xbox 360 backwards compatibility... through emulation?
More details on the backwards compatability of the xbox 360 were posted at www.xbox-scene.com today. Apparently ATI has a huge role in the hardware of the upcoming system. According to them backwards compatability will rely on emulation, somthing I dont recall any previouse console doing.
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Xbox 360 Backward Compatibility Details
>> From TeamXbox.com:
Quote:
In an interview with Bit-Tech.Net, Richard Harris of ATI has revealed the very first details on how backward compatibility will work on the Xbox 360. Explaining the role ATI hardware will play in the process, Harris states:
“They have implemented compatibility purely through emulation (at the CPU level). It looks like emulation profiles for each game are going to be stored on the hard drive, and I imagine that a certain number will ship with the system. They already have the infrastructure to distribute more profiles via Live, and more and more can be made available online periodically.”
“Emulating the CPU isn’t really a difficult task. They have three 3GHz cores, so emulating one 733MHz chip is pretty easy. The real bottlenecks in the emulation are GPU calls – calls made specifically by games to the nVIDIA hardware in a certain way. General GPU instructions are easy to convert – an instruction to draw a triangle in a certain way will be pretty generic. However, it’s the odd cases, the proprietary routines that will cause hassle.”
Read the whole article on TeamXbox.com and bit-tech.net.
(June 11 15:37 EST) - (direct link to article)
(Posted by:: XanTium)
