Microsoft is trying to create an Xbox 360 emulator for Xbox One

The new generation of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles do not support the games for their predecessors, the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360. The reason is that generations are based on completely different processor architectures. But soon things can change, as Microsoft is trying to create an emulator that allows you to run old games on your new console.

The Xbox 360 is based on the Xenon processor of the Power PC family, and the Xbox One completely switched to the x86 architecture, precisely because of this difference, developers can't do a little blood when porting games from one console to another. Games literally have to be rewritten from scratch in order to make them work on an alien architecture. And this, as you understand, is fraught with huge financial and time costs, so very few developers are taking this step.

What to do to make the huge Xbox 360 games library run on Xbox One. Option one is to write a special program that can virtually recreate the iron of the old console on a new one. These programs are called emulators and are very popular among fans of old video games, which from time to time run ancient toys on their personal computers for different consoles like Atari, Famicom, and so on.

As a rule, emulators are written by enthusiastic programmers. They have to thoroughly examine the hardware of a particular platform, extract the BIOS and figure out the machine code in order to recreate it on a new hardware. But in this case, the engineers of Microsoft will write the Xbox 360 emulator, and they have full documentation and access to all source codes of the code, which can be considered a huge advantage.

“It is very difficult to emulate the Power PC architecture on the x86 platform, so for now we have nothing to show to the public. But I hope that one day we will achieve success in this direction, ”said Frank Savage, one of the leading engineers of the Xbox software division, with journalists.

It is curious that the former head of Xbox Don Mattrick, who now works at Zynga, in the summer of 2013 very unflatteringly said that there is backward compatibility with games of the previous generation of consoles. He called backward compatibility “the opposite way of thinking,” hinting that after the new consoles were released, only dull-witted gamers could play old games, thereby causing Mattrick to get a lot of angry reviews on the Internet.

Microsoft also considered the introduction of backward compatibility through its cloud service Azure. Something like that we can now see at Sony with their Playstation Now service, where games are played on remote servers and broadcast in real time on a TV or handheld gaming console for a small monthly fee.

While Microsoft is trying to write an emulator of its own console, an amateur programmer has already written an independent Xbox 360 emulator, which was able to run a simple toy Frogger 2 from the Xbox Live Arcade. The game works at a terribly slow speed, which is perfectly visible in the video posted on the web by the author of the emulator. But the development of the application is at the initial stage, so that we can expect acceleration of its work in the future.

The article is based on materials https://hi-news.ru/hardware/microsoft-pytaetsya-sozdat-emulyator-xbox-360-dlya-xbox-one.html.