New System Shock? Halo2 in 720p etc..

[EndR]

According to gamefront.de

(babelfished)

F.E.A.R. and light gate is to appear alleged for Xbox 360, whereby F.E.A.R. on Dev kit would already run.

Midway works on a successor to AREA 51.

Bio Shock, the unofficial successor to system Shock, is planned.

Halo 2 will run on the Xbox 360 in 720p.

Is easier ' ribs ' of CD-r MP3-Dateien on the Xbox 360 than with the Xbox.

A version of town center OF Heroes is to be in work, what in the negative the developer answers however.

A slack Headset with the code name ' Emestine ' is planned.

Platinum of Hits' plays are to only cost 9.99 to the Weihnschtsgeschaeft USD.
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A new System Shock would be very interesting indeed. Anyone could make out what
"A version of town center OF Heroes" could be?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I can well believe that. If MS are recompiling the execs, improvements to their flagship title would help move units to existing XB owners (who might otherwise be waiting to see what the other next-gen consoles may offer) plus encourage takeup of the HDD SKU.

I guess 'Town Centre of Heroes' is a dodgy translation of 'City of Heroes'. Or maybe not. Maybe it'll be followed by 'Shopping Mall of Heroes' and 'Municiple Park of Heroes'

 

[AlNom]

These are from the latest OXM actually.

 

[Lysander]

Yea, I played system shock. This was one of the greats. Awesome.

 

[Qroach]

They aren't recompiling exe's. guy's come on let's get this straight. MS has stated already that they are writitng an emulator. Recompiling exe's isn't necessary as things like overriding resoloution can be controlled inside an emulator. Why would they need more than an emulator to make this work?

 

[scooby_dooby]

They've stated that games that use more than one "layer" would not work with simple emulation.

I think by Layers he was referring to hardware abstraction, i don't have time to dig up the quote but it's been posted more than once in this forum

 

[Reznor007]

They aren't recompiling exe's. guy's come on let's get this straight. MS has stated already that they are writitng an emulator. Recompiling exe's isn't necessary as things like overriding resoloution can be controlled inside an emulator. Why would they need more than an emulator to make this work?

I don't see how they have the power to emulate the system at full speed without lots of speed hacks. Emulating a 200MHz MIPS R5000 in MAME with a dynarec CPU core is ungodly slow, and the guy that wrote it works for MS's Virtual PC department. I fail to see how emulating a 733MHz P3 will be any more efficient.

 

[blakjedi]

I can well believe that. If MS are recompiling the execs, improvements to their flagship title would help move units to existing XB owners (who might otherwise be waiting to see what the other next-gen consoles may offer) plus encourage takeup of the HDD SKU.

I guess 'Town Centre of Heroes' is a dodgy translation of 'City of Heroes'. Or maybe not. Maybe it'll be followed by 'Shopping Mall of Heroes' and 'Municiple Park of Heroes'

thats MuniciPAL to you Shifty! I dont know why but if I were a developer I would use every ounce of teh best SKU possible to showcase my game... What if Devs started using sticker warnings like (HDD only!). That would definitely push the SKU and capabilities of the system...

 

[Qroach]

I don't see how they have the power to emulate the system at full speed without lots of speed hacks. Emulating a 200MHz MIPS R5000 in MAME with a dynarec CPU core is ungodly slow, and the guy that wrote it works for MS's Virtual PC department. I fail to see how emulating a 733MHz P3 will be any more efficient.

Mips and x86 are two very different beasts. You've already seen MAC's emulate windows, so it's not exactly a stretch that emulating the CPU by itself isn't possible. I can recall running a PSone emulator on my pentium 266 at full speed.

Anyway we're not going to get recompiled exe's. Microsft would need the source code for every game to do that, and that is not feasible.

 

[ector]

Talking about how slow it is to emulate stuff in MAME is pointless, as MAME is not architectured for speed, rather simplicity and flexibility.

If N64 was emulated in MAME/MESS, you'd need a 10ghz monster. UltraHLE could run mario, zelda and a few others on a PII 333 with Voodoo 2, because of a strong recompiler/dynarec/jit/wordoftheday, and lots of high level emulation, and lots of very specific optimizations that are not possible in an architecture as generic as MAME.

 

[Qroach]

I can remember running Ultra HLE on a P166 with a voodoo 2, an the framrate was damn good.

 

[scooby_dooby]

Anyway we're not going to get recompiled exe's. Microsft would need the source code for every game to do that, and that is not feasible.

That's why tehy're not doing every game.

It's very simple:

1) THE majority of games will work via emulation

2) Of the games that do not work via emulation, they will recieve recompiled XBE's, and this will only be for a select number of "best-selling" games.

I think the end result will be, pretty much any game you wanna play will run, they've stated the majority run through emulation, and the ones that don't tend to be AAA titles that really push the hardware, and since AAA will all recieve recompiled XBE's it's a non issue.

"Microsoft Press Briefing
In a separate meeting with Microsoft management, we confirmed that the company has agreed to pay a small royalty to Nvidia to allow the Xbox 360’s ATI chipset to emulate the performance of the Nvidia chipset in reading certain Xbox games. For games written in a single layer (management assumes that this is a large percentage of Xbox games), the hardware emulation should perform well.

For games written in multiple layers, a further emulation must be provided. The company intends to create software “patchesâ€￾ (i.e., separate emulation programs) for top-selling Xbox games written in multiple layers, and intends to sell the Xbox 360 with a hard drive that is pre-loaded with these patches. We presume that the majority of Xbox games will be backward compatible, and the company assured us that it intends to add patches should consumer demand warrant such action."

http://biz.gamedaily.com/features.asp?article_id=9761&filter=
"Apparently, for Xbox games that are written in a single layer (which MS management believes to be most of the Xbox library) the emulation should be pretty smooth. The smaller percentage of Xbox titles that are written in multiple layers will require "patches" (separate emulation programs) in order to work. Pachter says that Microsoft currently plans to sell the 360 with these patches already pre-loaded on the included 20GB hard drive. It is also conceivable that any additional patches for other Xbox games could be easily downloaded over Xbox Live.

Therefore, taking this information at face value, consumers can expect the vast majority of Xbox games to be playable on the 360. "We presume that the majority of Xbox games will be backward compatible, and the company assured us that it intends to add patches should consumer demand warrant such action," notes Pachter."

 

[Qroach]

This confirms what I'm saying. These "patches" aren't recompiled Xbe's,.they are emulators made specifically for certain games. So essentially it's like a patch. it's like how some emulators need specific profiles for games to run correctly. Translating or intercepting calls and handling them in anothe rway that other games couldn't handle.

 

[Reznor007]

Mips and x86 are two very different beasts. You've already seen MAC's emulate windows, so it's not exactly a stretch that emulating the CPU by itself isn't possible. I can recall running a PSone emulator on my pentium 266 at full speed.

Anyway we're not going to get recompiled exe's. Microsft would need the source code for every game to do that, and that is not feasible.

Yes, but we're talking about a complex CPU over 3x faster than one emulated at less than 30% speed on an Athlon64.

PC emulators right now are pretty slow. In every review of VirtualPC for Mac the biggest complaint is that it's slow(even on a G5), and it's only emulating a Pentium Pro with an S3 video card. There's also a compatibility mode for things that might not work normally(programs with self modifying code and such) that goes even slower.

So upgrading to a P3, emulating the entire Soundstorm DSP, and HLE'ing the video chip will be hard to keep at a good speed.

Emulating a 33MHz PS1 isn't bad, a 266 is almost 10x faster. N64 hardware is also pretty simple compared to Xbox, and while UltraHLE may work on a 300 or so, it only ran about 5-10 games really well, other games had horrible problems or wouldn't boot at all. Current N64 emulators need 900MHz+ and they still use lots of hacks.

I still don't know how Sony plans to do PS2 emulation either. Here's a comment about one of the current PC PS2 emulators finally starting to run Kingdom Hearts(on an Athlon64 4000):

The poor guy spent 5 hours to get 25 minutes worth of gameplay. This is partly due to the massive system requirements PS2 Emulation needs, and the fact he had to run the game in the slowest possible mode (Interpreter).

 

[Qroach]

echo...

Anyway we're not going to get recompiled exe's. Microsft would need the source code for every game to do that, and that is not feasible.

"Apparently, for Xbox games that are written in a single layer (which MS management believes to be most of the Xbox library) the emulation should be pretty smooth. The smaller percentage of Xbox titles that are written in multiple layers will require "patches" (separate emulation programs) in order to work.

 

[scooby_dooby]

Qroach I think you're bang on about the profiles for the emulator.

I just though that XBE's would be the easiest way to do it, and that the PR guy was just using "patches" as hiw word for a recompiled XBE.

But, given what you've pointed out about emulators and specific profiles for specific games, that makes much more sense. Why edit the XBE to change commands when they can just have the emulator use a special profile that interprets commands in a way specific to that game.

 

[Qroach]

bingo. You got what I was thinking.