Xbox 360 backward compatibility coming to Xbox One

LOS ANGELES—While Microsoft's pre-E3 press conference focused largely on newer video games, the event also filled in a pretty major gap for hardware-upgrading holdouts: backward compatibility. Starting later this year, the company's newest console, the Xbox One, will support a limited number of older Xbox 360 games—and Xbox One preview program users will get a shot even sooner than that.

Gamers will have two ways of playing old games that are part of the backward-compatible initiative. If users already purchased the games digitally through Xbox Live, they can simply log in and re-download the game on Xbox One without paying any additional cost. If they own the game as a disc, they'll have to download the game to their Xbox One hard drive, and the system will then check for the disc before launching the game.

Technical details on how this works are still unknown. The hardware of the Xbox 360 is very different from the hardware of the Xbox One, and pure emulation of the kind used in console emulators such as MESS and arcade emulators like MAME is technically improbable; Xbox 360 is simply too fast and too new. The limited compatibility and need to download even those games that are owned on disc suggests to us that some mix of recompilation and emulation is in use.

We also don't know if there will be differences in framerate or resolution. At least one Xbox One feature will be made available to 360 games: using Kinect voice commands, such as taking a screenshot while playing old games.

The list of games in the first wave can be found here. Much like the Xbox 360's limited support for the first Xbox's games, more 360 games will be added to the backward compatibility list over time—and there's no guarantee that a favorite 360 game will ever be brought forward to work on Xbox One. Nonetheless, Microsoft promises over 100 titles to start, with hundreds more coming in the future.

This announcement follows the January 2015 launch of Sony's PlayStation Now service, which offers a far more limited form of backward compatibility—namely, players who already own a game either digitally or on disc must still pay to access a PlayStation 3 game on PlayStation 4, and that session is powered by PlayStation Now's cloud service as opposed to working locally on a user's PS4 system.

This is a breaking report, and we will actively update it with new information as it becomes available

Via

Comments

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document? That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the docum...

Boom, the startup that wants to build supersonic planes, just signed a massive deal with Virgin

Have you heard about Boom? Boom is a relatively new startup that’s aiming to build something pretty crazy. They’re not building an app… or a social network… or even some new gadget for the Kickstarter crowd. Boom wants to build planes. Really, really, really fast planes. Specifically, they’re trying to design and build a supersonic passenger plane that goes 2.2x the speed of sound. If all goes to plan, they’ll be able to shuttle people from New York to London in 3.5 hours, and SF to Tokyo in 4.5. Sound crazy? I wouldn’t disagree. It’s worth noting that the company is in the very early days for something as intensive, massive, and hugely expensive as designing and producing a passenger aircraft. They’re still working on their first prototype, and hope to fly it by late next year. But it’s also worth noting that the team behind the plane has some serious talent in its blood: the company’s 11 employees have collectively contributed to over 30 aircrafts — having worked on thin...

Fun Tools to Translate Your Name into Japanese Calligraphy

Japanese calligraphy is an artistic writing style of the Japanese language. Its Chinese origins can be traced back to the twenty-eighth century BCE. Calligraphy found its way into Japanese culture in 600 CE and is known as the karayo tradition. For Westerners, calligraphy is forever fascinating. However, it takes years to learn how to properly draw the signs. Two basic principles must be known to understand Japanese writing: there are different writing styles and different alphabets. Kaisho for example, is a writing style most commonly used in print media. Tensho on the other hand is used in signatures. Other writing styles are Reisho, Gyosho and Sousho. The alphabets include Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana. Katakana is used for writing foreign words. It can also serve to highlight words, in analogy to capital letters as we know them from the Roman / Latin alphabet (Romaji in Japanese). Each Kanji character has a meaning of its own, while Hiragana or Katakana characters merely repres...

Kiran Upadhyay

Search This Blog