XBox One Backwards Compatibility and Xbox One X Enhancements for X360 and OG (XO XOX BC)

[function]

Yeah, it worked, but I think you had to do things like get the exact HDD model and BIOS and use some special sector cloning tool. A straight copy of files or even a re-image wouldn't work.

Third party HDDs were all unofficial and used such a method. MS (and/or retailers) must have loved the margins those official HDDs.

Maybe MS could make a pay-for emulator for Xb1. That way they could cover licensing costs for whoever wants it ...? I can't not own a console that can play RC2 and Orta.

 

[BRiT]

Does that actually work? I've never read of anyone doing that successfully.

Yes it works. I did it several times. First upgrade from a 20GB official hdd to a 120GB WD hdd then to a 250GB WD hdd then to a 320GB WD hdd. The tutorials out there are very explicit and clear in what you have to do and when.

 

[turkey]

Yes it works. I did it several times. First upgrade from a 20GB official hdd to a 120GB WD hdd then to a 250GB WD hdd then to a 320GB WD hdd. The tutorials out there are very explicit and clear in what you have to do and when.

Also if you own a "arcade" there are plenty of cheap clone housings for the drive which makes it tidy, or a bit of wadding holds the drive ok on the slim.

250gb here and no issues, had a 120 in my old fat ome without issue also.

 

[Riddlewire]

But you still can't play Tenchu:RFD, Unreal Championship 2, ToeJam&Earl 3, Raze's Hell, Obi-Wan, Azurik, Painkiller Hell Wars, and a host of other Xbox exclusive games. Not to mention multi-platform console titles where the best version was on the Xbox (hint: nearly all of them). Furthermore, a lot of the emulated games that did work on 360 had performance or other technical problems.

I'd definitely pay (one time, no subscriptions) for a "true" Xbox 1 emulator for Xbox One. I can't see any reason why Microsoft can't make this happen.

 

[Cyan]

Well, I had the same exact reaction than BriT when I launched the emulator. I started to laugh when I saw the Xbox 360 logo, the notification on the number of friends being online and so on. X360 dashboard was 720p and the letters looked a bit rough on the edges, but the games look pretty despite being 720p upscaled.

The framerate is perfect and the resolution is not blurry. The spots to place towers in Defense Grid didn't look as crisp as in Defense Grid 2 -native Xbox One- but it was there where I noticed some kind of blurriness, not everywhere else nor in any other game.

Perfect Dark was 1080p 60 fps. The framerate seems flawless for the most part, although I wouldn't say the same when I started to walk around the Carrington Institute. The framerate of other games is flawless, and some even seem to run better, like Toy Soldiers and Toy Soldiers: Cold War.

Using the "download content" in any game ALWAYS brings up a message saying "that feature is not available right now"

I took a few screenshots. It's literally a X360 inside a Xbox One. It works impressively well. This is going to become a standard in the future, I'd say. It looks crisp. (Kingdom of Keflings looked pretty pixelated and had aliasing)

Super Meat Boy

Xbox 360 logo and Xbox Live Arcade logo

Gamer picture unlocked

Toy Soldiers: Cold War

The original Toy Soldiers -2 friends online (2 people playing X360, there were like 80 friends online total, from Xbox One and X360)

leaderboards

What also surprised me is that some of my games had the saves on the cloud, for instance Defense Grid.

 

[goonergaz]

Sounds much better than what was shown at E3 - would love to re-play RDR hope that comes out

 

[Cyan]

Sounds much better than what was shown at E3 - would love to re-play RDR hope that comes out

RDR is one of the games I still have in disc format, one of my favourites in the X360 library. Additionally, people that only have a Xbox One can have access to the free X360 games they give every month for free if they have Gold, logging in and getting the game at xbox.com . Hopefully they will unify this and people that only have the Xbox One can get X360 Games with Gold for free (Thief this month) directly using the console interface.

 

[Rangers]

On DLC Podcast Cannata said Aron Greenberg said (or implied) when he interviewed him that BC updates would be in batches of hundreds of games.

If true and not some misunderstanding, I can only assume the ATI-ATI GPU leap made it a WHOLE lot easier than Xbox>360 BC? That still doesn't speak to the CPU which would be a different architecture in both cases.

If they really do have a fairly good general purpose emulator, it might not have been the waste of resources I thought.

 

[eastmen]

On DLC Podcast Cannata said Aron Greenberg said (or implied) when he interviewed him that BC updates would be in batches of hundreds of games.

If true and not some misunderstanding, I can only assume the ATI-ATI GPU leap made it a WHOLE lot easier than Xbox>360 BC? That still doesn't speak to the CPU which would be a different architecture in both cases.

If they really do have a fairly good general purpose emulator, it might not have been the waste of resources I thought.

they said everything but Kinect games and multi disc games right now. Multi disc games they are trying to get working. The only reason why more games aren't out is they need permission of the publishers

 

[Allandor]

On DLC Podcast Cannata said Aron Greenberg said (or implied) when he interviewed him that BC updates would be in batches of hundreds of games.

If true and not some misunderstanding, I can only assume the ATI-ATI GPU leap made it a WHOLE lot easier than Xbox>360 BC? That still doesn't speak to the CPU which would be a different architecture in both cases.

If they really do have a fairly good general purpose emulator, it might not have been the waste of resources I thought.

well, ...
maybe less time for draw calls had something to do with that. so the cpu had to do much less. If some CPU-work needed a bit longer you have now some spare time that absorbs that.
Another thing is, before you had 5 hardware threads on 3 cores for games. Now you have 6 CPU-Core (or 7,5) just for those threads. This should also help a bit.
But still, some commands could be really really be faster on the Power PC core with 3,2 GHz. Also the caches on the CPU-side should be much faster (on the PPC core). It is still impressive that they managed to get this thing up and running.

 

[Cyan]

well, ...
maybe less time for draw calls had something to do with that. so the cpu had to do much less. If some CPU-work needed a bit longer you have now some spare time that absorbs that.
Another thing is, before you had 5 hardware threads on 3 cores for games. Now you have 6 CPU-Core (or 7,5) just for those threads. This should also help a bit.
But still, some commands could be really really be faster on the Power PC core with 3,2 GHz. Also the caches on the CPU-side should be much faster (on the PPC core). It is still impressive that they managed to get this thing up and running.

It's certainly running fine. First Xbox 360 vs Xbox One comparison. Mass Effect in this case. Xbox One emulator improves performance, textures, eliminates popping and load times are shorter.

The video... how epic was Mass Effect, not surprising it became huge, one of the games that defined a generation full of new imaginative franchises.

I'd recommend to watch the video on youtube to enjoy a larger screen. Plus the comparison style is original and fun, kudos to the guy.

 

[Cyan]

It's interesting how bc has always been put down as not needed, no one cares about it and no one plays old games anytime the argument of it's importance came up. But given how XB1's bc has hit top story in so many places (even on non tech websites) and given how many threads it has spawned here, I hope people can finally accept how important bc really is. Well probably not, but to the rest of the media and gaming populace now you can see that yes it is hugely important

On that note, was there any mention if old Kinect games would work? I know that's a long shot but who knows.

It doesn't support old Kinect games, nor games that require a native Xbox 360 peripheral to work, like say...Rock Band or Guitar Hero. BC is a big deal, how many games can you play on PC and gems you can discover no matter the year you find them? You can build an "eternal" library that way, just like on the PC. GoG started like that for instance. Consumers get more value for their money, plus developers can enjoy sales of their old games and fund their newer games for newer machines when they are working on a new game in the process...

Now if they just make the old Xbox 360 Xbox original emulator, now you'd have almost the entire Xbox library in a device. They can launch Classics deals, and unify both stores, I think.

I tested a few games myself and some of the Xbox 360 games seem to perform better, a feeling that I share with the guy who made this video on how the emulator works step by step.

 

[Jay]

Kinect doesn't work. MS explicitly mention this. Link is somewhere in this thread.

That was in relation to core games.

 

[Nisaaru]

Shouldn't Kameo work? Here it tells me it isn't supported yet.

P.S. AFAIK it was part of some XBox Live bundle with PGR so maybe the cd had a different serial-id than expected.

 

[Allandor]

Shouldn't Kameo work? Here it tells me it isn't supported yet.

P.S. AFAIK it was part of some XBox Live bundle with PGR so maybe the cd had a different serial-id than expected.

This is known. Only discs sold in North america are supported right now (my german mass effect had no Problem), also some classic disc (like my Kameo disc, too) do not work. This is known and will be supported in future releases (just like DLCs)

 

[Arwin]

Looking at the hardware design of the Xbox One I always felt that it would allow 360 backward compatibility. I think I said as much in a thread here somewhere. Now I just heard in the Giant Bombcast podcast interview with Kudo I think, and he explains that the 360 is indeed a true emulation. He specifically contrasts it with Xbox emulation on the 360, which were 'just Shims'. Here, the emulation is done in a VM that runs the 360 OS fully emulated, and the game thinks it is really on a 360. On the other hand, the VM is presented to the XboxOne as a game, so the Xbox One thinks it is running a game, hence all the streaming features and such are available. Some games require different features, but they always keep adding these to the overall emulator code base.

 

[goonergaz]

I agree, I think MS left the option there - I can't believe 'they thought it was impossible' but 18mths later they have it up and running and it's actually improving games.

Either they didn't have the time or they thought they didn't need it...it's a shame it didn't launch with it, it would have been interesting to see the sales.

 

[nightshade]

Wait so how is this possible?
How is an x86 architecture that's only about 8-9 times more powerful able to emulate a power PC through software emulation?

 

[goonergaz]

the 2nd (hidden) GPU obviously - misterxmedia was right all along!

 

[Allandor]

Wait so how is this possible?

How is an x86 architecture that's only about 8-9 times more powerful able to emulate a power PC through software emulation?

The problem I see isn't that the jaguar hadn't enough power, but the single-thread performance isn't that much better, than optimized code for an in order architecture, that almost has twice the frequency. This is quite an achievement, even if the PowerPC architecture wasn't the strongest. You had 3.2 GHz for just one thread. I assume that this could be a problem in some titels that are highly optimized for the PowerPC architecture. But well, if the cpu has less to do with GPU drawcalls (don't know how bad the situation is on xbox360 but I heard it wasn't that good), so if they manged to reduce the time on that, they should have enough cpu-time. But still, the commands have to be translated into x86er commands.

There are also the timings that has been reduced. The xbox 360 had GDDR3 ram which had quite long wait times for the cpu. Also the embedded sram should be much faster (latencies) than the old embedded dram. So this can also buy some time for the command translation. Also there is more memory available, which should help with some caching-reoutines, too.




But still, this is quite an astonishing accomplishment to get that emulator working in that short time (phil said they began discussion one year ago).