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Emulation (Games) Microsoft XBox (Games) Games

Microsoft Gaming Chief Calls For Industry-Wide Game Preservation (axios.com) 51

Posted by BeauHD from the preserving-gaming's-past dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: Microsoft's vice president of gaming, Phil Spencer, wants the gaming industry to work toward a common goal of keeping older games available to modern audiences through emulation, he tells Axios. Emulation allows modern hardware to simulate the functions of older hardware and run game files, or executables. "My hope (and I think I have to present it that way as of now) is as an industry we'd work on legal emulation that allowed modern hardware to run any (within reason) older executable allowing someone to play any game," he wrote in a direct message. Microsoft's newer consoles -- the Xbox Series and Xbox One -- run huge libraries of older Xbox 360 and original Xbox games using this technique.

Emulators are most commonly used worldwide by fans, preservationists and pirates. They run games from the original Nintendo era to more recent PlayStations, but there is no consistent use of them by the industry. [...] An official industry emulation approach would require long-term online support to offer game files and to possibly check if the user has the right to access them. Spencer, whose own platform has some of these issues, still sees a path forward. "I think in the end, if we said, 'Hey, anybody should be able to buy any game, or own any game and continue to play,' that seems like a great North Star for us as an industry."
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Microsoft Gaming Chief Calls For Industry-Wide Game Preservation More

Microsoft Gaming Chief Calls For Industry-Wide Game Preservation

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  • Ironic (Score:3, Funny)

    by Luthair ( 847766 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2021 @11:37PM (#61997959)
    Given they just said there would be no more xbox 360 games being added to backwards compatibility.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      not really, two very different things. backwards compatibility takes a lot of work, especially when architectures change. What he is calling for is emulation which may or may not run on latest consoles but would provide access to older games regardless of support on new consoles.

      • They are one and the same thing here. They are doing stayic recompilation from one architecture to another. This is a form of emulation. With ups and downsides like all emulation.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by mr5oh ( 1050964 )
      Especially since I wouldn't consider what they have backwards compatible at all. I have 150ish 360 games sitting on the shelf. None of which are obscure titles. Not very many, read less than a quarter of them can be played on the new Xbox. Worst part is some of those games it's the only way to play them as publishers have lost rights to those IPs or because that's the only way they were released.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The reason they gave is that the licences have expired for the other games and without them they can't provide the necessary patches to make the emulation work well.

      This is what ends up killing most games. The rights are either withheld because one day someone might be able to make a buck by selling it again, or they have expired and would cost too much to re-acquire, or they just don't know who holds them.

    • My father has dozens of WWII simulation and strategy games that were written to be installed on Windows 3.1 or Windows 95. He laments that he cannot install them on modern versions of Windows. The problems range from lack of classical joystick support on a modern PC, to requiring ancient directx or C runtime libraries. Not to mention, some installers actually expect you to have an autoexec.bat and config.sys file that actually work! Most of this is a software problem (excluding the joystick hardware), and n

  • Sell the ROM's and let end users use emulation app (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2021 @11:53PM (#61997989)

    Sell the ROM's and let end users use emulation apps of there choice.
    I don't want to be forced to use an shitty emulation app when I want to use an better one.

    There are lots of cases in where the free emulation apps are lot better then the paid ones.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by NFN_NLN ( 633283 )

      If all you're dealing with is offline cartridge ROMs the free 'market' has already addressed that.
      The biggest issue is online games that rely on a server to function. Once those servers are turned off, unless they open source the code those games are useless.

    • If you get that you would be inviting extremely strict DRM controls to prevent piracy.

    • Shorten copyright to a sane duration, say 30 years.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Calydor ( 739835 )

        Even that is insane for pop culture. That would put Bryan Adams' Everything I Do up for grabs this year, and let's be honest; it's a great song but it's not really much of a hit these days.

      • The original term was 14y with a single 14y extension. That was in the era of incredibly slow distribution and expensive reproduction. Given the instant global distribution for virtually nothing these days, it's not sane to have copyright even that long. Copyright should last, at most, 10 years, with a single 5 year renewal. And the terms should include mandatory release of all components of the work at the end, drm-free. So anyone with the proper equipment should be able to run a necessary server for a gam

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        In order to receive copyright protection, software should require that the source code is submitted to the government and stored securely offline. When the copyright expires the government will make the source code available.

        That would also help with DMCA exemptions for working around copy protection. The source could be released under NDA to certified parties who produce software for assisting those with diabilities.

  • 'I think in the end, if we said, 'Hey, anybody should be able to buy any game, or own any game and continue to play,' that seems like a great North Star for us as an industry.'

    Anyone want to wager how long it is before he is ordered to walk that statement back?

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • PC games never had this issue.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by NFN_NLN ( 633283 )

      "10 Online-Only Games You Literally Can't Play Anymore"
      "These online-only games were fun while they lasted but are literally unplayable these days, due to being entirely shut down."
      https://www.thegamer.com/onlin... [thegamer.com]

      • The author lists the *original* FF-14 release as #6 (which was apparently pretty awful until it was rewritten). And #1 on that list is Miiverse. Seriously? How much are we missing there?

        Could have at least picked some better examples.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Calydor ( 739835 )

          The original FF14 release could be interesting to experience for those of us who only joined after 2.0 just to see what it was like.

          Play it hardcore for months? Nah. Give it a once-through to say I did? Sure.

      • That's arguably more of a problem with online console games. All online games suffer from the same issues but on PC it's easier to modify the game and connect it to a private game server (if such a thing is even available.)
    • really? I have a whole shelf full of PC games from the 80's and 90's, many of which are near impossible to play without older hardware.

    • PC games never had this issue.

      PC games have always had this issue, mmo's are just RPG's with stolen networking code, the last 23+ years of PC gaming have been a shitshow with the rise of the internet because it allowed software companies to trivially steal their own software by stealing the files and game code behind a client-server back end and sell it to the public.

      In the 90's everyone was expecting to get level editors, dedicated servers as local application C compiled exe's forever, that stopped when the moronic public bought into U

      • PC games never had this issue.

        PC games have always had this issue

        Some might read your post and think you're exaggerating but if anything you're coming up short. Blizzard sued to stop bnetd from allowing people to use third party gaming servers and won. I consider this one of the most devastating and damaging court rulings in PC gaming history.
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bnetd [wikipedia.org]

      • The steam requirement can be overridden. That's how pirates do it. I have the source code of several flavors of ways to do it. I thought I'd need it some day so I saved it.

      • If Ultima 9 was literally cancelled, then why is the Dragon Edition box sitting on my bookshelf?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by pacinpm ( 631330 )

        I mostly agree but you are exaggerating slightly. There are some game you can't really run on your own server, it would be too expensive. Example: EvE Online. Almost 100k players online on the same server. Thousands on the same shard directly interacting. You need massive servers to run this.

        • I mostly agree but you are exaggerating slightly. There are some game you can't really run on your own server, it would be too expensive. Example: EvE Online. Almost 100k players online on the same server. Thousands on the same shard directly interacting. You need massive servers to run this.

          This is what they used to sell you on to deny you the ability to run your own servers, we already had limitless player multiplayer with quake 2 engine and it didn't require giving up game ownership.

          See here by John carmack: "no limit to the # of players" -- quake 2 engine.

          https://youtu.be/TfeSMaztDVc?t... [youtu.be]

    • Yes, PC games do have this problem. Granted, the current PCs are descendants of the IBM PCs of the 80s but we don't have complete hardware and software compatibility so that every piece of software ever created for an IBM PC can be run on modern day PCs.
      Windows has been pretty good at preserving compatiblity where possible but even with that, changes in hardware (processor speed, the advent of multi cores) and software make a lot of games from the 80s, 90s and even 2000s hard or impossible to run on curren

  • as if (Score:2)

    by nyet ( 19118 )

    repeal the DMCA, problem solved.

    • I don't think the DCMA is really all that much of a barrier. Still a lot of Swedish ROMs out there.
      As for the emulators, IIRC, Nintendo suing someone ultimately made emulation legal.

  • Warez groups have been archiving this stuff for decades now.

  • From the summary:

    Phil Spencer, wants the gaming industry to work toward a common goal of keeping older games available to modern audiences through emulation, he tells Axios.

    Yet section 10.13.10 of the latest version of the Microsoft Store Policies [microsoft.com] (effective 2021-10-28) still states:

    Products that emulate a game system or game platform are not allowed on any device family.

    How does Microsoft plan to reconcile these two mindsets? Would it be something like the approach used in Apple's App Store, where emulator

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Calydor ( 739835 )

      Probably through having a 'legitimate' emulator written by the IP holder of the original system. Eg., Nintendo could release a SNES emulator and Sony a PSX emulator, but Apple doesn't get to write a Sega Genesis emulator and so on.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by noodler ( 724788 )

        How does Microsoft plan to reconcile these two mindsets?

        By adding the words "unless we do it" to the sentence you quoted.

        • That would be a fun can of worms since emulation is legal, at here in the US it is.
          An argument could be made for unfair practices if they just allowed the platform maker's emulator on it.

  • They seem to have hit a wall with their backwards compatibility program.

    Many games that could otherwise run, are not available. How do I know? The open source Xenia emulator gives us that list: https://github.com/xenia-proje... [github.com]

    GoldenEye? Works great on open source. Not even listed on Xbox.com. With MGM being sold to Amazon, it is not difficult to see how it will almost never see the day of the light (and no other James Bond games, too).

    Terminator? Nope
    Most other movie licenses? Blocked

    Games with music, like

  • Emulating the games will be easy compared to emulating the game servers required for multiplayer games. Surely they deserve preservation too. But the server software is not out in public the way games are. That’s before we even consider anti-cheat features.

  • Call me cynical, but this reads like a money grab. Sell old content with minimal dev and marketing. Seems to me the retro-gaming community is thriving quite nicely without this. And a large part of the fun is the work of finding the games and then developing and configuring your kit to play them.

    • Well, of course they plan on making money on them. I wouldn't expect Phil Spencer to publicly advocate for piracy. OTOH, I'm happy someone is willing to make an effort to make old games work on current systems and sell them to me. I think GOG.com is a great idea and I've bought several old games from them.

  • Emulators are most commonly used worldwide by fans, preservationists and pirates.

    Arrr, they be having a good gaming rig in the hold, me hearties! Bet ye didn't expect that!

  • Microsoft's vice president of gaming, Phil Spencer, wants the gaming industry to work toward a common goal of selling old games to modern audiences through emulation,

    Fixed that for you.

    Given the fact that optical drives are largely on the way out and the fact that microsoft won't let me run images of my old games on their new boxes it just means that he wants to sell the old stuff again. He gives exactly zero fucks about preservation. He just wants to tap a new revenue source.

  • They've just hit a point where from a business stand point it would be profitable to sell their old games as they're far enough back technology wise that it won't take sales from their new games.

    Simply that retro gaming has really fit into it's own genre. Earlier the concept was stop getting you playing the old games you already paid for and don't pay a subscription for, so if you want to play video games you'll have to buy their new ones, regardless of the quality or which you enjoyed more. Now with indie

  • With this and the announcement of stopping BC on the new XBoxes, me thinks Microsoft wants to make a cloud service for old games.
    Not an emulator to play them.

    That would be more up their alley.
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