Xbox 360 games on Xbox One?
HOLY CRAP!
Someone needs to explain this one to me.
Now, I'm no idiot and I am a software developer. So I know, and knew before, that this wasn't technically impossible. But every fibre of my being tells me it should be so improbably that it would never happen.
There are a few ways such a thing might be accomplished.
The obvious one that comes to mind is hardware level emulation. But emulation adds an extra step, or frequently several extra steps and usually requires that the hardware doing the emulation is many times faster than the hardware being emulated to get good results. And this gens consoles really aren't in some important respects THAT much faster than their last gen counterparts. It doesn't seem likely that this is a hardware emulation thing.
The next option would be a runtime (effectively an emulator) that does a 1:1 mapping of every operations from the old hardware to the new. This would be a massive undertaking when you consider that virtually everything about the last and current generations has changed. Different architectures and different GPU vendors. One would think that this (along with more traditional emulation) could pull of some basic games. But fall flat on its face when it comes to code working at lower levels. Covering every single possibility here should take a truly massive amount of time.
The third option is recompiling. This is both the most and least feasible simultaneously.
It is the most feasible because the output should be a native Xbox One game and since the hardware demands from the prior gen games were lower, everything should run buttery smooth.
But, at the same time, it is also the least feasible, because it requires doing all of the work mentioned in the last option. The game needs to be decompiled and recompiled or recompiled straight into a valid Xbox One game. In either case, you need to be able to map every single command from one platform to the other. And then you also need to make sure the publishers are onboard with this. And how does it work if the game was a physical copy? Does it credit the game to your account and simply pull down a digital version instead?
Lots of questions need to be answered here still. But on the surface, this sounds like it blows Sony's offering out of the water. This is big news.
Someone needs to explain this one to me.
Now, I'm no idiot and I am a software developer. So I know, and knew before, that this wasn't technically impossible. But every fibre of my being tells me it should be so improbably that it would never happen.
There are a few ways such a thing might be accomplished.
The obvious one that comes to mind is hardware level emulation. But emulation adds an extra step, or frequently several extra steps and usually requires that the hardware doing the emulation is many times faster than the hardware being emulated to get good results. And this gens consoles really aren't in some important respects THAT much faster than their last gen counterparts. It doesn't seem likely that this is a hardware emulation thing.
The next option would be a runtime (effectively an emulator) that does a 1:1 mapping of every operations from the old hardware to the new. This would be a massive undertaking when you consider that virtually everything about the last and current generations has changed. Different architectures and different GPU vendors. One would think that this (along with more traditional emulation) could pull of some basic games. But fall flat on its face when it comes to code working at lower levels. Covering every single possibility here should take a truly massive amount of time.
The third option is recompiling. This is both the most and least feasible simultaneously.
It is the most feasible because the output should be a native Xbox One game and since the hardware demands from the prior gen games were lower, everything should run buttery smooth.
But, at the same time, it is also the least feasible, because it requires doing all of the work mentioned in the last option. The game needs to be decompiled and recompiled or recompiled straight into a valid Xbox One game. In either case, you need to be able to map every single command from one platform to the other. And then you also need to make sure the publishers are onboard with this. And how does it work if the game was a physical copy? Does it credit the game to your account and simply pull down a digital version instead?
Lots of questions need to be answered here still. But on the surface, this sounds like it blows Sony's offering out of the water. This is big news.
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