Backward Compatibility & Failing Old Hardware

Hello,

I am a long time fan of the Original Xbox. I clearly remember the day that i bought it. I still have that Xbox and I still play it regularly. What is great about it is all the good games that can be bought on the cheap; I still buy games for it.

The reason for this post is that I am concerned that my Original Xbox will fail since the hardware is 16 years old and the last time a brand new Original Xbox was made was in 2006(?). I know there are ways to try to preserve an Original Xbox but at this
point it seems like we are holding them together with proverbial duct tape and bubble gum. If I lose my original hardware I will have a good size Xbox library and no way to play it save for the few games that are backwards compatible. I know that backwards
compatibility is currently being worked on, and there are various issues such as licensing etc That are slowing things down (the games that do play one the XBox One look great btw).

Would Microsoft allow a company such as Hyperkin or anther company that focuses on retro games to create a clone system? I think that may be a way to allow Original Xbox fans to continue to enjoy our games while official backwards compatibility is being
worked on.

Thanks for reading

:)

 

Hoax warning

This is days old. Kotaku covered it like a week ago. There's no conceivable way to have backwards compatibility, as the hardware doesn't support it.

 

Boo!

The 360 is a 10yr old system. 10 year old hardware. You will have to transition to an XBox one eventually. Good news is you have backwards compatibility coming. This fall may be a great time to upgrade.

 

My concerns echo yours.

Mine is a 2001 mfg date Xbox. I replaced the DVD drive in 2012 with a Samsung because my Thomson died. Now the Samsung is giving out, too. There's a finite amount of Xbox dvd drives out in the world, and even the newest ones are both very old and also
heavily used. Eventually, they'll all be useless and a modded console will be the only way to play a lot of original Xbox games. I bought an Xbox One right after they announced Original Xbox compatibility. That was the only reason I bought it. I don't
care much for new games. I thought MS would make the entire library compatible by just emulating the Xbox itself, rather than a handful of games. Now it seems even worse because that first batch appears to be all we're going to get.

I doubt they will ever allow a clone system. I don't think Microsoft owns all the Xbox technology. I believe Nvidia still owns the GPU tech.

I don't think anyone from Microsoft looks at these threads. So I don't mind telling you that you should probably look into ROMs. There are two PC emulators for Xbox that are coming along quite well recently.

 

The Hyperkin consoles aren't clones, not in the strictest sense of the word. They are ARM powered emulation machines. There is no original hardware in them. The hardware is similar what you get in cheaper Android smart phones and
the Raspberry Pi machines. Emulating old 8-bit and 16-bit hardware isn't particularly demanding, heck, I was emulating consoles from the 80's and early 90's on a 486 PC back in 1996!

Even Nintendo's Mini Nes and the mini Super Nintendo, released over the past couple of years, all run on ARM based hardware and are 100% software emulation.

You would think that original Xbox emulation would be easy to do right? Well, it isn't. The original Xbox had an Intel 733Mhz processor, 64MB of RAM and an NVidia based graphics card - basically a low to mid range PC from circa 2001. The problem is that
original Xbox contains a lot of custom firmware and relatively undocumented graphics chip, which makes emulation extremely challenging. Which is why, only now are we starting to get work in progress, proof of concept emulation.

This emulation lags waaaay behind Game Cube emulation with Dolphin (which is brilliant by the way) and PS2 emulation with PCSX2, which is great, but more demanding than emulating the Game Cube.

And of course, like all emulation on PC or even devices like the Hyperkin, no help is offered from the original manufacturer, zero, why would they?