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Comment by kuu | Hacker News Reader

The forced obsolescence of consoles is amazing. Now the new generation is advertising as one of their major achievements the retro-compatibility with the previous generation games, but what about PS3 or 360 games? Don't worry, you will have the option to pay again for the same game, maybe with new textures (but maybe not).

At the same time, on PC I can play almost any game it has existed in PC history.

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There's a pretty good list of backwards compatible 360 games that can be played on the modern Xbox consoles. Microsoft did the work in this case.

Since it's different architectures there's a bit of work involved in making sure the compatibility layer works as expected. It's a technical achievement that they've been able to do it as good as this.

There's also OG Xbox games available with a compatibility layer as well.

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/xbox-backwards-compatibil...

It's actually amazing that Microsoft:

- Paid developers to emulate a Pentium III (original xbox) on a PowerPC (360) in the first place

- Subsequently paid developers to do the effective opposite - emulate PowerPC (360) on x86 (one, series)

Also consider it's far easier to emulate an original xbox on a one/series than it was on a 360

I can imagine reworking the x86 processor should be straightforward, but I'd be curious about the cost of emulating the proprietary hardware inside the Original Xbox (eg: render pipeline, memory architecture, I/O, etc.).

An example of this sort of thing can be well-observed emulating the Nintendo 64. The CPU is a plain-standard MIPS III, but emulating the console's graphics chip hasn't always been accurate for a long time. Disney-released games on the Nintendo Wii would toy with the write-back cache to prevent emulators from booting their games.[1]

I can imagine the largest amounts of difficulty are outside the CPU for a polished-enough project.

[1] https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2017/02/01/dolphin-progress-rep...

Yeah amazing (me playing a DOS game on a FreeBSD PowerPC machine), Thanks anyway Microsoft ;)

Playing one DOS game. Not supporting a whole platform and the software developed for it with a multitude of stakeholders (consumers, game developers, game publishers), lots of contracts and responsibilities to be held against those contracts. Verifying if each game runs properly on the emulation layer or if there will be unforeseen bugs later in the game progression due to some weird combination of programming voodoo and the system.

I don't mean to say that given Microsoft's development power it's a massive achievement but it's an achievement and should be assessed objectively, not with snarky comments.

>Playing one DOS game.

?? No with dos-box you can nearly play all of them. It's just one emulator but then you have also NES SNES GB SGB Saturn Wii PS1/2/3 PSP Wine Atari Commodore etc...

Dolphin emulator is the 8th wonder of the world

Absolutely!!!! What a great piece of software.

For supported games this works incredibly well, and I imagine there's probably no technical reason it couldn't be made to work for all 360 and Xbox OG games.

However, it doesn't appear to come for free in terms of effort: I don't believe there's a kind of universal emulation layer that supports every game. When you put in a game disc for a support Xbox or 360 game the console doesn't install the game direct from the disc but rather downloads a compatible version from Microsoft. The disc simply proves that you own the game (and you still have to insert it every time you want to play the game).

This has some advantages and disadvantages. The obvious advantage is that the downloaded version could include enhancements like better visuals, sound effects, bug fixes, etc., and plenty of games on the backwards compatibility list do include some level of enhancement.

The obvious disadvantage is that you can't just play any old game you might own. I don't know why Microsoft haven't implemented some sort of universal backwards compatibility directly into the consoles but obviously they have their reasons.

The fact that the games are downloaded rather than installed from disc throws up another issue: licensing. It will never be the case that all games are supported through backwards compatibility due to content licensing issues (effectively Microsoft are redistributing content because of the way compatibility works).

Similarly, some games ship with altered content due to licensing issues. One fairly well know example here is GTA: San Andreas, where the soundtrack differs quite significantly from the version on the disc. The best way to play GTA: San Andreas on a console if you want to experience it as originally intended still remains original PS2 or Xbox hardware or, if you have one that works still, earlier models of PS3 that included PS2 backwards compatibility (this was removed in later revisions).

I think the reason is that the Xbox 360 had a PowerPC chip/architecture vs the x86 of the current Xboxes, and the developers often wrote close to the metal optimizations that may not be feel good when put through a normal emulator (if they could even get it up to speed). This way, they know it'll work perfectly and can sell the game in the Xbox Store if you have never played it. (And can stop games that will never work, like Kinect games).

The months before rolling this out, they modified an internal API "reserve-gamertag" and introduced a small chance of a race condition.

This race condition allowed anyone spamming (3k+ req/sec) this one specific public API to eventually (2 minutes) take any unbanned inactive Xbox360 gamertag that hadn't been migrated to the XboxOne platform.

Xbox has no bug bounty program; ironically this means the finder of this exploit made 10x what Microsoft would had given him, even by a generous estimate.

The PS3 has an incredibly powerful CPU that is a a real pain to emulate.

Modernretrogamer did quite an interesting Youtube piece on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLebZyha74o

I keep reading that it's difficult to emulate but the current Rpcs3 is doing great work at such a high pace

https://youtu.be/MhLteF_xVi0

Rpcs3 is extremely impressive, but remember it took 9 years to get to the point where it is now, and still many games break or have unplayable performance even on the highest-end PC's you can buy today. So it kind of proves the point how ridiculously difficult it is to emulate that machine.

> I keep reading that it's difficult to emulate but the current Rpcs3 is doing great work at such a high pace

The fact a 9 year old emulator with talented devs with successful patreon is doing great work at such a high pace doesn't invalidate the fact PS3 is a nightmare to emulate.

I generally agree, but it’s worth noting that rpcs3 has to reverse engineer everything. Any developer team working within Sony would likely have a much easier time.

OMG how have I not played this game!

It's surprising to me that PS3 emulation (RPCS3) is so much further along than Xbox360 emulation (Xenia). Is it just a matter of one platform getting more attention?

It's a combination of various factors. The games definitely play a role (PS3 has more exclusives, Xbox360 is mainly Halo and even that has been remastered on PC now).

Another factor is how the projects are maintained and managed. The maintainers of RPCS3 are more active and pull requests get feedback and merged relatively quickly.

On Xenia side, pull requests can remain open for months even though they should be merged, and this has caused multiple (potential) contributors to stop making pull requests.

Source: I'm a contributor on Xenia

Complete guess: I think part of the issue is that a lot of Xbox games that aren't exclusive to Sony or Switch are also on Windows. So maybe there is a slightly smaller incentive?

It is also interesting that the orig xbox is not further along.

They don't make them like this anymore

Every Game Dev: Thank God

I know it was a pain to code for initially but once the tooling got better was it really that bad? The Cell still seems like an awesome piece of kit.

Had the PS4 been a PS3 with a new GPU and a clocked up Cell with an extra PPE would that have been a bad thing?

Johnathan Blow had an interesting view on it [1], he talks about the idea of the Cell being you somehow refactor your game to be parallelized across the SPEs. But the whole point of a game is that you're simulating a cohesive little world, and anything that is easily separable from the global view of the world is probably not core to the gameplay.

One example is sound effects, if you're generating sound effects, you can't do a good job of that without the context of the environment and what is making the noise, so you necessarily have very deep data dependencies.

[1]: (at about 22 minutes onward) https://oxide.computer/podcast/on-the-metal-9-jonathan-blow/

>> Had the PS4 been a PS3 with a new GPU and a clocked up Cell with an extra PPE would that have been a bad thing?

Probably, if only because non-exclusive AAA games already cost tens of millions of $$$ to develop, and no other consoles or PC's show any similarity with the Cell architecture. So you would either end up with really crappy PS versions of multi-platform games, or they would not be made for PS at all.

I “loved” the idea of the cell when I heard about it, but the development community’s struggle with it should be a salutary lesson to us all!

It's a challenge game companies have had for a long time.

Sometimes, being bold means trying new architectures... But the important thing is making sure they are easy to adopt.

That's the irony of the 'lesson' of the PS3 being hard to develop for; Sega learned that one the hard way with the Saturn.

I guess that’s my question, was the Cell fundamentally bad or was it just too new, different and hard to adopt?

If it’s the latter then building the PS4 on the cell as well should have been fine as by that point it’s a well-known and well-understood architecture.

Even if it's well-understood, being fundamentally different than the other platforms is still a cost for anyone not exclusively making Playstation titles.

The Cell was poorly suited for video games — video games don’t have much in the way of highly parallelizable, discrete tasks. Games, even modern ones, generally want fewer, higher-clocked cores — something like Threadripper would be of little benefit.

I don’t think I’ll ever understand people that buy consoles, especially for FPS games. The controls are terrible, the FPS is terrible, the display is probably terrible if they’re using a TV, and the number one reason I will never understand: paying money if you want to play multiplayer. So you’ve already paid money for the console, you paid an exorbitant price for a game that is rarely on sale, and now you have to pay _more_ money to Sony/Microsoft so that you can use the internet? What the actual fuck? I can’t understand how console players aren’t rioting about this. Imagine the outrage if Microsoft prevented you from playing an online game on PC saying “Please buy a Windows+ subscription for online features”.

I bought a PS4 to play Crash Bandicoot when I wasn’t sure it will ever come out on PC (also fuck exclusives - a whole another debate), but since I bought it on Steam the console is a glorified HBO player. I don’t even use it for Netflix because using my fire TV stick is faster.

Costs less, lets you kick back on a couch, setup and maintenance is a couple orders of less magnitude less complicated, much smaller attack surface for malware.

Oh yeah, and the internet subscription also tends to come with a constant stream of free games. Every month there’s a couple new things to play that cost more than your month’s subscription.

> much smaller attack surface for malware.

And much smaller blast radius too. I don't do home banking on my xbox.

Malware on a large scale on computers, be them PCs, Macs or Linux hasn't been a problem for years unless you as a user engage in downloading shady stuff from dodgy sources.

The reason consoles are safer is that you can't do any dodgy downloads on them beyond the manufacturer's walled garden, similar to how mobile devices work, not because they have magic security pixie dust making them invulnerable to malware, especially since they share the same X86 hardware as PCs.

> The reason consoles are safer is that you can't do any dodgy downloads on them beyond the manufacturer's walled garden, similar to how mobile devices work, not because they have magic security pixie dust making them invulnerable to malware, especially since they share the same X86 hardware as PCs.

That's not the whole story. The Xbox takes sandboxing very seriously, and provides isolation way beyond a typical PC. See for instance [0]. Recent generations of Xbox and PlayStation have been based on AMD64, but I don't see that this is a major factor.

edit It's a pity they don't offer decent keyboard+mouse support. Being able to use a console as a serious desktop web browser would be a very useful feature.

[0] https://youtu.be/U7VwtOrwceo?t=1180

> It's a pity they don't offer decent keyboard+mouse support. Being able to use a console as a serious desktop web browser would be a very useful feature.

Some games offer M+KB support, and I think the new Xboxes have some support at a system level. I’m not sure if that extends to the system UI, though.

They never added mouse+keyboard support for Edge on Xbox One. Too early to say for the Series consoles but I suspect they'll disappoint again.

Blast radius really depends on just how dedicated you are. Yes, it's true that even a low or medium end gaming PC is going to have a much larger power source that can contribute to the fireworks if a small explosive is properly placed & detonated. PC enthusiasts will often point to this in order to support their choice of gaming hardware.

This ignores the realities of modern day explosives, or even what can be cobbled together from household items. Any discernable difference between a PC & console all but disappears if they're detonated with even a modest explosive.

Context matters as well: A PC is more likely to be in a clearer zone, at the very least for better ventilation. A console on the other hand is much more likely to be in an area that is more densely populated with other consumer electronics. The television alone is likely to be sufficiently large to make a more impressive field of debris than a PC.

Obviously this is just taking the typical setups into account. All bets are off when dealing with a PC that has some truly exotic cooling mechanisms. Detonation under those conditions should, at minimum, be accompanied with evacuation orders for neighbors within a 3 to 4 block radius of your home.

> I don't do home banking on my xbox.

You probably could do this, as the console includes the Edge browser, including a Private Browsing feature. (At least, the Xbox One includes a pre-Chromium version of Edge, I'm not sure about the new Series consoles.) It doesn't strike me as a particularly bad idea, other than in terms of the user experience, likely with no support for keyboard and mouse.

>and the internet subscription also tends to come with a constant stream of free games.

I don't want that, I just want to play one or two games online, the ones I purchase. My friend has been telling me how much better Overwatch is on the PS4, and the fact that I'd need to pay to play online is ridiculous, shocking when I found out about it. It's not too expensive, but the principle of the thing annoys me.

> Costs less

Spec wise PC hardware is cheaper. Most people tend to spend more to build something much more powerful than a console, causing it to cost more.

> lets you kick back on a couch

Nothing is preventing you from doing this with a PC. Steam has a TV mode interface that is much like console interfaces. I use PS4 BT controllers with mine.

> setup and maintenance is a couple orders of less magnitude less complicated

I'll give you that on setup. A dedicated gaming PC doesn't require any more maintenance than a console. Everything auto updates now.

> much smaller attack surface for malware.

Sure, but if you have a computer dedicated to gaming the attack surface area is small. If you're worried about it don't use that computer for anything other than games.

> Oh yeah, and the internet subscription also tends to come with a constant stream of free games. Every month there’s a couple new things to play that cost more than your month’s subscription.

Check out Humble Bundle, it has similar value except you get to keep the games DRM free forever. Also it's not required, you have a choice.

>much smaller attack surface for malware.

Not really, consoles are now fully fledged X86_X64 PCs with closed source, security through obscurity OSs, similar to Windows and MacOS but with much more DRM to prevent you from running anything not signed by the manufacturer(cough, pirated content, cough).

You could say they're about the same risk in theory but malware on PC land hasn't been an issue in many years unless, as a user, you intentionally visit, download and run unknown stuff off dodgy torrents/pirate/p0rn websites, then nothing can really protect you.

The reason why consoles are "safer" is there's not much you can do with them other than access the manufacturer's "app store" which is thoroughly vetted, not because they have some security secret sauce that PCs don't have. Similarly, if you were to treat your PC like a console/tablet and only visit/download stuff off legitimate sources approved by the vendors then you're at no higher risk of malware.

A PlayStation 5 is £450 and will smoothly play any game I buy for it. PlayStation+ for 7 years is £350.

Total cost excluding games is £800 for 7 years of smooth gameplay.

An £800 PC wouldn’t even play current games smoothly, never mind releases in 7 years.

>An £800 PC wouldn’t even play current games smoothly

Why do people assume you need a million $ PC to play current games smoothly? Is it the tech youtubers/influencers like Linus to blame for this madness where everything needs to be run at 4k 300Hz ULTRA settings to count as PC gaming?

PC gaming hardware for a good experience is more affordable than people think.

A 850-900 Euro PC (for us over the channel) with an RTX 2060 will definitely play all AAA titles very smoothly. Sure, not in native 4K, but consoles games(even next gen) are also not native 4K/ultra settings but rendered in lower fidelity then upscaled to whatever your TV output is.

>never mind releases in 7 years.

That PC will most definitely play games 7 years from now but on lower settings which will still match the visual fidelity of the 7 year old console as the game developers will have to lower game details to make the game playable on the then outdated console hardware.

He also forgot you can simply keep upgrading you PC, and your PC can play all your old games without having to repurchase them.

Also, if you added another $800 to your PC every 7 years it would still outperform a console.

Also a gaming PC is still a usable computer, a console is not. Therefore a home PC can pay for itself by letting you code on it or whatever it is you may do.

This is what worries me with younger generations.

Just the other day when google shut down google music a top comment was pretty much 'sorry boomers no one keeps mp3s anymore we all stream get lost dinosaurs'[1] as if that streaming service would always be there...in a thread about a huge music SAAS shutting down!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25066751

A lot of people want to play games on the couch with a controller, not hunched over a desk which is the typical pc experience.

Which can also be done on PC even wireless controller such as gasp PS4 and Xbone controllers.

That and you are going to end up buying a PC of some kind anyway because you can't work on a console

A 7 years old PC GPU equivalent to 2060 today is the Kepler GPU like Geforce 660, if you think you can match PS4 visual fidelity on that then you have not seen either one or another or both.

The better idea is to get a laptop $400-800 more expensive than the one you were looking at. That way you get benefit of performance across your laptop experience. With the amount of time anyone spends on a computer, the investment is worth it.

An £800 PC shouldn't struggle with anything below 1440p.

My PC cost that much 2 or 3 years ago and it barely turns the fans on playing most games even now

> I don’t think I’ll ever understand people that buy consoles

Because I buy it once and I can play each and every game in the next 5-7 years without spendig money on hardware upgrade.

> The controls are terrible

I'm ok with them, I'm not into hardcore competitive multi fps

>the FPS is terrible

you mean you cannot get 60 FPS for each and every game? Yeah sure, but I don't really need it.

>the display is probably terrible if they’re using a TV

why would it be?

> paying money if you want to play multiplayer

I usually buy ps+ when it is discounted, so I pay about $5 in a month and I usually get two free games for that price.

>you paid an exorbitant price for a game that is rarely on sale

You can buy ps4 games secondhand usually half price if you wait a month after the release, at least in the uk. Also, even AAA titles are heavily discounted during the summer sale on ps4.

So you probably payed much more for hardware upgrades than I payed for the console and for the games in the last 7 years since ps4 is out :)

Why do people buy consoles? It has very little to do with controls, and everything to do with price & conveninece. Because a PC gaming system is much much more expensive.

Take Horizon: Zero Dawn. It runs just fine on a 7-year old PS4 console. If you want to play on a PC, you need a PC that, at the level of a budget DIY system, will cost you around $600.

This doesn't even take into account the fact that this particular game didn't come to PC for 3.5 years.

I used to play games on a PC but I switched over to PS4 (and will probably pick up a PS5 when available). Sony makes a ton of blockbuster single-player games like Ghost of Tsushima, God of War, and The Last of Us that I can't get anywhere else.

The display is fine (I have a 4K HDR TV, which are now commonplace) and I can relax on my couch without messing around with a computer.

>I don’t think I’ll ever understand people that buy consoles

They are flat-out easier to setup and maintain for the bulk of the customer base. For example, setting up multiple users (family accounts) is a breeze on my PS4 and Switch, because that is a use case they pay attention to.

Meanwhile over on my PC, Steam supports sharing (family view) but it only seems to work from the same base Windows account. What the hell is the point of that; if I'm not around the kids can download and install all kinds of crap (click OK on the near useless Windows UAC prompt???). Or, I can create their own Steam account and their own Windows account and do library sharing but then you share all the games, you can't pick what subset, what to include or exclude.

Two options, neither fully solving the problem.

Because I already spent all day on my desktop.

Gaming console is the fastest STB thanks to its spec, isn't it?

To add to this, if you don’t play often enough, when you do want to jump on the couch and play with a friend, you have to wait 15 minutes for your console to upgrade.

Are you saying that PCs/games/Steam/ubisoftbsmanager/etc don't never have to upgrade in most inconvenient times? Beecause they certainly do.

this is not the way it has been on ps4, for sure it is not the way it works on ps5. ps4 can do updates when it is on stand by. i don’t know about xbox, but i presume it is the same.

I wouldn't exactly call it "forced obsolescence". Backwards compatibility is a niche feature used by a tiny fraction of the customer base very occasionally (who invariably still have the old hardware), and console manufacturers dump millions into added BOM cost/engineering time to get it working despite the economics making almost zero sense.

Seen how it's announced as a key feature of this generation as long as many remakes they're making, I wouldn't call it a niche feature...

This generation is somewhat weird. It seems like the bulk of the launch titles have been pushed into 2021 or beyond, so the new consoles are somewhat akin to PC upgrades: play the same games, but at a better frame rate and higher resolution.

This is a bit tangental, but.

While I agree the backwards compatability on PC is nice. The new M1 MBP Pro benchmarks quite clearly show, in my opinion, that the hell bent persuit of backwards compatability, on a _40 Year Old_ instruction set, may have significantly held computing back.

They've produced a chip that goes toe to toe with the fastest x86s parts, but does it in 10W instead of 65W. And this is their first shot at it.

I think we may need to recalibrate our expectations for long term software support, for both PCs and Consoles, if we want the most out of our hardware.

I can’t see any rationale for how it’s forced obsolescence. New consoles offer very obvious improvements over previous consoles, and they don’t prevent old consoles from working. Not offering infinite backwards compatibility with new hardware isn’t forced obsolescence.

Yeah it's like saying that Apple is doing forced obsolescence because modern Macs can't run PowerPC Mac software. PCs can run even very very old software because at least the architecture is the same. There is no good way to emulate the CELL cpu of the PS3 on modern x86 architecture, and even emulating PS2 architecture is very very difficult and full of caveats. That's not forced obscolescence, like you said - it's just obsolescence.

Well, some parts are forced anyway e.g. you can't play original Xbox games on Xbox Live anymore.

It's also why I didn't by consoles anymore since the PS2. The PS2 was awesome and the backwards compatibility to PS1 games got me hooked. However, I have no desire to buy 3 new consoles every 6-7 years that don't support my previous collection of old games. If the PS5 had backwards compatibility all the way to the PS1, I'd buy it in a heartbeat, but since it doesn't, I won't buy it.

How usable is PS4 without internet connection? I'd buy one (maybe used) if it is.

You put discs in and play games. From that perspective you don’t need an internet connection.

However, if you want to play blu ray movies, you need to connect it to the internet to download a license. Sadly.

It's worth noting that with the prevalence of day-one patches these days, it's entirely possible that the code on the disk is a barely playable mess.

It raises big concerns for archival—we'll eventually have high quality emulators for all of these systems, but to properly archive the games requires also archiving patches, which is difficult from both a logistical and copyright standpoint.

Recent example: the Cyberpunk people announced the latest delay after the game had already gone gold. So they’re taking an extra 3 weeks to fix it, while also pressing discs that have none of those fixes.

I might be wrong but it's not inconceivable that when newer batches of discs are manufactured they actually include the patches. Unless there's no more space, of course.

i see a future where if it’s going to be emulated the patch packages will either be included with the image OR the image available will be at last published version.

> However, if you want to play blu ray movies, you need to connect it to the internet to download a license. Sadly.

Just once.

Yes. Also this license is needed for DVD playback too.

> what about PS3 or 360 games?

That's only true for PS3 tho. Microsoft has been doing quite a good job regarding backwards compatibility, and you can still play 360 games in the new Series X.

PS3 was a completely different CPU architecture than PS4. That's why sony implemented a streaming library for older games instead.

Emulation alone wouldn't have worked because some folks more knowledgeable than I am have said that the PS3 chip was more powerful than even some modern CPUs. Streaming is really the only relatively universal and financially viable solution for that older library of games.

> VAN DER LEEUW: Even desktop chips nowadays, the fastest Intel stuff you can buy is not by far as powerful as the Cell CPU, but it’s very difficult to get power out of the Cell. I think it was ahead of its age, because it was a little bit more like how GPUs work nowadays, but it was maybe not balanced nicely and it was too hard to use. It overshot a little bit in power and undershot in usability, but it was definitely visionary.

https://www.gameinformer.com/feature/2019/12/03/the-first-25...

Nobody’s going into your home and taking away your PS4. Nobody’s forcing you to buy a PS5.

You can still buy digital titles on the PS3, which came out 16 years ago!

Backwards compatibility was basically not even a thing until the 2000s. Now you’ve got the PS5 and Xbox Series sharing essentially the same underlying x86 architecture of the PS4 and Xbox One...kind of like a PC.

This isn't forced or planned obsolescence, just plain obsolescence. Because not enough people care enough about it.

I can't blame SIE for not able to compatible with weird arch old hardwares (PS2,PS3). BTW Microsoft is excellent to make old Xbox games compatible, as wellas they does in Windows. (but not too weird like PS2/PS3)

> At the same time, on PC I can play almost any game it has existed in PC history.

Only thanks to emulation or the fact that modern hardware is still able to boot into some flavour of DOS.

Plenty of people buy their movies multiple times, Betamax, VHS, LaserDisc, CD-ROM, DVD, BlueRay, HiDef BluRay, streaming service,...

Or their music, tape, cassette, LP, CD, mini-disc, mp3, streaming,....

>At the same time, on PC I can play almost any game it has existed in PC history.

What you are saying is really:

>At the same time, on X86 I can play almost any game it has existed in X86 history.

What you could compare to if you want apples to apples could be how many old ARM games you can play on X86 or how many old X86 games you can play on ARM.

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