title WebLog #535 Topic: 2006-09-22 18.30.46 matt: Playing XBox games on XBox360
user matt
ip 69.12.138.157
vol 1

  Emulation, shmemulation. Why wait for Microsoft to perfect XBox emulation?

/more


  Microsoft recently added a couple more games to the
/link http://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/backwardcompatibilitygameslist.htm Backward Compatibility List
 for the XBox360. Unfortunately, most of them are ones I don't care about.

I still have more than 20 XBox games I have yet to play. I'm not buying an XBox360 until I can play most, if not all of them. But that doesn't mean they have to emulate the entire XBox 100%. I have an idea: With XBox Live Marketplace on the 360, publishers could recompile the bare essentials of these XBox games for the 360 and require the original XBox DVD. Everyone wins in this scenario.

First, it opens up an interesting new market for porting houses that can do this kind of work. There are several thousand XBox games out there that aren't emulated yet, or the emulation provided by Microsoft just isn't good enough (speed issues, etc). Native compilation of the original code should solve that issue. Kind of like running a Windows program under wine versus recompiling it against wine's libraries.

Second, it's a great way to boost the sagging game content market. Getting the rights to do a port and republish on Live Marketplace could be a great way to make some cash on existing content. Like remastering prior CD and DVD releases. Unlike that variety of rape that I personally hate, you could charge $4.99 for the recompiled binary from Live Marketplace. It would definitely be worth it to me for some of these titles since I can generally buy them new for less than $20.

Popping in my
/link http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0009JPV8I/102-6004876-5108133?ie=UTF8&tag=matthargettbl-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B0009JPV8I Ultimate SpiderMan
,
/link http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0007DGB4O/102-6004876-5108133?ie=UTF8&tag=matthargettbl-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B0007DGB4O Myst IV
or
/link http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00009VE6A/102-6004876-5108133?ie=UTF8&tag=matthargettbl-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B00009VE6A Quidditch World Cup
XBox DVD, paying $4.99 to download the 360 'update', and seeing them in 1080p (or 480p with FSAA and anisotropic filtering if there's too many hard-coded things that assume 480p/i) would be totally worth it to me. Even better would be if it wasn't just a recompile, but if *some* of the downgraded textures were replaced with 'new' textures that aren't as low-res as they had to be to fit in the XBox's RAM. For that added value, $9.99 might be a reasonable maximum price to play a game I already own.


It's double-dipping to be sure, but if done so as to not piss off consumers by keeping a reasonable price, it could be a winning situtation for the market and the consumers. If I was Ubisoft, Activision or EA, I would get on this Right Now. Or if I was Doublefine, the makers of
/link http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0007PIEAQ/102-6004876-5108133?ie=UTF8&tag=matthargettbl-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B0007PIEAQ Psychonauts
who have
/link http://www.doublefine.com/news2006spring.htm complained loudly
about the Xbox360 not emulating Psychonauts yet.

On a side note, I think that Microsoft should release their Xbox emulation software (or many parts of it) as Shared Source. Get the community at large working on this issue, please.

/discussion