drkohler said:
Ever heard of a thing called Shader Code? Unless develpers have been distributing their games with its shader code as source (almost certainly not the case, always binary), there is no way for full BC. It is very unlikely that the next gen gpu architecture fully "understands" old shader code (with all the timing problems as a supplement not even mentioned. Well k I just did..). (That is likely the thing with "no full X360 bc on X1", there are games that just can't be emulated/reverse compiled unless MS gets access to the shader code.) |
Don't console makers give devs access to their systems below a given level only through their APIs and standard libraries? This should give them enough knowledge and instruments to make a translation layer. Anyhow, PC and Android show us that if a new architecture is an evolution of the previous one, BC becomes far easier.
I have Win 7 on my PC, and I often play much older games on it, sometimes I had problems with old, ill-behaved DRMs, other times I had to get, usually from GOG, a new, tweaked setup to install them properly, but I rarely had problems with graphics, and in this case, most of the times it was just that the game offered a limited selection of possible resolutions, none of which looking good on new monitors, and even in this case I always found tweaks that solved the problem.
