Xbox 2 details
Posted on November 04, 2003 @ 12:50 in Games
Microsoft's deal with IBM for providing the CPU for the Xbox 2 is all over the web. They're changing the hardware platform quite drastically, so my first question was: what about backwards compatibility? Am I going to be able to play Xbox 1 games on an Xbox 2 console? Sony has probably benefitted a lot from offering that backwards compatibility in the move from PlayStation 1 to PlayStation 2. Sony recently announced that they've managed to shrink all the PlayStation 2 components onto one chip, so it's not going to be all that expensive for Sony to incorporate the previous hardware platform into the next generation PlayStation, even if they change the hardware as drastically as Microsoft.
Wired, however, is the first publication shedding some more light on Microsoft's plans. They say that Microsoft is going to use the Virtual PC software they acquired from Connectix last year to run Xbox 1 games on Xbox 2 hardware. That makes sense. Virtual PC was/is software for the Mac and the Mac runs on IBM PowerPC CPUs, of which one version or another is now destined for Xbox 2. All in all an interesting move from Microsoft and as the Wired article notes, possibly an indication of a more hardware independent future Microsoft.
In unrelated news: having the flu sucks drips.
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