I think I just realized that Microsoft isn

For me as a gamer, this is pretty depressing. Between the PC, Xbox 360 and Apple TV, there's no room for yet another internet connected "TV" device in my house. I'm sure that a lot of people will love it as a device, I just won't be one of them. Microsoft really needed to have backwards compatibility between the XBOne and the 360 to even have a change at getting my money. - Scoble, Alex Scoble

Requiring an XBox Gold subscription seems counterproductive if that's really their target http://friendfeed.com/aswang... - Victor Ganata

I think they're going for it all. Gaming and home entertainment. Actually it would be good for you since it comes with a HDMI in port. You can connect the Apple TV or whatever to it. Forget about backwards compatibility. They're totally different hardware. PS4 won't have backwards compatibility either. - Rodfather

Sorry, but the totally different hardware argument doesn't fly for me. They could have done it if they wanted to, one way or another, and they would have been much more likely to get my money since I still play plenty of 360 games and there are no compelling XBOne titles. - Scoble, Alex Scoble

For multiplayer, it makes sense, especially since the PS4 requires PlayStation Plus, but I don't see how it can even compete with Chromecast or Apple TV or anything else that's free after the price of the device. Consider that one year of XBox Gold is more expensive than a Chromecast and half the price of an AppleTV. - Victor Ganata

Alex, that's bullshit, they would have had to shove a complete 360 chipset into the thing, plus extra hardware and software. So the device would cost an extra $100-200 easily. Which isn't worth it for either company. The whole reason both chose this architecture is that it is commonplace and makes porting across systems much simpler (better for all gamers). Both companies learned their lesson with the PS3. - OCoG of FF, Jimminy

Hell, you need 3+Ghz to emulate a SNES accurately, and good luck finding a 3Ghz CPU in most commodity computers, when even modern games don't require that. - OCoG of FF, Jimminy

It's all about the games for me. When there's a compelling title on either system, I'll pick it up. Last year, gaming on the Nintendo 3DS and Vita have been some of my best gaming experiences ever. I also caught up with a lot of PS3 exclusives. There's so many good games out there. - Rodfather

Yeah, I think the XBox One makes sense as a gaming machine, less so for anything else. - Victor Ganata

For someone who doesn't game much and would mostly use the Xbox One for Netflix, then it doesn't make much sense to pick it up. Yeah, it's silly Xbox Live is required for those apps. - Rodfather

Pinkman, what? I was running an SNES emulator very acceptably (maybe not 100% perfectly) about ten years ago, on a then-midrange PC. - Andrew C (see frenf.it)

Yeah, you don't need much. I have a SNES emulator and Zelda Link to the Past on my phone. The DS emulator works well on my phone too. I'm pretty sure there's a N64 and PSP emulator on Android too. - Rodfather

Andrew, yes you can play most games acceptably, not accurately, but there is no denying the increased cost of emulating newer devices. And accuracy is necessary for some subtle effects and preventing timing issues. http://arstechnica.com/gaming... - OCoG of FF, Jimminy

Would emulating an XBox 360 on an XBox One really be acceptable, though? It doesn't seem like as enormous of a technological gap as between a modern smartphone and a 16-bit gaming machine or even an N64 or original PSX. - Victor Ganata

I opted for a PS4 because I 'lost' fewer PS3 games I could no longer play. XBOne's lack of backward compatibility even for XBLA games is a kick in the pants to folks that have invested funds and times in those and can't take them with. Nintendo got some of that right. - Neal Krummell

I'm sure it's more than just emulating a Xbox 360 game. There's the underlying services and controller compatibility. Maybe Xbox Live on the Xbox One is totally different underneath the surface. - Rodfather

I'm probably going to pick up a PS4 eventually. Remote play with the Vita sounds nice. Sony generally has better support for indie developers and they have a lot of developers on their payroll for exclusive games. I'm in no rush. I picked up the PS3 when the Slim version came out. - Rodfather

Victor, it would definitely be better than the PS4 having a PS3 emulator. But the issue with emulation is you'd have to emulate a whole different instruction set, because of a design decision with the 360, as well as handle the bus timings and other issues that can break games that have been tuned to a specific architecture. You're easily looking at 4-5x cost in addressing those issues for a system that had 3.2GHZ to begin with, so 15-20Ghz required for acceptable emulation. - OCoG of FF, Jimminy

Microsoft and Sony play long games. They don't have a strong suite of games just 2 months from launch but most units sell years 2-4. - Johnny

Some people are skipping the Xbox One and PS4 and going with PC gaming and the Wii U. That covers indie games, multiplatform games, and Nintendo exclusives. - Rodfather

There's a shit ton of people who aren't gamers in the traditional sense, but they'll pick up a system just for Call of Duty or Madden. And that's all the games they will ever play. - Rodfather

There's no point in arguing. Cristo is just commenting to talk about himself. - Rodfather

The Xbox 360 wasn't backwards compatible unless you bought the $$$ Xbox hard drive. - Johnny

The 360 emulation of the original xbox was a custom translation/emulation thing, which is why it had to be tuned per game (engine) and left a large chunk of the original catalog out. They did try to make the most popular games backwards compatible. - Andrew C (see frenf.it)

When we're talking about 8-bit and 16-bit and even 32-bit emulation, we're definitely at the point where current CPUs/GPUs can just emulate the hardware in software, so they can be really faithful, including all the "unsupported" kludges. - Victor Ganata

Victor, sure, the issue isn't the emulation of just the processor though. You may get a working emulator for it, but it doesn't mean it's going to function well or properly. You've got various bus timings to account for as well as I/O and other subsystem emulation to include. Those ancillary systems are more important, due to the construction of the software. Processor emulation is good for simulation and time/speed independent software. Unfortunately, it doesn't do as well for games, because of the dynamic time-sensitive nature. - OCoG of FF, Jimminy

Imaging playing an FPS at 3-4x speed, so that you're facing ~0.5-2s latency in your actions. It'd get annoying very quickly. - OCoG of FF, Jimminy

Look at any existing 8-bit and 16-bit emulators and you'll find that they're emulating much more than the CPU, though. An x64 machine is more than adequate to fully emulate the I/O controllers, the serial buses, the video chipsets, and the sound chipsets of these machines down to the quirks. It's not as impossible as you make it out to be. - Victor Ganata

Like, C64 emulators even emulate the 6502 CPU on the floppy drive and the hardware-dependent kludge you need to trick the VIC-II chip via the raster interrupt to split the screen into graphics and text portions and to display more than 8 sprites. Of *course* you need to emulate all the subsystems too for full emulation. - Victor Ganata

Yes, and they get by, but we're also talking about systems that had Mhz chipsets. And I'm not saying you can't emulate these systems, just because of the subsystems. But to do full software emulation at speed X, for just the single chipset, requires some low multiple of X. Then you have the costs associated with subsystems, and handling the bus interactions, that adds extra multiples of X. - OCoG of FF, Jimminy

The 360 had a 3.2Ghz system, so you have to emulate a 3.2Ghz system, which can't be done on a system with less than 3.2Ghz, with any kind of accuracy. And that's before addressing subsystem and timing synchronization. I'm not going to argue about the feasibility of emulation, for 15-20 year old systems. It's possible. - OCoG of FF, Jimminy

Yeah, I'm not saying you're going to emulate the hardware of an XBox 360 fully in software on a modern-day x64 machine, but a computer with multiple cores running faster than 2 GHz is probably going to be adequate to perfectly emulate the hardware of a machine with a CPU running at 1 MHz or even 33 MHz. If you figure out a way to plug in the original controllers, the game play will be indistinguishable. - Victor Ganata

Remember, the XBOX 360 has a Power PC with NVidia graphics, and the XBOX One is all x86 on AMD. They are running a modified Hyper-V hypervisor on the box, but I doubt there is enough horsepower to get 360 compatibility done, but who knows? - Eric @ CS Techcast

Victor, not my words. That's from the creator of bsnes, he says 3+ Ghz for full accuracy of the SNES, and some games are unplayable without the accurate timings. For the 8-bit systems, I have no doubt you could probably get full-emulation with accuracy most likely under the 2Ghz mark. 16-bit at 21Mhz, it's questionable. Because you can't just stuff the register, even if that would allow you to make more requests in the time period. The register size and core count isn't really the limitation, it's getting the timings right. Even with more cores, you've still got to manage cross core synchronization, and that would make the emulation even harder to manage accurately. - OCoG of FF, Jimminy

Yeah, I mean with 8-bit machines, we're talking about buses that run in single-digit millihertz and with response times measured in 10s and 100s of microseconds, not nanoseconds, so I don't think modern day hardware will have any problems with timings. - Victor Ganata

Yeah but you have to run lots of sleeps and fire requests in the right cycles. If a system has to pass through the loop every 50 cycles. And audio every 6.25 cycles and video has to run every 12.5 cycles, there is already an issue of timing. You "can" just estimate the audio to 6 cycles (and it will run too quickly), and you can estimate the video at 12 or 13, but you're going to end up with either dropped frames or inaccurate renders. Managing those cycle timings for fidelity is the issue, because the emulator has to pass and manage dynamic sleeps on all the subsystems simultaneously to prevent slippage, fast-timings, and occasionally slow-timings or issues caused by external services calling resources. - OCoG of FF, Jimminy

I'm not denying that you can't get reasonable gameplay out of systems that fall under the optimal measure. That's veritably proven, by a whole host of emulators that have been on the market for years. I was just pointing out why Alex's 'backwards compatibility" request was bullshit without requiring them to add an Xbox 360 to the system itself. - OCoG of FF, Jimminy

Well, I'm arguing you can get perfect fidelity when you have such a massive gap between the host and guest systems. The best emulators actually do have to hand-tune the timings, but it's definitely not impossible for systems that are well documented after all the decades of hacking and reverse engineering. - Victor Ganata

Well you're going to have to disagree with the guy who build the most accurate SNES emulator. http://arstechnica.com/gaming... - OCoG of FF, Jimminy

I wasn't talking about the SNES specifically, though. It has proprietary subsystems that haven't been fully reverse engineered and documented, so, yeah, it's going to be tough to get full fidelity. But when you know the exact specs, it's not an impossible task. - Victor Ganata

Now mind you, the SNES also had the advantage of cartridges that could store extra components, which is a disadvantage for emulators. - OCoG of FF, Jimminy

Even the SNES's CPU is proprietary--a custom version of an off-the-shelf 16-bit CPU--so without the specs you're going to have to go with trial and error. The computers and game systems based on 8-bit 65xx CPUs were much closer to the off-the-shelf chips, and there have been more than 30 years to reverse engineer them anyway. - Victor Ganata

Well I wasn't really arguing with your 8-bit argument of getting them to run under 2Ghz with accuracy. (In fact, I already conceded that, in fact you'd probably be able to do it with something between 1.3-1.6 Ghz.) And I think all the components for the SNES (including the cartridge chipsets) were finally reverse-engineered a few months ago. (It may have been the NES.) - OCoG of FF, Jimminy

It seems like the meat of his argument is that it's always a tradeoff between speed and fidelity. Like, he also says you can probably build an SNES emulator that only requires a 300 MHz CPU that will run a number of games, but the ones that rely on obscured hacks and kludges will (1) look terrible (2) play terribly (3) not work at all. But full fidelity will require a lot more CPU power, and will actually require keeping in known bugs (like how Starfox will have random moments of bad, bad lag.) - Victor Ganata

I guess my point (and I think the author's point) is that it's not technically unfeasible, you just need to know the specific details of game implementation, and some of them really use obscure techniques to push the hardware to the limit. So you're stuck with either emulating the hardware at the per-cycle level (which is obviously CPU intensive) or you work around it in the emulator or you just directly hack the ROM. - Victor Ganata

"There's no denying it, absolutely perfect synchronization is very rarely required. But the fact is, there are cases where it is." - Victor Ganata

Reverse engineering the co-processors/custom chipsets/DSPs in the cartridges seems pretty tricky, and I'd be surprised if people have bothered with all but the most popular titles. "LLE is also a very expensive operation, monetarily speaking: to obtain the DSP program code requires melting the integrated circuit with nitric acid, scanning in the surface of a chip with an electron microscope, and then either staining and manually reading out or physically altering and monitoring the traces to extract the program and data ROMs. This kind of work can cost up to millions of dollars to have done professionally, depending upon the chip's complexity, due to the extremely specialized knowledge and equipment involved." - Victor Ganata

"Once finished, you must realize that DSPs are usually one-off specialty parts. Instruction sets must be reverse-engineered from binary blobs and emulated with virtually no documentation at all." - Victor Ganata

But I do agree with your point. Including full backward compatibility with the last generation would've been insanely cost prohibitive. It would probably just be cheaper to buy an XBox 360 and an XBox One than to buy an XBox One that could play every single XBox 360 title. - Victor Ganata

Also my argument was never that you couldn't reasonably emulate games at lower threshold speeds. Just that you couldn't accurately do it, or do it without overhead surpassing the original specs (which was me being confused about what I was arguing about [I was making the general claim, as it would relate back to my original argument]). - OCoG of FF, Jimminy

I can't find the initial announcement, but all DSP's have been decapped and dumped for official titles, for almost 2 years. http://www.tested.com/tech... - OCoG of FF, Jimminy

OK, that's reasonable, you probably can't ever have 100% full software emulation, ever, no matter how much raw CPU/GPU power you have, because it's just absurdly impractical. But even the author says you can probably attain 90% fidelity without having crazy requirements. - Victor Ganata

I'm still confused. DOES IT STILL PLAY GAMES? I like that my Xbox 360 can do all the other stuff (most of which is geo-blocked) but I never ever use it. I want a stable and fast piece of kit that I can turn on and jam on. Unless the new "social and TV" features on the Xbox One detract from the basic function of playing games then this is all a bit silly. - Johnny

Yeah, towards the end of the article he talked about the Fully (transistor level with transistor delays) Emulated Pong requiring 3Ghz. Some attempts at transistor level (without delay) emulation for the NES & C64 existing but being horribly slow. And fully emulated N64 likely never being achievable in our lifetimes. - OCoG of FF, Jimminy

Johnny, but it doesn't play Xbox 360 games. /sarcasm - OCoG of FF, Jimminy

"Unless the new "social and TV" features on the Xbox One detract from the basic function of playing games then this is all a bit silly." -- well, both the PS4 and Xbox One have 8 gigs of RAM and devote 2-3 gigs of it to non-game stuff, so yeah, in some sense the new features do detract from gaming. There's silicon in there (I think they also devote a core each?) basically permanently dedicated to the other features and which game devs can't use, so. - Andrew C (see frenf.it)

Andrew, but it's shared memory allocation (the 360 had this, but it was only 512MB), so they get the benefit of being able to use it to build video buffers. So they have quite a bit of memory they can use either for IOPS(CPU) or FLOPS(GPU), which means they can pull more out of the system. Depending on what they need. Having 5-6GB available to the GPU is awesome for game devs. - OCoG of FF, Jimminy

Yeah, I actually think MS *is* going for the gaming market. If they really wanted people to use the XBox One for other things, they wouldn't require a $49.95 annual subscription for features that are free on every other system out there. - Victor Ganata

And you don't sell 80 million Xbox 360s just to gamers. You need the casual gamer and the media centre consumer to help fund new things like the Xbox One. As long as they don't effect the core gameplay, bemoaning that Microsoft are targeting these consumers somehow makes this less of a gaming machine is silly. Just because the features are there doesn't mean you have to use them. - Johnny

MS is aiming for the integrated home. Who hasn't watched a Sci-Fi film where the houses listen and talk back to commands. But we aren't there yet, so they give you other reasons to talk to this box in your living room, that you'll actually use. They're just training people. - OCoG of FF, Jimminy

If you think about it, when it comes to gaming consoles, backward compatibility has been the exception rather than the rule. It's only really been for the last couple of generations. For the rest of the history of consoles, they've always expected you to buy a new console that can't play any of your old games. - Victor Ganata

I can see the frustration with not having backwards compatibility this time around. A lot of content is tied to your account now. Music, movies, Xbox Live Arcade, and Xbox Games on Demand are all sitting in the cloud. Fortunately, the movies and music are transferrable. It's a nice touch that Nintendo put in the Wii emulator and allows you to transfer downloaded content to the Wii U. - Rodfather

I'm wondering how long Microsoft will keep Xbox Live for the Xbox 360. 3-4 years? Even if you had a physical disk to play, will it download updates and DLC after they shut off the service? - Rodfather

I'd say at least 3-4. Took them a while for the original Xbox. Most consoles get bought years 2-3 so they need to keep it up for all the paying punters. Plus the second hand game market is huge. - Johnny

I'm thinking it'll be longer this time around. There's so much content tied to Xbox Live. It's going to be a mess when Microsoft cancels Games for Windows Live this year, which is basically PC games on Xbox Live. Games like Fallout 3 are tied to it. - Rodfather

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