Next Xbox not compatible with 360 discs? Backwards compatibility going away?

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zamardii

2[H]4U
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The Playstation 2 was selling way beyond the launch date of the Playstation 3. In fact, games are still being sold I believe for the PS2 in most retail stores. The PS3 launched at $500 and i'm sure many kids' parents wouldn't buy them a $500 console so many people for the longest time have been playing Playstation 2 games and continued to do so until the price of the Playstation 3 dropped and the Playstation 3 at the time of launch was backwards compatible with no only PS2 games but also PS games. That is excellent customer service and was a very wise choice so that one machine could occupy the space of 3. Sony for all their bullshit never gave up on their Playstation fanbase and stuck by all their consoles well past the next-gen replacements.

Now if this rumor about the next Xbox is true, when what does that about how Microsoft thinks about its customers? The 360 itself is still a very capable machine capable of producing some really high quality games. So what will drive somebody to buy a next Xbox? I know most people don't think this is a big deal but it really is. Perhaps people were already expecting this because the 360 was barely compatible with the large library of the first Xbox but it surely does not sound like the people at Microsoft care much about their invested customers. If Microsoft hadn't been stubborn and just put their games on Blu-Rays like Sony did, instead of fucking around with HD-DVD (even though no games were on the format) then Microsoft wouldn't have to worry about running 360 games on their next Xbox and you could get more people to buy Blu Ray movies too.

This is not a problem PC gamers have ever had to worry about luckily and I really hope Microsoft changes their mind or at the very least this article to be proven false.

P.S. I know it says software emulation is possible but we all know that is not nearly good enough.

Sincerely,

A PC Gamer who owns a PS3 and 360 since launch day of both.

http://www.gamespot.com/news/xbox-720-powered-by-amd-x86-chip-report-6406591
 
zamardii said:
This is not a problem PC gamers have ever had to worry about luckily and I really hope Microsoft changes their mind or at the very least this article to be proven false.
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I've lost many of my classic DOS games due to Windows upgrades.
 
zamardii said:
The Playstation 2 was selling way beyond the launch date of the Playstation 3. In fact, games are still being sold I believe for the PS2 in most retail stores. The PS3 launched at $500 and i'm sure many kids' parents wouldn't buy them a $500 console so many people for the longest time have been playing Playstation 2 games and continued to do so until the price of the Playstation 3 dropped and the Playstation 3 at the time of launch was backwards compatible with no only PS2 games but also PS games. That is excellent customer service and was a very wise choice so that one machine could occupy the space of 3. Sony for all their bullshit never gave up on their Playstation fanbase and stuck by all their consoles well past the next-gen replacements.

Now if this rumor about the next Xbox is true, when what does that about how Microsoft thinks about its customers? The 360 itself is still a very capable machine capable of producing some really high quality games. So what will drive somebody to buy a next Xbox? I know most people don't think this is a big deal but it really is. Perhaps people were already expecting this because the 360 was barely compatible with the large library of the first Xbox but it surely does not sound like the people at Microsoft care much about their invested customers. If Microsoft hadn't been stubborn and just put their games on Blu-Rays like Sony did, instead of fucking around with HD-DVD (even though no games were on the format) then Microsoft wouldn't have to worry about running 360 games on their next Xbox and you could get more people to buy Blu Ray movies too.

This is not a problem PC gamers have ever had to worry about luckily and I really hope Microsoft changes their mind or at the very least this article to be proven false.

P.S. I know it says software emulation is possible but we all know that is not nearly good enough.

Sincerely,

A PC Gamer who owns a PS3 and 360 since launch day of both.

http://www.gamespot.com/news/xbox-720-powered-by-amd-x86-chip-report-6406591
Click to expand...

the only way to easily get backward compatibility, is to include the previous console's hardware, inside of the new one. This is what the PS3 did. It basically had a PS2 inside of it, alongside the PS3 hardware. Not only is this not generally cost effective, it actually becomes more expensive over time. As production on previous gen hardware lessens, costs go up. You can see this easily with PC hardware. Go look at the cost of DDR1 and 2 ram VS. cost of DDR3.

If there is a large enough performance gain in the next generation, Software emulation may be possible. In the case of the PS3, it is possible to emulate a PS2 completely, through software.

But, it may not be possible for a PS4 and an Xboxnext, to emulate the PS3 and the 360. Their CPU architectures are still reasonably powerful and have (especially in the case of the PS3) a lot of custom hardware features that make emulation extremely difficult. In short, the games are often so highly customized to the hardware, even if you could generally emulate the hardware, the games still would likely not work well. As with the Xbox 360, you would have to make an emulation patch for every single game and many of them may not be realistically possible.
 
XBOX 3 and PS4 are going to a almost PC like architecture. It would be impossible to play old games on the new hardware as emulation is very inefficient and requires a lot of programming. For near native BC they would have to include the older CPUs in the new console, but that is very costly.

I'm more worried about requiring an Internet connection, as maybe 20 years from now I will want to fire up my XBOX 3.
 
Is the jump in processing power from the PS3/Xbox360 to PS4/Xbox3 even enough for the new consoles to be able to perform software emulation of the old console's games?
 
I guarantee that it will not be, especially given the weak per core performance of the new systems.
 
noobman said:
Is the jump in processing power from the PS3/Xbox360 to PS4/Xbox3 even enough for the new consoles to be able to perform software emulation of the old console's games?
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socK said:
I guarantee that it will not be, especially given the weak per core performance of the new systems.
Click to expand...
I think the processing power is irrelevant. The manpower required to program the emulator for every game is the main concern. Software emulation requires every game to be tested and bugs to be fixed. That's why the 360 list was very small and took a long time to get updated.
 
bigdogchris said:
I think the processing power is irrelevant. The manpower required to program the emulator for every game is the main concern. Software emulation requires every game to be tested and bugs to be fixed. That's why the 360 list was very small and took a long time to get updated.
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This, pretty much.

Best example is the PCSX2 emulator. I've followed that project since alpha. As the consoles got more and more powerful, the more and more complex they got. The PS2 is not something that can be easily written in C++ in a day and say it emulated the console's hardware completely. There were a lot of things that were done by a very talented group of programmers to emulate the PS2 in software as close to actual hardware as possible.

Everyone in this thread has to remember that software emulation isn't perfect, but it isn't easy. You have to emulate every single component that belongs in the console. And, that's not just the custom processor, custom graphics chip and custom sound chip alone. There's the memory controller, memory subsystem, the I/O controller for the disc drives, controllers for the memory cards or hard drives, etc., etc.

All of that is done directly on the CPU. The CPU has to be pretty powerful and very fast to emulate each and every component of that console.

Even to this day, PCSX2 cannot emulate 100% of the PS2 library out there due to some games using custom assembly code or whatnot. The ZSNES emulator is very close to 100% emulation, but there are some custom chips in certain games that have not been emulated perfectly yet.

The same has to be done on the next Xbox and PS4. You would need a group of programmers that know the hardware or can reverse engineer it like with the PS2, and program that hardware directly in software. That's the first step. The next step is to test it with the games released with the previous generation console. That's the hard part, and we've seen the 360's emulation of the older Xbox console not being fully 100% as a large amount of that library could not be emulated.

Then you need the hardware to run the emulation program as smoothly as possible with little issues. That might be difficult to do on the 1.6GHz Jaguar-based CPU, and the emulator would have to be multi-threaded probably to get any kind of decent performance out of the old 360 or PS3 game.

I'd say maybe in about two or four more years we may have the processors powerful enough to emulate the 360 or PS3 system. This is why for the PS4, the PS3 games will be streamed and not emulated. The current generation PC hardware is not powerful enough to emulate a PowerPC-based CPU architecture especially something as complicated as the CELL. And, remember, the 360's CPU has 3 PPEs as well, which was based on the CELL processor. So, neither console will be easy to emulate in software, and will not be easy to program either.

As for the PS4 and Xbox Next, I believe we can actually emulate them faster than we can emulate the 360/PS3 consoles. The next Xbox is definitely going to be using a Windows-based kernel of some kind. And, the PS4 would probably be the equivalent of running Linux on x86 hardware. It will not surprise me that someone will figure out how to get an Xbox Next game running in Windows 8 (or 8.1) to run on a current generation computer before the PS4 is cracked.
 
There seems to be a hell of a lot of 360s in homes, to the point that investing heavily in backwards-compatibility wouldn't have great returns. It would not be smart to spend lots of resources on a feature that most people probably won't need or use and then have them pay more for the device because of it.
 
bigdogchris said:
I think the processing power is irrelevant. The manpower required to program the emulator for every game is the main concern. Software emulation requires every game to be tested and bugs to be fixed. That's why the 360 list was very small and took a long time to get updated.
Click to expand...

You're cheating and relying on per game hacks to get usable speed. You're not emulating the hardware so much as you are the behavior of the what the game expects to happen. The software expects a certain result, and while you'll (obviously) get that from emulating the underlying hardware, you can potentially game the system and try and give it what it needs without.

Emulators are loaded with sorcery like this. Look at the kind of machine it takes to emulate some newer titles from a single core Wii, let alone a considerably more powerful, triple core 360 (with 6 hardware threads). Not a chance of it happening.
 
socK said:
You're not emulating the hardware so much as you are the behavior of the what the game expects to happen.
Click to expand...

Isn't that what emulation means? I mean, any more, then you aren't really emulating anymore, so much as you are just copying it with hardware.
 
Sony started dropping PS2 compatibility only 4 months after release and had it completely dropped within 1 year.
 
-Dragon- said:
Does this mean we can get original xbox backwards compatability on the 720?
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That's a very good question.

The original Xbox had an x86 processor-- a custom Pentium III CPU running at 733MHz.

I believe the kernel was based on Windows 2000 supposedly.

There are already emulators for the original Xbox, so it should not be all that difficult to emulate it on the Xbox 720 given the more powerful CPU and GPU.
 
chameleoneel said:
the only way to easily get backward compatibility, is to include the previous console's hardware, inside of the new one. This is what the PS3 did. It basically had a PS2 inside of it, alongside the PS3 hardware. Not only is this not generally cost effective, it actually becomes more expensive over time. As production on previous gen hardware lessens, costs go up. You can see this easily with PC hardware. Go look at the cost of DDR1 and 2 ram VS. cost of DDR3.

If there is a large enough performance gain in the next generation, Software emulation may be possible. In the case of the PS3, it is possible to emulate a PS2 completely, through software.

But, it may not be possible for a PS4 and an Xboxnext, to emulate the PS3 and the 360. Their CPU architectures are still reasonably powerful and have (especially in the case of the PS3) a lot of custom hardware features that make emulation extremely difficult. In short, the games are often so highly customized to the hardware, even if you could generally emulate the hardware, the games still would likely not work well. As with the Xbox 360, you would have to make an emulation patch for every single game and many of them may not be realistically possible.
Click to expand...

negative ghost rider, you can also expand upon the current console hardware to make the next console hardware (The Wii for example)
 
socK said:
You're cheating and relying on per game hacks to get usable speed.
Click to expand...
Because that's how you do it when it's still this new. Not every emulator is like MAME, where you are emulating 2 decade old hardware.
 
PS4 also does not have BC. NextBox and PS4 will not have BC.

The only console of this next gen with BC is the WiiU
 
I'm more interested in emulators satisfying the need to play old games. Unfortunately there aren't any playable xbox emulators but if you look at ps2 and gc/wii the emulators run even better than the original consoles.
 
Krieger91 said:
Oh yes it is.
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No, not really as Windows will still run titles that are older than some of the dudes posting in this thread. I can still play take no prisoners from 1998 on my Windows PC here in 2013.

Other utilities such as dos dox will allow for even older titles to run.

Then you have virtual machines that can run 16 bit code

I still play OGL games on my PC just fine (hexen 2, quake 3, Unreal, etc)
 
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