Xbox 360 to be backwards compatible

[CheapyD]

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=22839
Still just a rumor, I guess...but its looking good.

[kill3r7]

I certainly hope so but if not I still have my xbox which I'll be keeping so it's not that big a deal.

[javeryh]

epobirs is famous!

This will be awesome if true because I've never played xbox before (other than for 10 minutes at a friend's house or kiosk or something) and I know I'm missing out on some great stuff like Halo, KOTOR, Splinter Cell, etc. These games should be had on the cheap by then too!

[evilmax17]

Here's hoping...

[jkam]

I am kind of hoping for this as well. I don't have an XBOX and it will give me an excuse to get the XBOX 360.

[jimbodan]

If this is true, Xbox 360 will be moving up on my want list. Currently it's toward the backend of my next generation que, but since I really need to replace my Thompson xbox I might as well just wait and grab the 360 sooner then I expected.

[Grave_Addiction]

Epobirs is just too damn smart. The guy needs to build his own console.

[heavy liquid]

I'm hoping for backwards compatibility. I think it makes a big difference to whether or not a lot of average gamers buy it early. Especially moms and dads buying it for their kids. They're more likely to plunk down the money knowing that there's already a huge library of games available.

[Rig]

I hope so, becuase I don't want to lug my Xbox along into the next console war. But, doesn't that disprove the "Xbox 360 pics" that were posted before? Because, IIRC, those pictures showed no ports for controllers. Unless, they aren't really going to change the controller much, and we are forced to use the newer controllers for our older games...

[Gameboy415]

If this does turn out to be true, I might actually want to sell off my XBOX.

BUT, does anyone know how much the XBOX memory cards hold?
Because I'd be willing to sell it off if I can keep my saved games......and who knows if the XBOX memory cards will be compatible with the new system.....argh

[Rig]

If this does turn out to be true, I might actually want to sell off my XBOX.

BUT, does anyone know how much the XBOX memory cards hold?
Because I'd be willing to sell it off if I can keep my saved games......and who knows if the XBOX memory cards will be compatible with the new system.....argh

I know that the current Xbox memory units are pieces of expensive shit. I bought one, thinking I could transfer to a new Xbox, if needed, or to transfer in the future to the 360. They hold 500 blocks, but a lot of games won't transfer over! (Especially the ones I want to move over! :cry: ) I was very disappointed in that regard.

[Scorch]

God, I hope this is true. I don't want to sell my system and all the games.

[Spruce]

I know that the current Xbox memory units are pieces of expensive shit. I bought one, thinking I could transfer to a new Xbox, if needed, or to transfer in the future to the 360. They hold 500 blocks, but a lot of games won't transfer over! (Especially the ones I want to move over! :cry: ) I was very disappointed in that regard.

Tecmo games in particular seem to be notorious for it. You're better off getting the PSO USB keyboard adaptor and using a cheap jumpdrive as an Xbox mem. card.

[screwkick]

I just bought an Xbox and some games, banking that this would happen.

[alongx]

God, I hope this is true. I don't want to sell my system and all the games.

Why would you do that anyway? I'll be keeping my Xbox, GC, and PS2 past when I get their successors, despite the fact that they will not be needed.

[Kaijufan]

I really hope that the Xbox 2 does have BC.

[russtophiles]

I just hope the backwards compatibility works on ALL games and doesn't have exceptions like the PS2 has for PS1 games, and also hope that all the games that are HD compatible stay that way. It'd also be nice if they could improve disk data retrieval .....I'm sick of hearing my Xbox's disk drive speed up when a guard suspects something in Splinter Cell CT....

[road3283]

I guess that answers questions about Live too, if it's cross- compatiable across both generations, you shouldn't have to set up a whole new account.

[ryanbph]

i thought that if you bought the one with the hard drive you would have bc

[kill3r7]

If it has BC than I would think it's worth buying the one with the hard drive. Don't have to worry about memory space and you can transfer all your xbox saves. This way you'll be able to sell of your xbox if you want to (I'm not).

[rafissaying]

i think i'm the only one who doesnt want it to be backwards compatible. that means that Microsoft has to saccrifice something in order for it to be BC. that means games won't be as clear, gameplay might not be as responsive, and so much more. i think that if it is BC the Xbox 360 will not be as fast and as "great" as so many people are putting it.

[epobirs]

OK, this is weird. I was responding to an earlier article on that site that questioned whether an optional hard drive on Xbox 360 would sell enough to make developers want to support it. My letter mentioned the oft repeated rumor of it being required for backward compatibility but I kept it in the context of rumor while offering further reasons why the storage would be needed for the emulation and not just because Xbox games expected the drive to be there. I also brought up that Sony's fumbling of their optional HDD should not be taken as a indicator since they took the better part of four years to get the HDD out in the US. A Xbox HDD that is available immediately as a bundle or add-on shouldn't find any resistance from developers as a required support item.

Whether the Inq guy knew about FX!32 is unknown. I brought it up and linked an old article from Byte. Despite never having much access to DEC Alpha hardware I knew about it in good detail from the product manager at DEC. I'm pretty sure that after the Compaq acquisition screwed up everything she left but I've never seen her at any of the trade shows since the DEC days. There was plenty of strong support from Microsoft for FX!32 development since it meant the Alpha could become a real market alternative to Intel before it had sufficient numbers to merit native apps like the Office Suite. The 64-bit Windows APIs started development on Alpha but it stopped being a viable platform before it got very far.

Even if those personnel are no longer at Microsoft the documents they generate remain for the techniques. Apple also used some similar techniques to mix native and non-native binaries during the transition from M68K processors to PowerPC chips. So there is plenty of precedent for this approach to emulation.

http://csdl.computer.org/comp/mags/mi/1998/02/m2056abs.htm
http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/usenix-nt97/full_papers/chernoff/chernoff.pdf
http://www.byte.com/art/9610/sec12/art5.htm

Now I really have to write that longer piece.

[epobirs]

i think i'm the only one who doesnt want it to be backwards compatible. that means that Microsoft has to saccrifice something in order for it to be BC. that means games won't be as clear, gameplay might not be as responsive, and so much more. i think that if it is BC the Xbox 360 will not be as fast and as "great" as so many people are putting it.

This is being done through emulation. It has no bearing at all on the native performance of the Xbox 360 platform. The only thing that could really be perceived as a sacrifice is the need for controller compatible with Xbox1 games, and that is only true if you really dislike the Xbox controller.

Do you believe the PS2 would be better somehow if it was capable of running PS1 games? The way they achieved compatibility is pretty efficient in that the same chip performs many other jobs for the PS2 such as reading the controller ports, managing the USB, memory, and IR ports, controlling the DVD drive, etc.

[epobirs]

I just hope the backwards compatibility works on ALL games and doesn't have exceptions like the PS2 has for PS1 games, and also hope that all the games that are HD compatible stay that way. It'd also be nice if they could improve disk data retrieval .....I'm sick of hearing my Xbox's disk drive speed up when a guard suspects something in Splinter Cell CT....

If you look at the size of the PS1 library and how few of those don't run perfectly on the PS2, I'd have to say they did a great job. Last I checked fewer than 1% of PS1 games had problems.

That is a memory management issue. Obviously the guard's decision tree has branches that cannot fit in memory in a game with Splinter Cell's level of detail. At least it's fast. Consider the same situation on systems with less RAM and no hard drive.

[Wlogan31]

i think i'm the only one who doesnt want it to be backwards compatible. that means that Microsoft has to saccrifice something in order for it to be BC. that means games won't be as clear, gameplay might not be as responsive, and so much more. i think that if it is BC the Xbox 360 will not be as fast and as "great" as so many people are putting it.

Even if it is a small sacrifice in a couple of areas, I think it will be HUGE for MS to get this done. They will gain, IMO, a much larger market share because people, such as myself, who don't have an Xbox now will be more willing to buy an Xbox 360 that has a HUGE library of great games that we haven't gotten to experience yet due to limited funds in this generation...

[radjago]

If this turns out to be true, the market price for used Xboxen should plummit.

[cronnos]

What about the game saves on the current Xbox? Will we be able to send them somehow to the new hard drive? Backwards compatibility is no good for me if I can't use additional content I have downloaded already. Even more important are my game saves, will I have to start an RPG from scratch if I want to play it on the 360 or will they give me the tools to transfer the info? I hope M$ has thought of all these questions...

[Ozzkev55]

backwards compatibilty only matters to me so i can sell my current xbox to get the money for the new one

[epobirs]

What about the game saves on the current Xbox? Will we be able to send them somehow to the new hard drive? Backwards compatibility is no good for me if I can't use additional content I have downloaded already. Even more important are my game saves, will I have to start an RPG from scratch if I want to play it on the 360 or will they give me the tools to transfer the info? I hope M$ has thought of all these questions...

For most games the solution is already in stores. Ever notice those 8 MB memory units that plug into a controller slot? Beyond that there is an adapter available to use a USB drive for larger files.

Downloaded material shouldn't bea problem. Free stuff will just be downloaded again and purchased material should have records attached to your XBL ID allowing for those to be downloaded again as well. A minor inconvenience at worst.

[Ozzkev55]

so does BC really deform a systems power, need some stats here, or some tech info?

[epobirs]

so does BC really deform a systems power, need some stats here, or some tech info?

That question is impossible to answer without context. What are the two systems and how are they made compatible? How much constraint is placed on the new system in needing to conform to the old?

The effect on the PS2 is pretty minor. The memory cards are probably the most affected area. If Sony didn't need to keep costs down by having the new cards use the same design they likely would have made Memory Stick the standard for the PS2 and provided a huge boost for that format and allowed it to have pricing competitive with competing flash card formats. That in turn would have helped the PSP.

The controllers needed to be compatible but Sony was still able to add analog buttons to the feature set.

The cost of the PS2 chipset would have been a little lower but almost all of the circuitry that performs PS1 operations serves purposes on the PS2. It may have forced the engineers to make a few compromises but nothing major is apparent.

On the Xbox 360 side, the big unknown is whether IBM did any customization to the CPU set to better enable translation of X86 code. Motorola PPC chips had a hardware big-endian/little-endian converter for helping Apple gradually migrate the OS and apps from M68K chips to the PPC and this came in useful for x86 emulation as well. IBM didn't put this in the G5 and made life rough for Virtual PC users. They had to wait for a completely new version to come out of the portion of Connectix that now part of Microsoft. Even taking advantage of the G5's strengths the new version of Virtual PC doesn't perform as well as hoped. IBM didn't have any reason to include that hardware function since Apple had long since ceased having any migration needs and didn't especially want Windows apps to run well under emulation instead of those companies producing native Mac versions. It made the expensive 970 chip just a little cheaper and that was more important to Apple.

There isn't any reason IBM cannot add that function to their PPC version for Xbox. They have an IP sharing agreement with Motorola (now Freescale) from the days when both companies designed PPC under the same roof at the Somerset Design Center. (Motorola got that facility in the divorce.) This would take care of a major part of the heavy lifting in emulating x86 on PPC. There are other areas that could be customized as well if backward compatibility was deemed a critical feature and more hardware assist was required. Although if Microsoft is taking the approach I bleieve they are it wouldn't be necessary. Most of the work is being done before the user inserts an Xbox game in his new Xbox 360.

[rafissaying]

do you guys think if it is BC that the price of Xbox 360 will be higher?

[epobirs]

do you guys think if it is BC that the price of Xbox 360 will be higher?

Not for the base unit. The persistent rumor is that it will be a feature of the optional hard drive. While the hard drive may seem overpriced if considered solely as a drive in PC terms, looking at it as a memory card of unlimited capacity, fast caching for games, media storage for custome soundtracks and downloadable content from XBL, in addition to enabling use of the Xbox library of games, then all of that should make it quite desirable. Depending, of course, on the price. I doubt Microsoft will be inclined to gouge on this since the services it enables and encouraging continued sales of Xbox software is worth more to them in the long term.

[Ozzkev55]

Not for the base unit. The persistent rumor is that it will be a feature of the optional hard drive. While the hard drive may seem overpriced if considered solely as a drive in PC terms, looking at it as a memory card of unlimited capacity, fast caching for games, media storage for custome soundtracks and downloadable content from XBL, in addition to enabling use of the Xbox library of games, then all of that should make it quite desirable. Depending, of course, on the price. I doubt Microsoft will be inclined to gouge on this since the services it enables and encouraging continued sales of Xbox software is worth more to them in the long term.

To put that in laymans terms, yes

[GuilewasNK]

Backwards compatibilty might make me change my mind about not buying any next-gen machines.

[ArthurDigbySellers]

Am I the only one who read the questionnaire statement in a completely different way? I don't think this question points to backwards compatibility at all.

"Xbox Live is an online gaming service that works across both the current Xbox system and the future Xbox 2. You will be able to play online and compete against others across both consoles. If you are playing an Xbox game on Live you will be able to compete against people playing that same game on Xbox 2"

This doesn't say anything about being able to play Xbox games on Xbox2. All it says is that if you have the same game, you will be able to play against each other on Xbox Live across the two different consoles. What I take that to mean is that if an Xbox owner has Project Gotham Racing 3, and an Xbox2 owner has the Xbox2 version of PGR3, that they will be able to play against each other on Live. Similar to the way that the PS2 and PC version of FFXI can play together.

I think the term "same game" should be "same title." There is no doubt that Xbox and Xbox2 will co-exist for some time, and during that time, games will be released in two versions. The fact that you will be able to play on Live across consoles is still pretty cool.

Maybe the new Xbox will be backwards compatible, but I don't think this question points in that direction at all.

[Ozzkev55]

Am I the only one who read the questionnaire statement in a completely different way? I don't think this question points to backwards compatibility at all.

"Xbox Live is an online gaming service that works across both the current Xbox system and the future Xbox 2. You will be able to play online and compete against others across both consoles. If you are playing an Xbox game on Live you will be able to compete against people playing that same game on Xbox 2"

This doesn't say anything about being able to play Xbox games on Xbox2. All it says is that if you have the same game, you will be able to play against each other on Xbox Live across the two different consoles. What I take that to mean is that if an Xbox owner has Project Gotham Racing 3, and an Xbox2 owner has the Xbox2 version of PGR3, that they will be able to play against each other on Live. Similar to the way that the PS2 and PC version of FFXI can play together.

I think the term "same game" should be "same title." There is no doubt that Xbox and Xbox2 will co-exist for some time, and during that time, games will be released in two versions. The fact that you will be able to play on Live across consoles is still pretty cool.

Maybe the new Xbox will be backwards compatible, but I don't think this question points in that direction at all.
nice interpretation, with that being said...the plot thickens, only two weeks till our questions are answered anyway

[Monsta Mack]

If this is true why would someone even bother to buy the basic $299 model? Other then perhaps it would be on sale for them or they only had $299 on them?

Because for $100 more they could get (rumored) Halo 2.5, a internal Harddrive, a Internet Browser AND Backwards compat. Allowing them to enjoy all their XBox1 titles on live as well, the only problem being the games that have huge file saves and can't be transfered over to the XBox 2, so somegames you'll have to beat over again to enjoy the extra benefits (like Ninja Gaiden.). Not to mention with a HD you don't need to bother with memory cards and custom soundtrack will be there. Why would anyone bother with the basic model!?

I think MS shouldn't even bother with a basic model, or atleast make very few of the basic models.

[XboxMaster]

epobirs is famous!

This will be awesome if true because I've never played xbox before (other than for 10 minutes at a friend's house or kiosk or something) and I know I'm missing out on some great stuff like Halo, KOTOR, Splinter Cell, etc. These games should be had on the cheap by then too!


My God...

[epobirs]

If this is true why would someone even bother to buy the basic $299 model? Other then perhaps it would be on sale for them or they only had $299 on them?

Because for $100 more they could get (rumored) Halo 2.5, a internal Harddrive, a Internet Browser AND Backwards compat. Allowing them to enjoy all their XBox1 titles on live as well, the only problem being the games that have huge file saves and can't be transfered over to the XBox 2, so somegames you'll have to beat over again to enjoy the extra benefits (like Ninja Gaiden.). Not to mention with a HD you don't need to bother with memory cards and custom soundtrack will be there. Why would anyone bother with the basic model!?

I think MS shouldn't even bother with a basic model, or atleast make very few of the basic models.

It's called hedging your bets. Offering the base unit allows them to advertise a lower cost of entry. It also allows the market to declare what it prefers instead of trying to second guess and come up wrong. One of the big problems faced by the Xbox was conveying the value of its feature set to the general public. People with little understanding of the technical issues were hard put to appreciate what they meant to extending the potential of games. Consequently the Xbox didn't sell in sufficient numbers to get all the support it otherwise should. This was the perfect console for MMORPG but all of the half-dozen or so titles were cancelled, largely due to the expectation that the subset of the Xbox base they got as subscribers wouldn't be enough to make it profitable.

Selling on backward compatibility can backfire if it is perceived as adding cost. There are too many consumers whose reaction will be "if I wanted to play Xbox games I would have bought an Xbox long ago" or "I already have an Xbox and don't want to buy it again," so offering the entry level package lets you reach those people with a 'no hit, no foul' ability for them to add the hard drive package later when they come to appreciate its value.

Most of the people in this forum would plan to get the hard drive immediately even without the backward compatibility feature as we're inclined to appreciate the save capacity, media storage, and caching functions. But for us to see good support of the system we're dependent on the a large audience of less sophisticated consumers also jumping in. Winning them over with a competitive price may mean letting them add the drive later or not at all for those with the simplest tastes. So long as it doesn't cause too much confusion it's better to offer the choice. It's up to Microsoft to make sure the literature explains it well and that clerks in game stores and departments are made to read and understand it.

Perhaps they could have a mini-Certification program. The MCXS (Microsoft Certified Xbox Seller) would have an online test which grants those who pass it some sort of reward like a deeper discount on games bought through the current promo program for retailers or a cookie. Some are easier to win over than others.

[epobirs]

I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to write this. A spontaneous post becomes onerous work if I don’t get it done immediately.

A lot of people have tried to invoke Virtual PC on Apple Macintosh PowerPC systems, used primarily to run x86 Windows applications, as a reference point for the feasibility of running games from the x86 based Xbox on the PowerPC based Xbox 360. If this were truly a basis to judge then the case for backward compatibility would be pretty dismal but fortunately that is the case for a number of reasons.

At first glance the problem may seem the same but it’s really very different. Virtual PC has to fulfill several requirements that won’t be faced by the Xbox 360. Most of this derives from the difference between a PC and a game console. A PC is a democracy with many citizens all of whose rights must be respected but a console is a dictatorship, handing over absolute power to the application that has control of the session. Virtual PC on a Mac has to do more than let Windows programs run, it also needs to connect those programs to MacOS to enable access to the outside world in such away that the Windows installation doesn’t need drivers for Mac hardware with no Windows equivalent. It also needs to co-exist with Mac software running simultaneously and enable interaction between them or the value of the emulator is greatly compromised. Printers, scanners, modems, the whole menagerie of hardware a Windows app might need must be supported from the Mac in a way that allows the Mac to deal with everything else normally expected of it. Making this work means VPC can only access a fraction of the Mac in question’s power. Multiple processors aren’t of any help due to this. Even if VPC was allowed to take over the system this type of emulation doesn’t lend itself to parallelization and thus has little to gain from additional CPUs. At best it will take more time from one of the CPUs and leave the other entirely devoted to native operations for a someone better overall experience.

The burden of running a full-featured emulator with all of this connectivity is a more than minor burden. Before any user data enters the picture the system has to load MacOS, then VPC, then Windows, then the Windows application(s). Just the idle state of these four layers eats up a certain amount of CPU time.

The performance issue also begs the question, what is a PC? If you have an elderly system and just switched to using a top of the line Mac the VPC performance should be pretty good. But both the Mac and PC are perpetually moving targets. The purchaser of a brand new Mac probably has something fairly recent in mind when they imagine the hoped for performance of Windows apps than, say, a 733 MHz Pentium III. In addition, their most recent PC experience likely included substantially better video hardware than VPC simulates. It doesn’t matter if your Mac has the latest and greatest from Nvidia or ATI. VPC doesn’t know about it. It simulates an ancient low-end video chip within the simulated PC. Old versions supported Voodoo boards in the Mac but this had all kinds of problems and was dropped. The latest version was intended to provide some kind of simulated mid-range Nvidia GPU that would map to what any recent Mac had for video but that feature didn’t make it into the current release.) So, compatibility is high but game performance is awful on anything dependent on video performance. Other than text adventures, this would include just about every PC game published in the last ten years. Even games with no 3D have their performance needs. Thus VPC users wanting to play PC games get an even more distorted image of whether Xbox emulation on the Xbox 360 is viable. The range of possible software takes so many forms there is little chance of optimization for other than a small range of applications. The VPC developers have to make educated guesses as to what will be the PC apps Mac users cannot get by without.

So, Virtual PC on the Mac has to contend with using only a fraction of CPU time, a fraction of other resources like RAM, must coexist with other running applications on the Mac side, etc., all while faced with performance expectation that are based on PCs comparable to the host Mac.

On the Xbox 360 things are a lot easier. As I said before, a console is a dictatorship. The application of the moment has absolute power to command all available resources. There are a few limits, like not trashing the saves files from other games without express permission of the player but those has little or no impact on operational performance. The hypothetical Xbox emulator gets 100% of the CPU(s), 100% of RAM, and full, unmitigated access to the hardware. Right off the top this gives us a huge advantage over VPC but that is only the beginning. For instance we can find advantage from the multiple processor cores. While the emulation of the Xbox’s Pentium III must by necessity be limited to a single processor we can dedicate the others to lightening by having them deal with other portions of the Xbox. For instance, on of the cores can be given the job of taking in code directed at the XGPU and performing the translation needed to get those commands executed by the ATI chip used in the 360. This is mostly a lightweight task but there are some games that bypass the Direct3D API and talk directly to the processor. These are the most difficult games to emulate correctly. The third core could be assigned the audio and I/O functions including network access.

Another advantage is the software stack is much shallower. Xbox games use a highly streamlined version of the Win2K kernel to host the DirectX API suite. Without the need to deal with the bulk of PC hardware and their functions (printing, font management, GDI, etc.) this is very small and fast. With the entire API set the memory footprint is well under a megabyte. With the emulator sitting directly atop the Xbox 360 BIOS there will be far less separating the Xbox games from the 360 hardware.

Yet another advantage starts here. We aren’t dealing with a vaguely defined PC emulated on a vaguely defined Macintosh. We have an extremely specific platform with no major variances being emulated on another platform of equal specificity. There is no need to shy away from mapping advanced functions to the host platform since we know without question the equivalent or better hardware will be there. What we have is much closer to MAME emulation of arcade machines but we still aren’t done with ways to ensure our Xbox games run at full speed.

In the late 90’s back when there was still a company known as DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation to real old timers) they held the crown for microprocessor performance with their Alpha product line. For a few years it looked like they might be a real contender for the high-end desktop market with this 64-bit powerhouse. Dave Cutler, who’d previously been DEC’s lead guy on VMS and brought a lot of his guys with him to Microsoft, had designed Microsoft’s NT operating system. So there was lot of natural interest within MS in favoring the Alpha in picking up where the Intel product line was expected to run out of steam. (Intel apparently didn’t get the memo.) MS produced native versions of NT for Alpha, MIPS, and PowerPC in addition to the Intel x86 version but Alpha was by far the strongest alternative to Intel’s PC empire. MIPS and PowerPC could never quite get their act together beyond the highly proprietary SGI and Apple products. (IBM had a PowerPC version of OS/2 Warp but chickened out on pushing their PPC workstations.) DEC had another brainstorm to overcome the lack of native Windows software for Alpha systems, an x86 emulator called FX!32.

A few things distinguished FX!32 from most emulation environments. It didn’t run another OS on top of the emulator. Instead calls to Windows API commands were routed to the native code already running on the Alpha system. This required a software layer to handle some of the differences but was still vastly faster than running the OS itself under emulation. The other biggie was that rather than translate the same code over and over as it was called the translated code was saved to a local hard drive or server and referenced the next time the application was run for a major performance gain. As more of a program’s features were used the more it became native code. Referencing translated code for reuse is not the big innovation. Virtual PC, for instance, uses a chunk of RAM as a code cache but just Windows can easily consume most of the available space on a typical Mac. Saving the translated application code to disk and running it on a native OS was a combination that allowed X86 Windows apps to run at full speed on an Alpha system. Better yet, since the translation profiles could be stored on a server the initial translation need only be done once but all of the systems connected to that server could run the translated code, albeit at the cost of bulky files for the translations since they were less efficiently structure than native compiled code.

I cannot claim any NDA info but I strongly suspect a variation on the FX!32 techniques will be part of the Xbox 360’s backward compatibility. That is, if it’s necessary to ensure the games run at full speed. The primary advantages listed above may be sufficient. At the very least the kernel and API layer used in Xbox games will be ported to native code and extended to pass hardware calls as needed to the 360 hardware. Not translating the kernel and APIs on the fly will save a lot of work. The 360 will almost certainly have at minimum 256 MB of RAM, if not more, so there is plenty of space available for code caching. But much of that could be done in advance with very little real-time translation needed. In a sort of upside down fashion yet another advantage of doing this for a console is the small size of the library. Those hundreds of titles may seem like a lot but compared to a major OS like Windows it’s tiny. The games in the library also tend to have a lot in common structurally. This helps in optimizing not only the emulation but also the way it translates the code.

Much like storing the application profiles produced by FX!32 on a server, the games could be run through a lengthy process of automated translation and optimization. A game consuming 3 GB of disc space may only have a few megabytes of actual code. A few minutes of FMV material can easily consume more space but graphic and audio elements need no translation, just the code. If a game like Halo 2 produces a translation profile of only ten megabytes then the top 100 Xbox games could easily have their profiles preloaded on the hard drive while consuming less than a gigabyte of space. (The profiles could be much smaller on average and allow a much larger range to be preloaded on the drive.) Not a bad tradeoff out of 40 GB, as rumored to be the capacity. Profiles for any other Xbox games (or updates to existing profiles) could be downloaded from XBL as needed, causing a few minutes delay the first time a game is loaded. Whether this would be limited to XBL subscribers or open to all Xbox 360 owners would be a potentially controversial decision by Microsoft.

There, it’s done, as promised. We’ll know in a few weeks how close I’ve come to the truth.

[Scorch]

RUMOR #2: The Xbox 360 will be backwards-compatible.

Source: A survey sent to Xbox Live subscribers.

The official story: Microsoft has not made any announcements regarding backwards-compatibility and does not comment on rumors or speculation."--Microsoft representative.

What we heard: As the launch of Microsoft's next-generation console nears, the amount of rumors surrounding it is reaching critical mass. One of the biggest points of speculation is whether or not the device will be backwards-compatible, given current-gen Xbox games are designed to run with a 40GB hard drive and credible photos of the Xbox 360 show it with an optional hard drive. However, this week, numerous Xbox Live users reported they were sent a survey that explicitly stated they will be able "to play against gamers who are on Live through Xbox 2--as long as they are playing a current-generation Xbox game." Although Microsoft would not officially comment, the volume of the reports and the clarity of the survey's wording make it a near certainty that at least one model of the Xbox 360 will be backwards-compatible.

Bogus or not bogus?: Not bogus.

From Gamespot's rumor thing.

[gameprozero]

It better be!!

[sighlintbob]

That would just make my day!

[xboxundone]

WOW i hope that is true that would rock! :)

[Saucy Jack]

If Xbox 360 is backwards compatible, then I will definitely pre-order/buy it the day it comes out. Otherwise, I would have to wait for the Xbox 360 to build a decent library of games.

Hopefully, Microsoft will put a good drive on the 360 from the get-go so that we won't have to suffer like we did with the Thomson drives. But I guess when you buy a system at launch, you have to take a risk with errors and such.

Another 360 issue I wonder about is online gaming. Will our Xbox Live accounts be transferred over/work on the 360? Will we have to have seperate subscriptions (one for Xbox / one for 360)? Will we have to pay more in any way?

[YeahRight13]

i heard that gamespot is saying that xbox 360 is coming out like that but i really think that the xbox 360 looks gay

[Ledhed]

Just wanted to drop in to say, whoa, our boy is famous.