I’m not a pro cod player, but it seems to me like having one of these modified controllers over a normal one is as much cheating as using a mouse/keyboard when everyone else is using a gamepad. Both give you an advantage based on your hardware choice.
Yes indeed. The advantage is just (much) smaller.
I was really pleased by the backwards compatible announcement, and hope it expands in scope to cover most large games. It would definitely make me far more likely to get an xbox1, because right now there aren’t compelling enough games to justify a purchase plus finding room for another box, and there are 360 games that I am still going to play - Gears games, Dragons Dogma, Halo Reach, Crackdown, maybe Assassin’s Creed. I did finally knock of BioShock last year.
It also just seemed ridiculous that Microsoft didnt’ automatically offer backwards compatibility when the system architecture for both was basically “PC” (unlike the PS3, which obviously was never going to be able to be ported forward). That fact that microsoft didn’t bother with that and instead focused on so many things that weren’t desired by gamers really cost them. They would have gotten a huge jump on Sony this generation if they’d released earlier, without Kinect (which presumably would have sped release too), at the correspondingly lower price, and with backwards compatibility that Sony could never match.
In fact, the whole Sony streaming gig seemed designed with the expectation that microsoft would do that and so Sony had to have an answer in response - when Microsoft didn’t offer b/c it was a real give to Sony, and also took a lot of wind out of their no-longer-urgent response too.
stusser
6272
The X360 wasn’t a PC, it had a powerPC CPU. The original Xbox was a PC, as is the XBone and PS4.
RickH
6273
Curious, how much 360 software was written to the APIs as opposed to the system itself? If so, would that make the 360 b/c a “wrapper” or an emulator? My understanding has been that you need a machine at least 3 times as powerful to successfully emulate a given system, but the XB1 can’t be anywhere near that muscular.
Editer
6274
The Xbox 360 was using a 2004-spec 3-core PowerPC processor with 512MB of RAM. The Xbox One is using a 2013-spec 8-core AMD x64 CPU with 8GB of RAM. It’s dramatically more muscular.
Yeah, it’s easy to forget that the Xbox One came out 8 years after the 360, while the 360 was out only 4 years after the original Xbox.
Actually, the CPU cores in the Xbone and PS4 are quite weak compared to something like a modern i3. They’re closer to atom CPUs. The Xbone probably isn’t powerful enough to emulate the X360 in the same way you’d emulate a NES to play super mario bros. The backwards compatibility must have a layer translating powerPC instructions to x86_64 so they can run natively, in the same way that OSX on intel could run OSX/powerPC programs during the transition period. DirectX calls should be largely backwards-compatible, assuming MS wouldn’t certify X360 games that wrote directly to the hardware (which may not be true, and if not, those games will probably never run on Xbone without being fully ported).
RickH
6277
RAM is great, but is the AMD x86 core three times as powerful as the PowerPC used in the 360? I have my doubts as to whether the AMD processor in the XB1 is even up to the power of an i7, which can emulate a Wii or a PS2, but likely not a PS3 or 360.
Or has something amazingly cool been done to avoid that issue, such as what UltraHLE did so it could run Mario 64 (and not much else)? Again, I’m really just curious because I’ve been following emulation for years with amazement that it can be done at all.
It is way, way, slower than the i7. Like I said, it’s not emulation. System calls inside games are translated from powerPC to x86_64 code, which runs natively on the Xbone. The X360 OS and various libraries, including the version of directX9 on the X360, were probably ported to x86_64 to run natively. MS obviously has all the source so they could avoid the translation layer there.
In fact, they probably do the translation themselves offline (as opposed to realtime) and simply download a full ready to run VM container to your Xbone. That explains why the X360 game disks are never actually accessed beyond initial purchase validation. That’s the most elegant way to do it.
Apple proved a similar approach with rosetta on old versions of OSX. It translated powerPC to x86 in realtime and worked great. You could run all your old powerPC OSX applications on x86 OSX no problem. There was a performance hit, but the x86 CPUs were much faster than the old PowerPC ones so it wasn’t a big deal. All that same reasoning applies to the Xbone BC.
Note all of the above is just me guessing, we don’t actually know how it works yet. But I betcha I’m right.
jsnell
6279
They claim they’re emulating the whole 360 OS on top of virtual hardware, and it’s not any kind of offline translation of the game binary. (Source: Phil Spencer on the Giant Bomb live show).
So not offline then, but I still don’t buy that it’s actually emulation. It must be realtime translation.
Maybe they use PC versions as base for some multi-platform games. Probably easy to run those on the Xbone as it’s practically a PC and add some stuff like snap on.
Ubi has all their titles on the PC and they feature heavily on titles to come.
No, because then Xbox Live wouldn’t work. Remember, they’ve said there’s no recompiling or anything like that. It seems like they’re downloading and running the 360 games that are on the Xbox store (which explains is why Mass Effect is supported, but not Mass Effect 2 or 3).
Cyrano
6283
Well, then they’re lying. There was also a web page with an FAQ that has since been taken down that said that the compatibility is done through emulation…
Just a mistake. The difference between full emulation and translation is somewhat technical.
Interesting discussion - thanks for the additional info and correcting my previous misconception on the 360.
You might not need to be in the preview to try out BC: http://www.reddit.com/r/xboxone/comments/3acbbz/play_360_games_without_being_a_preview_member/
I haven’t had a chance to try it yet, bit that sounds promising.
Wendelius
I can confirm that that works. I just played Geometry Wars Evolved using that, and I performed every bit as lousy as I did on 360!
I tried Super Meat Boy for the first time. I bought it on an XBLA sale once, a long time ago, but forgot all about it after that. I’m only through the first 11 levels or so in the first area, but man, what a tough game. I think I tried the demo once when the game first launched, and stayed the hell away from it, but after Rayman: Origins, patiently and wonderfully, taught me how to play tough 2-D platformers, I might actually be up for this kind of challenge.
Speaking of Origins, I hope they are able to port that game over and make it BC too. Rayman: Legends is nice, but it’s a notch down from the perfection of Origins.
