible.
I only use inline assembly for atomic operations myself. For inner loops, I write them in C++ and check the disassembly to confirm that the compiler did roughly what I had in mind.
Neither cache affinity nor intrinsics are as bad as you are thinking. With cache, you just arrange your data in the order it is used and generally cache will be good to you, you don't need to know the exact stride most of the time. Intrinsics mostly have an equivalent between platforms, SSE registers are 128 bits long for a reason
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Given that the Xbox One is AMD based and Xbox 360 was PowerPC, it has to be a 'software-based solution' - either a PowerPC emulation layer, or a PowerPC VM. Either of which would slow things down, given the resources that the emulation would require.
No, based on the article it seems it isn't emulation or a VM otherwise all games would just work without MS having to do anything except install the emulation/VM.
"Moving forward, it apparently is a matter of developers simply saying "yes" to backwards compatibility - Microsoft will do the heavy lifting and make sure the game's properly playable on the new hardware."
Given that the developer just has to say "yes" (presumably that means providing MS with the source code if they don't have it already) and what
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why also add and X86 vm for the 1st xbox games as well? X86 VM + redirecting video calls should work.
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why also add and X86 vm for the 1st xbox games as well? X86 VM + redirecting video calls should work.
Well one reason is you would have to include the original XBox OS with drivers for the newer hardware - or a virtualized device for the hardware - but also the original XBox had a fixed function graphics pipeline which the 360 and One have done away with so that would need to be emulated too. It could be done but it's probably not really worth the effort.
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Shesh dude.... There ARE ways to make that "off the shelf" Western Digital laptop drive work in your 360.... You have to get the right drive, but it's not that hard.
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As for openness and compatibility, at least Microsoft allows you to use standard usb sticks for storage.
So does the PS4, FAT and EXFAT both supported, why did you think it doesn't?
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I suspect it's more of "if the publisher has a port, we'll let you download it for free if we can tell you already have the old version". How hard it is to port I don't know. Could just be a recompile and relink, if MS makes compatible drivers etc available.
Rosalina Stone (Score:2)
So an x86 based system is backwards compatible with programs compiled for PowerPC? In what corner of the multi-verse?
During the first years of the Apple Intel transition (late Tiger, Leopard, and Snow Leopard), Mac OS X had an emulator [wikipedia.org] to run PowerPC apps on an x86 CPU. I think it was called "Rosalina" [mariowiki.com] or something.
Re:Whatever, I only play Pong (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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the last time they made a huge-hurrah over backwards compatibility (xbox360), the list was 300 titles long and none new were added.
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Maybe a JIT emulator that stores it's translated code to your hard drive? i.e. Treat the PowerPC instructions like bytecode...
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given their revenue, i'm sure quite a few companies would love to be half as obsolete as MS.