XBox One is NOT backwards compatible (despite stories emerging today)

[Tom]

From The Verge:

Behind the scenes, Microsoft has built an Xbox 360 emulator that runs on the Xbox One to get these games working, and it?s easy to spot. When you first launch an Xbox 360 game on the Xbox One it starts a setup process that includes the Xbox 360 boot up animation and even the Xbox Live prompt to note you?ve signed in. It?s a little surreal, but there?s a virtual Xbox 360 running on my Xbox One now.

http://www.theverge.com/2015/6/16/8788391/theres-an-xbox-360-inside-my-xbox-one

It should help that the 360 architecture is over 10 years old

Yes, and older consoles are even older

[Mr. Analog]

Yes, and older consoles are even older

To quote Vinesauce Vinny: "WHAT?"

[Tom]

Yes, and older consoles are even older

To quote Vinesauce Vinny: "WHAT?"

High end pcs still have problems with consoles older than the 360. the Xbone is a low end PC. I can't imagine how it can possibly emulate the 360 in any kind of a decent way.

[Mr. Analog]

Yes, and older consoles are even older

To quote Vinesauce Vinny: "WHAT?"

High end pcs still have problems with consoles older than the 360. the Xbone is a low end PC. I can't imagine how it can possibly emulate the 360 in any kind of a decent way.

Who knows what kind of mumbo majick they're using to make it happen. Like I said earlier I'm sure there will be a lot of games that just won't work well with it (if at all.)

Now if they had put a 360 on the board this wouldn't have been an issue but I doubt Microsoft was really thinking about footing the bill to give an upgrade path for people with existing libraries of games. The XBone launch price was already fairly steep

[Tom]

I just think trying to emulate that rather powerful triple core PowerPC part with a quad core low end AMD APU is going to be challenging to do in real time. You can pass the gpu calls through with a virtualization/pass-through layer (like virtualbox does with OpenGL), but trying to fully emulate the 360 cpu on the APU in the xbone seems to me to be impossible to do in real time. I still hear about performance issues with Game Cube emulators, let alone a 360. And IIRC, any attempts at a Wii emulator seems to be stuck at major performance issues as well. Modern PC hardware just isn't fast enough yet.

I just find a Wine like layer which includes the old 360 environment much more likely.

[Mr. Analog]

The initial list of compatible games:

?A Kingdom for Keflings
?A World of Keflings
?Alien Hominid HD
?Banjo-Kazooie
?Banjo-Tooie
?BattleBlock Theater
?Defense Grid
?Geometry Wars Evolved
?Hexic HD
?Jetpac Refuelled
?Kameo
?Mass Effect
?N+
?Perfect Dark
?Perfect Dark Zero
?Super Meat Boy
?Toy Soldiers
?Toy Soldiers: Cold War
?Viva Pi?ata
?Viva Pi?ata: TIP
?Zuma

[Mr. Analog]

Earlier reports were wrong, MS is actually building a 360 emulator for the XBone:

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/revealed-how-xbox-one-can-play-360-games-via-backw/1100-6428366/

"The approach that we've taken is to actually emulate the full Xbox 360 hardware layer. So the [operating system] for the 360 is actually running when you run the game," Spencer explained.

"If you watch the game's boot you'll see the Xbox 360 boot animation come up. From a performance standpoint it allows [emulation] to work. We're able to get frame by frame performance equivalents."

"[Xbox Live] thinks you're on a 360, so people have been asking 'hey, why are you playing Mass Effect on the 360?,' I was actually playing on the Xbox One."

[Melbosa]

Wow so that's actually pretty cool then...

[Thorin]

I'm not a gamer, I don't necessarily know all the ins and outs of the PS4-vs-XB1 battles.  I gotta say, though, kudos to Microsoft for realizing that this is what gamers wanted and then giving it to them.  Too bad the Kinect-based games won't work, although I understand there's lots of technical difficulties with sensors and all that.

[Mr. Analog]

Oddly enough Nintendo was on the ball with backward compatibility with the Wii U (which is why I bought it in the first place)

Microsoft has done a 180 on virtually everything that made last year's E3 a disaster for them, the question is is it enough to bring gamers into the current gen? Have they learnt anything, will they take features away over time like they did with the 360?