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Windows Central - Sarah Bond has set up a new team dedicated to game preservation and forward compatibility
- Thread starter HeisenbergFX4
- Start date
DeltaPolarBear
Member
The early next gen would mean there will be no exclusives for it by definition at launch. This would usually be a problem, but if 3rd party are absorbing the cost of manufacture and launch, then Microsoft doesn't care how badly the Xbox PC fails.
adamsapple
Or is it just one of Phil's balls in my throat?
As of right now, the only thing we know for sure is that they're talking about 'largest technical leap you will have ever seen in a hardware generation', and the OEM thing is discord rumors. An Xbox handheld is more likely than that, imo.
Little Chicken
Member
Weird how Xbox is always held to a different standard to Sony and Nintendo.
XBOX: Reiterates their support for backward and forward compatibility. Met with suspicion and derision despite having a successful BC program, which not only made hundreds of older-gen games available in perpetuity, but gave some higher resolutions and framerates!!
SONY & NINTENDO: Applauded for reselling you the same shit 5 years later.
XBOX: Reiterates their support for backward and forward compatibility. Met with suspicion and derision despite having a successful BC program, which not only made hundreds of older-gen games available in perpetuity, but gave some higher resolutions and framerates!!
SONY & NINTENDO: Applauded for reselling you the same shit 5 years later.
DeltaPolarBear
Member
You can run PS4 games on PS5 though. You make it sound like you are forced to rebuy the remaster.
Nintendo didn't sell enough WiiU to need to worry about back-compat for it.
Topher
Identifies as young
That's just one side of it though. Xbox has received tons of praise for their BC. Sony and Nintendo have received tons of criticism for their remakes/remasters. Only way your take is true is if you only read what you want to read.
DeltaPolarBear
Member
What you just quoted is literally IMPOSSIBLE to do. The only reason they dared to say this is because it is not in a legally binding shareholders meeting. If this was in an actual advert they would have been sued.
There had been many leaps in console from generation to generation, and all the major leaps had been done. I am saying outright that your quote is simply wrong if not just misinformed. And if you believe it it would just be one more lie to add to the pile from Xbox Division.
Not really, it falls in line with the other rumours which have been right to date.
Again, even if that rumor were to be correct, the baseline would still be Microsoft designed and developed, and there’d be an ‘official’ console release.
What, you think it’d be Lenovo or Huawei (for example) designing their own Xbox console hardware (incl specs) and then devs will make games to run on a staggering amount of hardware variations…just like PC gaming?
The "greatest leap" being hardware based - that ship has sailed 20 years ago.How compatible is it to use ARM with the goal of achieving the "greatest generational leap"?
Of course, they can always do the absolute numbers thing - where every gen is greatest ever, it wouldn't be the first time for MS.
That’s the tinfoil hat theory that gets pushed on message boards, yes.
What marketing purpose was that stat supposed to serve? anyone with eyes can already see the ‘Most played’ charts to see the Diablo 4’s gone way up post GP release.
adamsapple
Or is it just one of Phil's balls in my throat?
They said this in the small presser video they put out in Feb, not this email. This is just reiterating what they said then.
Ok, I don't care if it isn't 100% accurate whenever the next device comes out, I'm just talking about what was officially communicated from someone at MS, not something that was spread over discord.
You're putting more weight on discord rumors over official communique.
Bumblebeetuna
Member
We can add another to the list of innovations
Ashamam
Member
I don't see it as tinfoil territory. Its pretty clear to me MS is very close to a number of outlets. Windows Central being one of them. My comment was about the overall leak, not specifically the D4 part of it.
StreetsofBeige
Gold Member
Talk about reshash central. MS grilled for Halo, Gears, Forza. And look what Sony does. Last of Us alone has been milked with remaster and remakes like crazy and a tv show to boot. Dont be surprised if PS6 has another LOU Remanufactured Edition.
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demigod
Member
She basically confirms the oem. There’s your “largest technical leap”. Not bound by the manufacturer’s 1 or 2 sku. This leak has been spot on.Not really, it falls in line with the other rumours which have been right to date.
Topher
Identifies as young
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thicc_girls_are_teh_best
Member
Think I saw a couple others bring up a similar idea and honestly, this could work. In fact kinda surprised this wasn't something I had thought of at first. Them making an Xbox emulator for Windows with, I'd presume, deeper level access to the kernel than typical emulators, would make sense.
Also if devices like the Polymega can let people make ISOs from their disc games, that should be easily possible with an Xbox emulator as long as the user has the appropriate drive to read the discs to be ripped (OG Xbox and 360 games, for example). Just make a digital copy of the physical game and run the digital version as an install from that point on (probably also back that digital copy up via the cloud).
The emulator, though, would also need to be really fleshed out. It'd need to feel basically like the current Xbox console UIs do, which is why it'd need some lower-level access than typical emulators do. Maybe something closer to a virtual machine (I don't know a lot about VMs, I don't use them). Or, something that can sit between a VM and Windows itself as a Windows equivalent (permissions at an OS level even if it's mainly just a frontend still running on the OS).
So basically, someone can use their system like a console with that type of experience, and anything file-wise they can already access on an Xbox console, they could do the same on the PC through this type of frontend. Any Windows program a person'd want to launch that normally requires services/utilities disabled when running the 'Xbox Mode', can just get activated and then that program operates as normal.
I guess this is where the SSD and system I/O would really need to come in handy though; you don't want users to micro-manage system resources for games and regular applications running simultaneously like they have to do with regular Windows systems. So maybe some type of hypervisor between 'Xbox Mode' and the regular Windows environment that manages memory usage for the system between both environments, determining what services/utilities etc. are active or not, dumping save states of applications on both sides to some partition of the internal SSD when system resources might have to be freed up (then reloading those session states when needed)...all of that and more not requiring any user intervention, just let it all be handled seamlessly in the background.
Hopefully. Would be nice if Sony & Nintendo did similar.
Online play shouldn't be behind a paywall, especially when F2P games are exempt from it and certain platform holders bring their GAAS to PC where the online play is free vs. console. There are other ways to incentivize value to a sub service aside locking online play behind it.
Personally I am also leaning to the idea that at least some hardware aspect of this, likely on the processing side, is going to be spec'd as a blueprint standard that 3P OEMs can build their systems around. It'll probably also have some degree of scalability (with things like clocks, mainly, or certain shader units disabled for lower-performance devices) and modularity on both the OEM (system RAM capacity, default storage etc.) and, depending on form factor, user (upgradable compatible GPUs, swappable PSUs, upgradable system DRAM etc.) ends.
That does open room for a lot of different device types, at the very least I'm guessing Microsoft themselves would use a scaled-down version of whatever spec is settled on for this rumored handheld.
Not really, it falls in line with the other rumours which have been right to date.
The leak that just keeps giving.
Those "Discord rumors" have been spot-on so far. Funny how we selectively choose which rumors/leaks to give validity to, huh?
adamsapple
Or is it just one of Phil's balls in my throat?
Yeah, especially considering none of the rumors said anything about Xbox 'announcing' big technical leaps for next-gen hardware.
Topher
Identifies as young
ChorizoPicozo
Member
Sarah is our queen
demigod
Member
Lol @ you misconstruing the word technical.Yeah, especially considering none of the rumors said anything about Xbox 'announcing' big technical leaps for next-gen hardware.
adamsapple
Or is it just one of Phil's balls in my throat?
You know what, you're right , they didn't say big technical leap, they said largest technical leap.
mckmas8808
Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
Why are they constantly talking about a next-gen console in the beginning of 2024? It's only April and they've talked about it two times this year already. Is this thing really coming in 2025?
mckmas8808
Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
Ask yourself why they sell just as good as MS' first party titles?
demigod
Member
Technical, not Power, not Graphical, TECHNICAL. I guess you don’t know what word Phil used.
adamsapple
Or is it just one of Phil's balls in my throat?
DeltaPolarBear
Member
Simple. At this point Xbox had already made up their mind that there would not be a traditional XboX-Next. As in they are not going to waste any research or development on making a new walled garden machine that are sold at a loss. The decision had been made. Thus, now the talk is how to convert existing libraries of Xbox customers to the PC platform. To salvage the customers they currently have for the new reality. It is a waste to just drop the console customers, there is still money to be made there. But now the goal is to preserve as much of the gaming library as possible now that Xbox is going to be a Windows Compatibility layer.
Doing this means there is no need to talk about making new games for the hardware; it would just be a PC in the end of the day, so a 2025 launch would not be out of the question. It isn't even next gen, just current gen in legacy mode.
It reminds me of how Steam claim there is a plan for what happens if they had to shut their doors; that Gabe actually know what to do to preserve the games people bought, if the unthinkable happens. We don't know what the plan is, but the plan is there. Xbox is just executing THEIR own plan.
VitoNotVito
Member
How do you do preservation with a DRM?
bitbydeath
Gold Member
Probably just a PC with an Xbox sticker on it, or maybe without the sticker.
DeltaPolarBear
Member
You don't. The DRM was always meant to kill the game on cue.
A DRM game is either jailbroken or it dies. But the Xbox gaming license should be able to be transferred to PC, as that was always the plan. So as long as a PC version exists it should be ok.
mckmas8808
Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
But how does that match up to their "biggest technical leap in history" comments?
DeltaPolarBear
Member
First, taken at face value it is automatically a lie. I live through enough gaming Gens to know that.
Second, you can lawyer away the sentence if you need to. For example, "technical leap" is not measurable unless you define it first.
But regardless it is bull-crap either way. Microsoft never had problem with lying to their customers, why stop now when it might be the last chance for Xbox Division to do so?
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DeltaPolarBear
Member
During the NES and SNES era, the games are hardware constrained. You literally only make what you can fit on the storage medium. So each hardware upgrade tend to give "free" gameplay upgrade. Like music automatically get better, more playable characters, more detailed art...
We stopped hitting hardware limits two gaming generations back. Now it is about how to make a good game despite spending AAA money on hiring artists. Having better hardware helps, just not as much as it used to.
VitoNotVito
Member
Well, that was my point
It doesn’t matter what platform, Xbox or PC. Microsoft used DRM for all their releases…
DeltaPolarBear
Member
Microsoft Gaming is still alive, and so you got that going for you.Well, that was my point
It doesn’t matter what platform, Xbox or PC. Microsoft used DRM for all their releases…
Amusing that Microsoft is obsessed with maintaining compatibility due to Enterprise demands, while Apple is of the opinion that software should automatically be bricked deliberately when a new OS version comes out, unless it is patched to work with the new OS.
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ZehDon
Gold Member
"Largest technical leap" being reinforced internally, and in this controlled leak, makes me think there's some weight to the ARM and/or NVidia shift. Given that their on-paper advantage never materialised this generation, Xbox might be looking to change things up in a few ways.
VitoNotVito
Member
What is your point cause I obviously do not get it…
Microsoft games have DRM embedded. How do you “preserve” it?
PendekarRajawali
Member
DeltaPolarBear
Member
I would worry about that when Windows is dying as an OS.
Kataploom
Gold Member
I think these days consoles can't allow themselves not have backwards compatibility. Not only technology for that is easier than ever but also PC and other types of hardware have gotten people used to expect it... One of the reasons many play on PC is too avoid having to rebut a game years later because of no bc
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Team Andromeda
Member
Hope this means Xbox is using ARM CPUs in the Next Box
DeltaPolarBear
Member
Sony knew that. From the beginning, the plan was to have BC for every console going forward.
Then PS3 crashed and burned. The issue is that the Cell is an abandoned technology, so there is no "cheaper alternative" to upgrade to. Even the streaming service has actual PS3 Cell chips in them to run PS3 games. You can't have PS3 compatibility without using an expensive custom chip that no one else uses. Not even Sony managed to truly emulate it in modern hardware. So the original plan to build the "ultimate console" that contained the ability to run every previous gen games was halted.
That doesn't mean the plan died for Sony, it was just rebooted. PS4 is the new baseline and they are going to carry the compatibility forward again.
T-Cake
Member
Largest technical leap to me means datacentres with supercomputers in that will power Xbox games going forward. There will be almost no limit on the power available for developers to use - as Google talked about with Stadia. Devs could use multiple "slices" for their games but I don't think any of them ever did.
Ashamam
Member
A little off topic but I am curious as to wtf you are talking about lol. Can't say I recall any examples of Apple intentionally killing software unless you are talking about an architectural change like 32 to 64 bit? They kind of went out of their way to make Rosetta 2 to literally not brick x86 code on Apple Silicon. But what do I know, I've only been using Apple products since the Apple IIc.