Xbox Series X|S Backward Compatibility Enhancements Detailed [XSX|S BC]

[Jay]

I think it comes down to security concerns and the want/need to be able to still sell the games. There may be other cost concerns as well. On 360 I know Microsoft had to pay nVidia royalties for certain texture formats or something like that. It's possible they circumvent that by changing the format in the repackage.

Isn't that the point though? Not about selling games but preserving the legacy of games you already have.
XSX supports the X360 texture formats, as for royalties they wouldn't be selling the games so they don't need to worry about it.
It's no different than if they supported BC natively if they don't need to repackage the game.
Security? Not sure it's worth worrying about if someone clones a disc and plays the game.
The only people at this point that would come after them is the platform holder, which happens to be them.

The whole issue with licensing is due to repackaging and also selling online. That's why I said not to repackage, if it was an issue with Nvidia then that's already been resolved if they needed to do something with their texture formats.

So the only real reason not to, is not being able to get a cut from digital sales. Which isn't the core of his message.
Their push towards digital probably makes it not worth it in their eyes, but in terms of supporting the history of games whilst they can, they could do even better.

I'm not sure what the state of og xbox & X360 emus are, but better for them to do it and provide it as a XSX feature.

 

[see colon]

Isn't that the point though? Not about selling games but preserving the legacy of games you already have.
XSX supports the X360 texture formats, as for royalties they wouldn't be selling the games so they don't need to worry about it.
It's no different than if they supported BC natively if they don't need to repackage the game.
Security? Not sure it's worth worrying about if someone clones a disc and plays the game.
The only people at this point that would come after them is the platform holder, which happens to be them.

The whole issue with licensing is due to repackaging and also selling online. That's why I said not to repackage, if it was an issue with Nvidia then that's already been resolved if they needed to do something with their texture formats.

So the only real reason not to, is not being able to get a cut from digital sales. Which isn't the core of his message.
Their push towards digital probably makes it not worth it in their eyes, but in terms of supporting the history of games whilst they can, they could do even better.

I'm not sure what the state of og xbox & X360 emus are, but better for them to do it and provide it as a XSX feature.

Microsoft isn't in a position where they want to burn bridges or make their partners unhappy, though. And while they may message around preservation or "respecting the investment you've made into games", they are also a business that needs to generate income. Having true, native BC where you simply put in a disc and the game is played off the disc is all well and good, but if you aren't also generating income from that, it doesn't make a lot of sense, especially since the time invested to test and recertify those games is an expense. And from the partner standpoint, what if a company wants to re-release a game that was on 360 on newer hardware, but Microsoft just adds that title to BC with FPS and resolution boosts. They wouldn't be so happy about that, I think.

Regarding security, piracy of old games is one thing, but plenty of other systems, namely the DS, 3DS and Wii have all been hacked because of the lackluster security of their BC support. If there is an opening there, it will be exploited.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Isn't that the point though? Not about selling games but preserving the legacy of games you already have.
XSX supports the X360 texture formats, as for royalties they wouldn't be selling the games so they don't need to worry about it.
It's no different than if they supported BC natively if they don't need to repackage the game.
Security? Not sure it's worth worrying about if someone clones a disc and plays the game.
The only people at this point that would come after them is the platform holder, which happens to be them.

The whole issue with licensing is due to repackaging and also selling online. That's why I said not to repackage, if it was an issue with Nvidia then that's already been resolved if they needed to do something with their texture formats.

So the only real reason not to, is not being able to get a cut from digital sales. Which isn't the core of his message.
Their push towards digital probably makes it not worth it in their eyes, but in terms of supporting the history of games whilst they can, they could do even better.

I'm not sure what the state of og xbox & X360 emus are, but better for them to do it and provide it as a XSX feature.

As see colon mentioned it isn't just about whether MS can or cannot technically do it. It's about their various partners like EA, Blizzard, Square Enix, etc.

They can't just unilaterally do something if all or at the very least the vast majority of their publishing partners aren't also on board. Well, I mean they could, but then they put their entire Xbox business in jeopardy and more importantly they risk other publishers just outright boycotting Game Pass and/or xCloud. Those last two would be a huge blow at a time when Game Pass is finally getting established and xCloud is still in its infancy.

So, one way to try get publishers on board is to take a public position on the matter without naming names and potentially shaming any publishers or competing hardware platorms. Basically just use a generic industry term that includes both hardware makers as well as software publishers and developers. And if there's enough public interest publishers may notice and/or the public may start to put some pressure on them.

It's similar to move by Phil Sencer and a few high profile developers publicly talking about it to raise awareness and put pressure on Sony to allow cross play on software titles. If they had never done that, there never would have been enough public support to get Sony to allow crossplay on titles on their platform.

If there's no public interest, however, this will likely just die or at the very least go into hibernation.

Regards,
SB

 

[see colon]

It's similar to move by Phil Sencer and a few high profile developers publicly talking about it to raise awareness and put pressure on Sony to allow cross play on software titles. If they had never done that, there never would have been enough public support to get Sony to allow crossplay on titles on their platform.

Sony turned that into a money making opportunity, too. That's what it's all about, after all.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Here's something that came to mind recently.

Considering Microsoft's approach to BC is based on thin VMs within which each BC title operates in an OS and environment that to the application appears to be the original platform it released on. So, the lion's share of the work is likely just ensuring that the VM will work within the environment of a new console.

Considering how relatively similar the PlayStation consoles are to the Xbox consoles in terms of hardware and capabilities. This then means that it's technically possible for MS to to have the PS4 OS operate within a VM on the Xbox consoles if there weren't legal hurdles. In essense, if MS were legally allowed to do so, they could likely offer PS4 BC on Xbox Series consoles with Xbox BC like enhancements. Any differences in hardware capabilities should easily be emulated within the VM itself.

Again, this would obviously require both Sony's help as well as their legal blessing, which is not likely to ever happen in the consumer space.

However, thinking more about this. I wonder if Sony and MS are still working on that potential Cloud partnership? In theory then, Sony could partner up with MS and have PlayStation BC be hosted on Xbox Series X blades where multiple PS4 titles could be served from each blade. This would be more cost effective from Sony's standpoint than having a single PS4/PS5 hardware unit per served PS4 title. And on top of that, no-one outside of MS and Sony would need to know that PS titles were being served from Xbox blades.

Additionally, it would be possible, with Sony's cooperation and legal blessing to have a PS1, PS2, and PS3 VM within which those respective titles could be served. Basically not something that can happen without Sony's legal cooperation as then you run into issues with violating any copyrights that might be in place WRT the OS and Hardware (something that the emulation scene has to work around in addition to generally not having full documentation on the hardware and OS).

Regards,
SB

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Here's something that came to mind recently. Considering how relatively similar the PlayStation consoles are to the Xbox consoles in terms of hardware and capabilities. This then means that it's technically possible for MS to to have the PS4 OS operate within a VM on the Xbox consoles if there weren't legal hurdles.

There is little abstraction in the PS4 OS which means this is not easy at all. Microsot spent a lot of effort building in APIs and abstraction layers to make cross-generational game support fairly straight forward on Xbox and Sony did not. We know that a lot of 'APIs' on PlayStation are not APIs at all, you're just shoving data into GPU command buffers. PS4 Pro and PS5 both include deep hardware-level compatibility with base PS4 hardware.

How would an Xbox going to handle that? How do you emulate - at clock speed - fast packed math when hardware isn't there? Or the checkerboard rendering hardware? You can abstract things called though APIs but when code hits the metal, you need to emulate it. At full speed.

It sounds tricky, if not downright impossible.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

There is little abstraction in the PS4 OS which means this is not easy at all. Microsot spent a lot of effort building in APIs and abstraction layers to make cross-generational game support fairly straight forward on Xbox and Sony did not. We know that a lot of 'APIs' on PlayStation are not APIs at all, you're just shoving data into GPU command buffers. PS4 Pro and PS5 both include deep hardware-level compatibility with base PS4 hardware.

How would an Xbox going to handle that? How do you emulate - at clock speed - fast packed math when hardware isn't there? Or the checkerboard rendering hardware? You can abstract things called though APIs but when code hits the metal, you need to emulate it. At full speed.

It sounds tricky, if not downright impossible.

Is it though? The whole purpose of a VM is to abstract away the underlying hardware as much as possible depending on what you are trying to accomplish. Performance is significantly better if the underlying hardware is the same or similar to what the virtual hardware environment is expecting. So, no translation would be required for something like X86 functionality or base GCN functionality. The only real stumbling blocks will be WRT emulating any customizations that Sony had implemented for the CPU and GPU cores and whether they are doing something non-standard WRT CPU and GPU access to memory.

For example, on XBO while MS certainly abstracted the hardware more than Sony did, there still needs to be explicit emulation in the VM for something like the ESRAM (BC of XBO titles are generally using base XBO code rather than XBO-X code which wouldn't require emulating the ESRAM) as titles within the VM are coded to explicity use it.

The question then would be how many and how extensive are the customizations that Sony had for the PS4 and how costly would it be to emulate those customizations in the VM? It's obviously not going to be as costly as say emulating ARM on an x86 machine. But it's also going to be more expensive than just a straight x86 hardware VM running any x86 based OS. Considering that the overall architecture is x86 based for the CPU and GCN based for the GPU, I'd be surprised if it wasn't closer to the latter case than the former case due to more limited number of things that would require software emulation.

This is also assuming explicit cooperation from Sony engineers due to the fact that it can only happen with Sony's explicit consent and cooperation.

PS1, PS2, and PS3 would be more problematic, but there's plenty of hardware resources to throw at those and with explicit cooperation from Sony it would be easier for MS to have a performant base VM for those to run on, unlike what emulation groups have to go through to get games on those platforms to run on x86 or ARM architectures.

Regards,
SB

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Is it though? The whole purpose of a VM is to abstract away the underlying hardware as much as possible depending on what you are trying to accomplish.

Sure, but virtualisation techniques work by hooking into the software and hardware vectors that enable virtualisation. Before the CPU industry agreed upon a standard for virtualising processor functions (Intel's VT-x and AMD's AMD-V), VM software was quite inefficient. Virtualisation is not magic and there are few options to virtualise a piece of PS4 code punching data into PS4's GPU if they don't exist. The method for this is APIs and you intercept and virtualise the API calls to the new hardware.

Microsoft spent a lot of time and effort building a virtualised environment for Xbox for good reason. You simply cannot just virtualise another device efficiently if it lacks those hooks. Believe me, if you could then Sony and AMD would have saved a shitton of effort making PS5's GPU hardware compatible with the way PS4 and PS4 Pro GPUs worked. The only option is to emulate the hardware and how the software interfaces with the hardware.

Consider that Sony and AMD aren't idiots, if there was a way to do this in software, they would have done this in software and had better PS4 performance on PS5 for free.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Sure, but virtualisation techniques work by hooking into the software and hardware vectors that enable virtualisation. Before the CPU industry agreed upon a standard for virtualising processor functions (Intel's VT-x and AMD's AMD-V), VM software was quite inefficient. Virtualisation is not magic and there are few options to virtualise a piece of PS4 code punching data into PS4's GPU if they don't exist. The method for this is APIs and you intercept and virtualise the API calls to the new hardware.

Microsoft spent a lot of time and effort building a virtualised environment for Xbox for good reason. You simply cannot just virtualise another device efficiently if it lacks those hooks. Believe me, if you could then Sony and AMD would have saved a shitton of effort making PS5's GPU hardware compatible with the way PS4 and PS4 Pro GPUs worked. The only option is to emulate the hardware and how the software interfaces with the hardware.

Consider that Sony and AMD aren't idiots, if there was a way to do this in software, they would have done this in software and had better PS4 performance on PS5 for free.

Sure, the hardware running the virtualization benefits heavily from having support for those hooks within the hardware, but the hardware being virtualised doesn't. Meaning that say Windows 98 can easily be virtualized and that VM works better if the host hardware has support for virtualization, but it does not matter at all that the hardware that Windows 98 was designed to run on didn't even have a concept of what hardware virtualization was. Likewise for the original Xbox. I don't believe MS started including hardware VT support in their consoles until the XBO generation.

Many of the things that I run in a VM have no concept of what virtualization support in hardware or software would even be. But the speed of VT is obviously significantly better if the machine I'm hosting that VM on has support for hardware virtualization and if the VM I'm using has explicit support for what I'm virtualizing in it.

Regards,
SB

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Sure, the hardware running the virtualization benefits heavily from having support for those hooks within the hardware, but the hardware being virtualised doesn't. Meaning that say Windows 98 can easily be virtualized and that VM works better if the host hardware has support for virtualization, but it does not matter at all that the hardware that Windows 98 was designed to run on didn't even have a concept of what hardware virtualization was.

Virtualisation happens on both a hardware and software level. You say "Windows 98 can easily be virtualized" but Windows 98 has zero support for virtualisation of any kind, unlike say Windows 10 Pro or Enterprise (but not Windows 10 Home), macOS and many flavour of linux which support virtualisation technologies. That is - and to be very clear - the environment can detect it is running in a virtualised space and "plays nice" with resources the understanding that it is haring resources with code outside of the environment it's running in.

Windows 98 has zero concept of running in a virtualised environment so if you want to run that OS under another OS you need to build a full environment in which it runs because it has no concept of sharing processor, GPU or any other resources with the host OS.

Likewise for the original Xbox. I don't believe MS started including hardware VT support in their consoles until the XBO generation.

The original Xbox also has zero support for virtualisation, which is likely why so few of the original titles were supported on Xbox 360. Xenon was certainly capable for original Xbox titles were targeting Intel 80x86 and Nvidia GPU hardware.

Many of the things that I run in a VM have no concept of what virtualization support in hardware or software would even be.

A 'virtual environment' and virtualisation are very different. The former is just a way of describing an emulator, the latter is describing two environments that are aware they co-exist in a single, shared hardware environment.

 

[Riddlewire]

The original Xbox also has zero support for virtualisation, which is likely why so few of the original titles were supported on Xbox 360.

461 games. Nearly half the library.
You and I have very different ideas about what constitutes "so few".

 

[Deleted member 11852]

461 games. Nearly half the library.

I knew it was under a little under 500 but was not aware that the original Xbox has so few games released.

edit: admittedly, when you look back the consoles of the era had relatively small libraries because 'smaller' titles weren't really a thing. PS2 was under 2k titles.