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A Microsoft Employee's Thoughts on Xbox 360 Backwards Compatibility

Posted Jul 22, 2006 at 1:56AM EST by QJ Staff

Listed in: Xbox 360 Tags: backwards compatible, Michael L. Brundage, Microsoft, xbox 360 titles

We all have our own crosses to carry, and just because Microsoft is ranked 48th in the Fortune 500 list, it doesn't exempt them from carrying the crosses that they should bear. One of those crosses is the Xbox 360 backwards compatibility issue which has been dogging the company ever since.

Without a doubt, the MS guys working on it including Albert Penello, are doing their best to bring great Xbox games to the 360. From our earlier report about Mr. Penello's insights on backwards compatibility, it seems that the guys who bear the unenviable task of making Xbox games compatible with the 360 are having a hellish time - but as they say one man's hell, could be another man's heaven.

Such is the case of one Michael L. Brundage, one of those nameless devs who have been slaving to make Xbox games compatible with the obviously more powerful gaming beast -- the Xbox 360. He finds the Xbox backwards compatibility to be a unique project, in the sense that normally, once you understand how something magical works, it's much less amazing. With Xbox backwards compatibility, the opposite is true -- the more you understand what it needs to do, the more certain you are that it's impossible, and consequently the more amazed you are to see it in action. Obviously, he feels fortunate to get to work on it.

He believes that it will be the hardest technical challenge of his career. He enthusiastically divulges that it's "not just the difficulty of emulating completely different processors and devices. It's also all the arcane knowledge I've needed to acquire about kernel-level development, advanced graphics processing, operating systems and computer architectures. It's changed the way I think about software."

And in his own words, he says that "a few people who understand how emulators work look at these numbers, impressive as they are, and conclude that Xbox backwards compatibility will not work." Included in that 'few people who understand' is himself. But doing something deemed as impossible is so much fun, according to Brundage. What makes it fun? The challenge of making the impossible possible. That's nice and all, let's just hope that Mr. Brundage's positive attitude results to more backwards compatible games.

Via Michael Brundage

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Microsoft may say they have a team workin on BC but they havnt made any real breakthroughs ever since the system was released.

Its been over decade since the SNES was released and people still havnt been able to fully emulate the system.

The Xbox360 will never get full BC. Also there will be certain games that will never get on the list. Even now, the games on the list still tend to crash and not function the way they do on the XBox.

I Kept my original xbox knowing that the BC in the Xbox360 would be total BS. And it was.

# backwards compatible — Guest 2006-09-04 10:35

why doesnt microsoft give the dev-kit to the internet and let other programmers see what they can do with it who know they might be able to make a full system emulator that will run all games, lets face it microsoft needs help on this task. I want to play otogi 1 & 2, and Nba street

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A Microsoft Employee's Thoughts on Xbox 360 Backwards Compatibility

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