More on Xbox 360 backward compatibility

360 News | Still not completely clear....

At E3, Microsoft announced with great fanfare that the Xbox 360 would be backward-compatible with current Xbox games. Since then, this statement has been revised to "most top-selling Xbox games". And with other Microsoft comments about "not living in the past" floating around, the truth has never been muddier.

It had been speculated that the problem was with Nvidia owning the way the current Xbox chipset works. And since Microsoft have defected to Nvidia's arch rival ATI for the 360 GPU, it would be very difficult both technically and politically to have Xbox games work on the 360.

Well it now seems Microsoft has agreed to pay Nvidia royalties in order to allow the ATI chipset on the Xbox 360 to emulate the Nvidia chipset's performance for certain Xbox games.

The term 'certain' is used because patches will be required for some or maybe all games, and these patches will be either included on the external hard drive, or available for download.

So now we know how - emulation and patches. But we still don't know which or how many games will be supported, or how good the emulation will be.

Hopefully we'll know all the details before November...

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10 Comments

themak

6 years ago

It will have some if not total backwards compatibility. The group working on Virtual PC was doubled, all into game compatibility. If this does not work there will be a shortlist of games to be recompiled and shipped on the HDD and more over live. This will be the game exe that is 6mb ish big, and seperate from the game itself.

LeonJ

6 years ago

Hrmm, when you say November, you should say March 06 for ozzies. Stupid Microsoft!

ObsoletE

6 years ago

--alex-- wrote

not exactly true...

it depends how much licencing MS wants to pay nVidia in order to make these games backwards compatible, and give their reputation for paying licences in the PC domain (ie: they don't) i don't think they are going to be too accomodating here...

however, if it is only a matter of a software patch, i'm sure there will be many hacks available pretty quickly to dl... which MS will probably publically denounce, but unofficially endorse since it'll help them in the long term...

themak

6 years ago

ObsoletE wrote

--alex-- wrote

The virtual PC teams job is to basically re-write the API calls so they are handelled differently. Becuase in a computer generic calls are made to the graphics card, but in the XBOX Nvidia calls were made. All that should be needed is for some translation between calls. Also these aren't hacks but a total recompile using an Xbox360 SDK, which only MS and the developer have access too, they will install some on the HDD and auto-download the rest, the assetts will still be found on the DVD.

P.S:
The WineX team helped to translate DirectX calls to use OpenGL so it shouldn't be impossible.

ObsoletE

6 years ago

but the problem isn't that it can't be done, it's that the coding for XB games are based on the nVidia graphics chip found in the XB, and since MS have dumped nVidia in favour of their rival (ATI) the games need to be re-encoded to utilise an nVidia emulator and since this all has to be legal, MS has to pay nVidia a licencing fee for utilising part of their code (or whatever) something which has lead to the "limited backwards compatibility"

(yes the language here is very basic, i'm no computational programmer/technician so i'm saying it as i understand it, which i'm told is pretty accurate)

i was just saying that since MS are notorious for not paying licence costs, what makes you think they will pay for ALL the xbox games to be compatible? they won't, and so unauthorised emulator programs will come out so people can run the XB games...

this is what i mean by hacks... un-authorised emulators for games MS deems unnecessary to convert...

themak

6 years ago

ObsoletE wrote

this is what i mean by hacks... un-authorised emulators for games MS deems unnecessary to convert...

They will be impossible, (I think) it will need the source code and a devkit and maybe an original devkit.

ObsoletE

6 years ago

^ not impossible... impossible without chipping (or modding the XBox OS) maybe, but if that's what it takes i'm sure it won't stop many people...

themak

6 years ago

ObsoletE wrote

^ not impossible... impossible without chipping (or modding the XBox OS) maybe, but if that's what it takes i'm sure it won't stop many people...

What is impossible is the recompile as it is impossible to get the source code for the game and manually edit it to run on the Xbox360. The impossibility is not the running of the code but the compilation.

Ask Mito about it.