Microsoft Announces Release of Backwards Compatible Original Xbox Games for Xbox One
Apr. 10, 2018Microsoft Announces Release of Backwards Compatible Original Xbox Games for Xbox One
April will be a busy month as the first wave of games will be released on April 17th. Microsoft are set to release the following titles with backwards compatibility:
April 17th Releases
April 26th Releases
Further titles will be made available April 26th, this includes:
These can be purchased through the Xbox store or if you already own a copy simply insert the disc. The games will receive visual enhancements when played on newer systems with 4-times the pixel count on the base Xbox One and Xbox One S, while Xbox One X owners will be able to play the games with 16-times the original pixel count according to Microsoft.
We will keep you updated with future backward compatible releases. Until then check out the latestXboxreleases here.
Yuria
News Editor at Fextralife. Yuria is an avid PC gamer and Twitch streamer who enjoys online multi-player games and believes games should have amazing storylines not just great graphics.
I really enjoyed jade empire, pretty sure I have the disc somewhere!
Why did this take so long? The CPU in the original XBox was a one core, 733MHz Celeron with a tiny cache. In other words, the CPU in the XBone uses the same x86 instruction set (plus some extra instructions), so no emulation is even required, it has 8 times as many cores, each running at 1.75GHz (over twice as fast), while performing substantially more instructions per-clock. One XBone should be able to play about 25 XBox games simultaneously.
The ratio of GPU power and quantity of memory is even higher.
Of course if they had relied on DirectX at the time (like they’re at least offering with DX12 and the XBone) it wouldn’t be an issue, but their games would have been slower.
Both Microsoft and Sony had a major falling out with NVidia (the reason only Nintendo would touch them, unless you count the Ouya), and I suspect their contracts with AMD are more thoughtfully constructed. Of course of they keep making games based on faster AMD CPUs and GPUs backwards compatibility is trivial. In fact forwards compatibility (that is the releasing of new games on both versions, with improvements on newer one, at roughly the same time,as was done with Persona 5 on the PS3 and the PS4) will probably also be very common for all but a few third-party exclusives for years after the PS5 and whatever follows the XXBone (“XXXBone”? That would be the greatest console name ever, even if only a nickname) are released.
