When Sony and Microsoft both pulled the sheet off their respective next-gen systems, as heralded as both consoles were, one of the most disappointing features, or perhaps lack thereof, was no backwards compatibility. With the 360 allowing gamers to play games from the original Xbox, the PS3 to play games from the PS2, and the Wii allowing gamers to play GameCube games, it was something we sort of got used to, dare I say even spoiled by. But what was the reason for not providing the same feature on the the latest platforms? Here's why.
Speaking to OXM, two anonymous developers explained that it wasn't some sort of financial decision, but rather, a technical one.
As one source put it, "If you wanted to emulate something then you need a virtual machine that runs around it and converts instructions from one language into another, which requires large amount of CPU power, which is not available in either the Xbox One or PS4," our source explained. Advanced as the two systems are, they use different components and processing architectures than their forerunners.
Here's the breakdown according to OXM:
"There are, broadly speaking, two ways of bringing about backwards compatibility on a console - incorporating the older console's components into the new hardware, as was the case with PS2 and PS1, or running a 'virtual machine' that mimics the capabilities of the older console."
In technology's inevitable march forward, it's not often you simply build directly on the bones of its ancestors. Mostly because it's seldom necessary, as technology advances pretty damn quick. Ergo, incorporating old components is redundant.
If you're going to go the second route, you're going to run into some limitations, in that the new hardware doesn't always work as well together as say, a fine cabernet with an aged cheddar.
For you turophobes, here's a more technical sounding example from the source:
"Let's say that I am porting a 'simple' Arcade title, that didn't really tax the system too much and just ran three threads, one per CPU and obviously used the GPU. This would mean that each thread could run at 3.2Ghz and run the game quite smoothly."
"Now, if we try to compile and run this on the Xbox One we immediately hit an issue... if we run the three threads, one per core, then the cores are only running at 1.75Ghz each! This is around half the speed of the Xbox360, so the game will run like treacle."
Savvy? Me neither. All I know is that if you want to keep playing your old games, old on to your old systems for a while yet, and disregard anything you see or hear on the Internet that sounds too good to be true.
