Xbox 360 thread

Microsoft's upcoming Xbox 360 gaming console will play some, but not all, old Xbox games, the company has admitted at the E3 gaming conference in Los Angeles.

This lack of backwards compatibility follows Microsoft's decision to switch chip vendors for its latest gaming device.

The current Xbox uses a processor made by Intel, but the Xbox 360 will deploy IBM's Power chips. The company also swapped out nVidia's graphics card for a model from ATI.

Because the chips have different architectures, games need to be recompiled and tested for the new system. Microsoft promised to start on the process with its best selling Halo and Halo 2 games.

Backwards compatibility is considered of major importance for gaming devices, protecting a user's investment in previous games while allowing access to the latest titles.

Microsoft claims to have over 160 games under development for the Xbox 360, and expects availability of 25 to 40 titles at the time of the launch in late 2005.

The announcement could hurt initial sales of the console as consumers are confronted with a limited selection of games in the early months.

Microsoft's main competitors in the market for gaming computers, Sony and Nintendo, have promised backward compatibility for their Playstation 3 and Revolution consoles.


So theyre going to expect people to re-buy x360 compatible games?
wtf
 
Drool-Boy said:
Microsoft's upcoming Xbox 360 gaming console will play some, but not all, old Xbox games, the company has admitted at the E3 gaming conference in Los Angeles.

This lack of backwards compatibility follows Microsoft's decision to switch chip vendors for its latest gaming device.

The current Xbox uses a processor made by Intel, but the Xbox 360 will deploy IBM's Power chips. The company also swapped out nVidia's graphics card for a model from ATI.

Because the chips have different architectures, games need to be recompiled and tested for the new system. Microsoft promised to start on the process with its best selling Halo and Halo 2 games.

Backwards compatibility is considered of major importance for gaming devices, protecting a user's investment in previous games while allowing access to the latest titles.

Microsoft claims to have over 160 games under development for the Xbox 360, and expects availability of 25 to 40 titles at the time of the launch in late 2005.

The announcement could hurt initial sales of the console as consumers are confronted with a limited selection of games in the early months.

Microsoft's main competitors in the market for gaming computers, Sony and Nintendo, have promised backward compatibility for their Playstation 3 and Revolution consoles.


So theyre going to expect people to re-buy x360 compatible games?
wtf

No, they'll build in the necessary emulation into the hardware or OS to be able to play the games.
 
smileynev said:
No, they'll build in the necessary emulation into the hardware or OS to be able to play the games.

More likely they will provide downloads that will go on the hard drive to make the popular game's engines run. Then, you still need the game for the content, but the game will be running mostly from the hard drive.
 
I hate how people try to throw all these specs at me. floating point 4 flop interlaced fucking shit! I just want to plug it in and blow things up! :mad:
 
Also, for the tech people that just like reading about all sorts of cool things you probably don't understand (Well, at least I know I don't understand all of it), here is a really cool link about the architecture.
 
taeric said:
Also, for the tech people that just like reading about all sorts of cool things you probably don't understand (Well, at least I know I don't understand all of it), here is a really cool link about the architecture.
That was actually interesting. It actually puts a somewhat interesting spin on what I said about the difficulty of programming for this generation of consoles. It looks like (from this article) that the code itself will actually be simple in the end, but the degree of planning that will have to take place to properly execute a game and knowledge of the individual programmer will have to go way up. You wont be able to brute force anything since the processor does all the tedious work. People will have to really and truly understand physics and geometry to make the system do anything at all.

Insteresting because from the stories you tell me, very few programmers seem project/process oriented and tend to like to throw something out there and see how it goes. All those people will basically be useless and you'll have only the good programmers left over. It'll make for a hell of a project team, but are there enough "good" programmers out there to meet demand? Dunno.
 
theacoustician said:
That was actually interesting. It actually puts a somewhat interesting spin on what I said about the difficulty of programming for this generation of consoles. It looks like (from this article) that the code itself will actually be simple in the end, but the degree of planning that will have to take place to properly execute a game and knowledge of the individual programmer will have to go way up. You wont be able to brute force anything since the processor does all the tedious work. People will have to really and truly understand physics and geometry to make the system do anything at all.

Insteresting because from the stories you tell me, very few programmers seem project/process oriented and tend to like to throw something out there and see how it goes. All those people will basically be useless and you'll have only the good programmers left over. It'll make for a hell of a project team, but are there enough "good" programmers out there to meet demand? Dunno.

I think it depends on the part of the programming you are talking about. The code will still be incredibly complex. It is just you will have less model data and more varied results based on what is there. So, this will not really help with the programming too much, but rather content creation. This will lead to less artists, not programmers.

This does lead to another rant I have. What the hell is wrong with having a 2d game? Am I the only one that thinks Metroid was a better platformer than FPS? Does Castlevania have to be 3d because it is on a new console? Grr....

Also, to a large extent, there are not that many bad programmers in the game programming industry. It isn't like the j2ee market where everything is constantly being fixed. When a game is released, it is released. No real fixing it.
 
taeric said:
I think it depends on the part of the programming you are talking about. The code will still be incredibly complex. It is just you will have less model data and more varied results based on what is there. So, this will not really help with the programming too much, but rather content creation. This will lead to less artists, not programmers.

This does lead to another rant I have. What the hell is wrong with having a 2d game? Am I the only one that thinks Metroid was a better platformer than FPS? Does Castlevania have to be 3d because it is on a new console? Grr....

Also, to a large extent, there are not that many bad programmers in the game programming industry. It isn't like the j2ee market where everything is constantly being fixed. When a game is released, it is released. No real fixing it.
I'm with you on the 2D-3D thing. It's like too many people want to use 3D settings for no other reason than just because they can.
 
theacoustician said:
I'm with you on the 2D-3D thing. It's like too many people want to use 3D settings for no other reason than just because they can.

For some reason I'm reminded of the great option in Curse of Monkey Island for 3d. The checkbox was there, but it wouldn't do anything. (If you clicked it enough, it would say "Look, you can click this all you want. There is no 3d.")

Of course, the next Monkey Island was in 3d. :(
 
taeric said:
For some reason I'm reminded of the great option in Curse of Monkey Island for 3d. The checkbox was there, but it wouldn't do anything. (If you clicked it enough, it would say "Look, you can click this all you want. There is no 3d.")

Of course, the next Monkey Island was in 3d. :(
Thats the second biggest fish I've had in my pants...
 
taeric said:
For some reason I'm reminded of the great option in Curse of Monkey Island for 3d. The checkbox was there, but it wouldn't do anything. (If you clicked it enough, it would say "Look, you can click this all you want. There is no 3d.")

Of course, the next Monkey Island was in 3d. :(
wtf

hahahahhahaha