Xbox 360 to be backwards compatible

[the_music_man]

a livejournal relationship hhahah ...... just make sure she doesn't turn out to be a he!! ahhhhh

 

[Grandmaster]

NVIDIA tech licensed for Xbox 360 backward compatibility

Deal will allow Xbox 360 to run Xbox titles, but tinkering with software is still needed

Microsoft has signed a deal with NVIDIA to license the company's technology in order to enable backwards compatibility in the Xbox 360, which uses an ATI graphics chipset that isn't natively compatible with Xbox titles.

Microsoft Xbox PR manager Michael Wolf denied that games would need to be recompiled, and assured us that the company had no intention of charging for updates to the backward compatibility service. However, he refused to answer further questions about how the process will work.

Now a report on US website 1up confirms that Microsoft has in fact licensed parts of NVIDIA's technology from the Xbox to allow it to emulate the chipset in Xbox 360, a deal which will see Microsoft continuing to make payments to NVIDIA for several years.

The company apparently plans to emulate the Xbox' Intel CPU on the 360's multiple IBM PowerPC cores, and will now be able to emulate the NVIDIA chip to some extent on the ATI graphics chip in the 360 - but it would appear that many games will still not work without some modification.

Patches for some popular games - or "emulation profiles" - will ship on the Xbox hard drive, and those games will as a result work out of the box. Microsoft is expected to work to get emulation working for other games over time, and will distribute further emulation profiles over the Xbox Live service.

What's not clear is how users without Xbox Live access - around 90 per cent of users on the current generation Xbox, for reference - will be able to update those profiles, and whether Microsoft will ever get the full range of Xbox software working on the new console.

Wolf declined to answer the first of those questions when we put it to him last month, but was more positive on the second issue, telling us that "our goal is to make ALL Xbox games play on Xbox 360, and at launch we'll have a selection of the top selling that will be tested and confirmed to work."

http://gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=9562

Good news for nVidia, and of course, us.

 

[~bk]

Sweet.

 

[Tittles]

a livejournal relationship hhahah ...... just make sure she doesn't turn out to be a he!! ahhhhh

Trust me she isnt lol ...

 

[Xie]

Well to make sure everyone can get the game updates they could setup a "360 update" that would allow folks to grab the xbox updates w/out Xbox360 Live membership. Seems like a simple thing to do.

 

[Grandmaster]

Well to make sure everyone can get the game updates they could setup a "360 update" that would allow folks to grab the xbox updates w/out Xbox360 Live membership. Seems like a simple thing to do.

Also, with the whole Silver Live subscription (which comes preinstalled with every 360), everyone should be able to play free on weekends, so they might use that for this as well so people don't have to pay.

 

[Xie]

Also, with the whole Silver Live subscription (which comes preinstalled with every 360), everyone should be able to play free on weekends, so they might use that for this as well so people don't have to pay.

Yeah it seems like the most logical way. I wonder how many times someone will be able to grab a game "patch" per account?

 

[Grandmaster]

I can't think of a reason why they would limit the number of times.

 

[Xie]

I can't think of a reason why they would limit the number of times.

Bandwidth and stress on Live servers. Yeah I know they are MS but even they have a limit to what there server farm can handle. Look at how they had to break up SP2 roll out, and Live is nowhere near as big as Windows Update.

 

[Grandmaster]

Well I mean its not like people regularly wipe their Xbox HDs

 

[Xie]

Well I mean its not like people regularly wipe their Xbox HDs

What about all the folks that are going to be trying to run Linux and other non-MS-ware on the 360? Also depending on how many games one does own, and how many they would like to continue playing on the 360, as well as how HUGE these "patches" may be who knows. You may just not have enough space for all of them on the HD that comes w/ the 360.

 

[tygy96]

Actually, it isn't supposed to be backwards compatible according to july's EGM

I'm very sad to even say this...

Now according to news a couple weeks newer It IS going to be partially compatable.
Partially meaning "only the best selling games" -microsoft