E3 2005: Xbox 360 limited backward compatibility

360 News | Only with games of Bill's choosing...

Xbox 360 will "officially" be backward compatible with the Xbox, but it's a little more complicated.

It will only be compatible with the prior system's top-selling games, said Microsoft's Vice President Peter Moore. Microsoft will pick and choose only the most popular Xbox titles from its backlist of games and will use emulator software for those titles.

Exactly how many titles remains to be seen. If it's only a few, then it isn't really backward compatible at all. If it's around half the Xbox catalogue the only way a regular user would know for sure is to try the game.

More news as it comes.

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8 Comments

Cerebral

7 years ago

Well some of the old PS1 games were incompatible with the PS2, so Microsoft are either being very technical, or very picky.

ObsoletE

7 years ago

i read a quote somewhere else (gamespot maybe?) that said that it was functionally backwards compatible, there were just external issues as to whether it would be implemented, sort of implied that there were legalities with doing it...

though why a company wouldn't want their product life extended by a newer console is beyond me...

either way, sound stupid to me...

armageddon12

7 years ago

That is the most rediculous thing I have ever heard.

Gtpod

7 years ago

I've been fairly main-stream with my Xbox games; PGR2, FSW, Halo... I'm sure they'll be supported.

ObsoletE

7 years ago

i was just wondering how the limitations are implemented...

depending on how it's done, i wonder how long it takes for someone to hack one so all (or most) XBox games are playable...

i would've thought it would have been easier on the console developers to make them all work...

stupid stupid stupid

Spanca

7 years ago

I think it's something to do with licensing the Nvidia technology required to run Xbox games, with the ATi chip in the 360.

David

7 years ago

Spanca wrote

I think it's something to do with licensing the Nvidia technology required to run Xbox games, with the ATi chip in the 360.

Exactly correct.

here's how I see it:

They have to pay Nvidia to run the old games (since nvidia owns how their GPU works), or emulate the old machine. And since emulation is almost never perfect, they'll optimise it for a few high profile games, and just lock out the rest since they'll be all buggy, or maybe not even run.

So the machine is NOT backward compatible at all, but may contain some internal code so it's able to run halo - kinda like those Dreamcast boot discs that ran a single PS1 game each. So 360 is Backward compatible to XB only in the same sense that DC was backward compatible to PS1, except the 'boot disc' will be internal.

I may be wrong, but that's how I reckon it is/will be.

ObsoletE

7 years ago

ah ok...

i'd forgotten that different chipsets would be used...

either way, i can see people making their own "Cracks" for whatever game they want to load on to the 360 though...

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