| HappySqurriel said: Full backwards compatibility is a nightmare when you look at consoles that switch their architecture from generation to generation; you don't have enough processing power to do a full software emulation so you're forced to do instruction translation which has compatibility issues. |
Yes. It is a hardware issue compounded by multiple subtle software bugs. Many games have problems becuase they didn't follow the official "spec" for development and took advantage of bugs in System X. On System X+1, these bugs may not exist so aren't provided for.
The more complicated the original system and the more it is different from the target system, the harder emulation is. Nintendo would have just as many problems with GC compatibility as MS has with Xbox if they hadn't merely used higher-clocked versions of Gamecube hardware.
