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Xbox 360 - Backwards Compatible

gco212 said:
You'll be able to buy the older games (pre-gamecube) on-line, if I'm not mistaken, but there won't be a physical slot for the games. As for Gamecube games, I'd imagine the Revolution's optical drive will be able to hold those small one's in a small part of the normal drive, just like on a computer.
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God thats such bunk, nintendo has been doing that for years, selling games they have previously made on new systems. They shouldn't be ALLOWED to say that it is "compatible with" games if you need to re-buy/download the games. That goes for microsoft too. They shouldn't be so greedy, sure BurgerTime is gonna satisfy 10min of your nostalgia, why not download it for free, its the new games that make money.
 
Just a guess...

What if they don't emulate at all? What if they just use some spare space on the included hard drive to house alternate game binaries? That could be a simple explaination for the "backwards compatible with 'top-selling' original Xbox games" remark. It would only be compatible with games it was *specifically* made compatible with.

It's presumable that the XBox360 will run off a modified NT kernel, just like the original XBox. The old games would need to be re-compiled, but that's about it - then you have a "native" XBox360 port of an old XBox game. Since the actual game binary is usually quite small compared to the game data, it wouldn't take much space on the hard drive to provide support for dozens of old games. In addition, since you wouldn't be emulating at all, there would be no speed penalty. In fact, you could do things with the extra hardware, like increase draw distances in Halo or turn up graphical details in other games.

I'm not saying this IS what they did, but it could be the path they chose. It is simpler in the short term, since you don't have to fix an emulation environment - but it does involve soem game-by-game effort. Both approaches have definite advantages.
 
It's been revealed (I can't remember where since I've read literally thousands of message board posts and news articles over the past three days) that Microsoft is going the recompile path with XBOX360, not the emulation path.

Microsoft bought the emulation technology for the servers sitting in the data center, and for rapid software development/test. Virtual Server is key technology for MS's enterprise strategy.
 
Who is going to buy old games, they need to be recompiled in order to work with the 360. Meaning that you'll need to buy them again, probably at a lower price but buying old games you already own is pretty stupid.

I'd would be cool if they could offer a patch via XBL, but it doesn't seem doable. Imagine downloading a 900mb patch?
 
oh come on.. is anyone really surprised by this. It's plainly obvious that M$ is drowning VPC for Mac.. it's a threat and they do what they always do to threats, embrace and extinguish. It's not the arcitecture, it's them being afraid of the Mac.. just like always (while, ironically, admitting that it's better.. several times, directly and indirectly).

Complaining about it, this post included, is pointless. They don't care and nothing can make them care. If Apple wants to put an x86 emulator in MAc, then M$ will crush them, but if M$ wants to use MAcs to run their widgets then you better stay out of their way. Fun. :rolleyes:
 
Likely Completely WRONG!

Macrumors said:
Readers will remember, however, that Microsoft acquired Virtual PC from Connectix back in February 2003. Xbox titles will likely be emulated by the new console. Virtual PC is still offered for the Mac from Microsoft.

If all true, a "Virtual Xbox" would certainly be a feasible Mac software product in the future -- but perhaps an unlikely one to come from Microsoft.
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There is not going to be any virtual Xbox. This is what there will be.

Microsoft will recompile the game engine for the new platform. The game engines are SMALL. What makes up most of the game, are textures, maps and scripts. The actual engine is the small part.

You will pop in your disk of say Halo2 and the operating system will say... Hey this is an old xbox game, do we have the new game engine? Like say on the hard drive as it ships (likely for H1 and H2 and for a few other games as well). Nope... Well then lets download it from xbox live. And it gets the new game engine. Which it then starts, and uses the textures, maps and scripts on the game disk to make the game run. Will this work for all games... No. Will it work for alot of games? Yes... Will it work for any given game if enough effort is put into it? Yes... There is plenty of excess horsepower so that any sort of translation required can easily be added.

This has NEARLY nothing to do with Virtual PC. Though I suspect that there has been alot of expertise on PowerPC performance programming when the ported DirectX and the Windows kernal to the new PPP xbox (don't think for a second they haven't). There will NEVER be a virtual Xbox for the Mac, or the PC. This won't improve VPC performance.
 
I know this is well known already obviously, but took this from the E3 floor today. Playable version of Need For Speed Underground: Most Wanted for the XBOX 360 running off of TWO G5 towers. Just about every person that noticed made joking comments about apple computers being needed to run microsoft's pride and joy.

xbox360g52km.jpg
 
thats why M$ bought VPC
they only need the technology of emulation for its XBox
they have no obligations to benefit mac users
and no obligations to make native graphic card compatability to us, too

and, even doubt they will transplant the "polished" emulation technology back to VPC
 
w_parietti22 said:
Really? That would be amazing! You'd have to have a slot load for the Game Cube games, a slot for the N64 games and another for the Super Nintendo games? O and don't forget, the problem with GameCube is that it doesn't hold a full sized disc so you can't play dvds on it and you can't put you CDs on the consol so that you hear your own personal music on the game - So you would have to have a full sized disc area too.

hmm... to me, (I'm not a designer) but it would look like some soort of box with a bunch of holes in it... that wouldn;t llook very good!
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One slot that can take both 8cm and 12cm discs, the rest of the games downloadable. (yes, from NES to N64)

It's official. Nintendo said it themselves. Go read on IGN or something.

The Revolution is gonna rock! Bigtime! I'm getting one. :)
 
SFVCyclone said:
so who came up with this connection between VPC and Xbox? quite insteresting though.
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People is having quite some facts mixed up. So let's tackle one at a time.

1) VPC has always been slow on games because it only uses the central CPU (G5, G4 or G3) to do all the hardware emulation. The CPU, then, emulates the Pentium-whatever CPU and a crappy S3 graphic card without 3D hardware capabilities. During all that emulation, your flashy powerful 3D card on your real computer remains unused. VPC 7 was supposed to bring 3D hardware emulation through your graphic card. If that was possible your 3D card would be able to free your G5 of some of the load, while being able to run Windows games that require 3D hardware (even if not current ones). MS couldnot add that feature in time so it shipped VPC 7 without the most expected feature.

So fact n0 1: It is not that VPC is slow with 3D games because it is a bad emu, but that the hardware you are using to run the program is not that powerful (a G5 is not powerful enough to emulate the CPU *and* GPU of a decent PC). If VPC could use the hardware GPU to emulate the virtual GPU things could change a bit.

2) MS leaked months ago that it had assigned its XBox team the task to add that much touted feature to Virtual PC for Mac. This is fact n02.

While the reasons for that might simply be that their XBox team is quite experience with the intrinsics of graphic hardware, people started to conclude that if MS could somehow get a Mac's graphic card (lots of times it being an ATI card) emulate a PC graphic card (lots of times it being a nVidia card), making a XBox 360 (which sports a CPU similar to a G5 and an ATI graphic card) emulate an XBox (which sports a Pentium 700 MHz and an nVidia card) would seem trivial. While this is speculation, it seems reasonable for me.

This has succesfully done before. The first batch of nVidia cards used a "glide wrapper" to emulate a 3dfx card (swhich once where the standard), at almost 100%.

3) There is absolutely no official word that games for the XBox 360 would be easily ported to a Mac. While the hardware might be similar, XBox 360 run under a OS, with its own kernel (stripped down WinNT) and graphics libraries (Direct 3D), which nowadays have nothing to do with Macs. While MS could indeed port all those Direct 3D libraries to the Mac, I do not see why they would.

Just my 2¢
 
If MS speaks of backwards compatibility they say to work first on Halo and then down to the rest of the games. Strange way to be compatible, are they going to recompile and sell 360 compatible versions of old games? Would be a very bad move but form MS we can expect everything. :confused:
 
oskar said:
I heard that version 7 was to come with the ability to use the video card directly from a Mac, but I guess Microsoft didn't like that idea too much. That would allow Mac users to really be able to play PC games with higher video requirements.
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And how would that piss Microsoft off, for christ sake. Miscrosoft sells THE SOFTWARE!!! I just do not get how they could care a bit what hardware you run your Windows on, as long as you poured your money on their pockets to make it legitimate.
 
elmimmo said:
3) There is absolutely no official word that games for the XBox 360 would be easily ported to a Mac. While the hardware might be similar, XBox 360 run under a OS, with its own kernel (stripped down WinNT) and graphics libraries (Direct 3D), which nowadays have nothing to do with Macs. While MS could indeed port all those Direct 3D libraries to the Mac, I do not see why they would.
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Game disks typically have the optimized OS stored on the disk itself and just a small rom in de console. If that rom can be emulated then we could use it to start up from the game-disk just as the console does.
No? :confused:
 
Bonte said:
If MS speaks of backwards compatibility they say to work first on Halo and then down to the rest of the games. Strange way to be compatible
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My take on this is that guaranteeing 100% perfect emulation is a too difficult task unless you just embedd¡ the real hardware in the box and do not emulate at all (the GBA is compatible with GB games just because of that, the GB Micro will not play GB games for the same reason). So they are working for a general purpose emu, that once reached a matured state, they will work on to tune perfect emulation for certain games. Something inbetween of what Bleem did for their PlayStation emulator for the Dreamcast (they released dedicated emulators for particular PlayStation games).

A similar case in the N64 emulation in Gamecube. Nintendo has released Zelda Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask for the Gamecube. People have hacked those and saw that v1 runs "Ocarina of Time" but not "Majora's Mask", while would-be v1.1 can run both and quite some other N64 games, while absolutely not all of the N64 catalog. Seems like Nintendo simply updated the emulator to enhance its emulation as needed, checking against particular games and obviating others that would never be re-released on the GC.

Quite natural, IMHO.
 
AidenShaw said:
Don't you mean Apple crippled Virtual PC by choosing a processor (the PPC 970) that didn't conform to the PowerPC Book E architecture?

Connectix made a big performance improvement by utilizing the little-endian support defined in the PowerPC standard. The PPC 970 didn't implement that standard, therefore Virtual PC suffered.

How much do you want to bet that the Book E little-endian features are in the Xbox 360 CPUs ????
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No, he got it right. VPC 6 is years faster that VPC 7 on my G5.
 
Macrumors said:

Readers will remember, however, that Microsoft acquired Virtual PC from Connectix back in February 2003. Xbox titles will likely be emulated by the new console. Virtual PC is still offered for the Mac from Microsoft.
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If this means better performance in futures VPC products for the Mac then this is going to be the first time in my life i'm actually going to wish M$ succeeds at something... Feels a little weird and bittersweet though!
 
elmimmo said:
I cannot see how a news piece speculating like the rest of websites echoing the same, without mentioning a single specific source might make it anything official at all.
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The text says that the info comes from MS itself but indeed no further info or sources as usual in this site.
 
SeaFox said:
*Yawn* I'm not that impressed.

Nintendo's Revolution is going to be backward compatable with all it's past consoles - ALL of them. Yes, I mean you'll be able to play Game Cube, N64, Super Nntendo and 8-bit NES games on it.
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Man, is it gonna be hard to fit those NES carts into that little slot! ;)
 
elmimmo said:
People have hacked those and saw that v1 runs "Ocarina of Time" but not "Majora's Mask", while would-be v1.1 can run both and quite some other N64 games, while absolutely not all of the N64 catalog. Seems like Nintendo simply updated the emulator to enhance its emulation as needed, checking against particular games and obviating others that would never be re-released on the GC..
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As I remember, "Majora's Mask" is a bit different fm the rest of N64 games, because IT REQUIRED ADDITIONAL RAM UNIT to install on N64!!!!
coz i have bought the game and, quite expensive.....
 
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