Do you know how Switch 2 backwards compatibility works?

[Wman1996]

Pemalite said:

Xbox's backwards compatibility is much more complicated.

The Xbox One actually included hardware support for some Xbox 360 stuff like texture and audio formats.
However they recompiled the entire Xbox 360 software environment, OS, API's, Drivers, the lot and virtualized it.
They also repackaged the games, they take the PowerPC code, reverse engineered it into an intermediate, then emulate for x86.

Basically Microsoft did a hybrid approach. They have emulation, they have virtualization, they have partial hardware support, they recompiled and they used a translation layer to achieve backwards compatibility.

Nintendo isn't doing the same approach here, there isn't any need, they are relying on the fact that the hardware and software is an evolution rather than a clean slate.

I still can't believe how dumb Microsoft was to not include any backwards compatibility for the first few years of Xbox One.

They could've undercut Sony by saying "PS4 has no backwards compatibility. We want you to be able to play many of your digital and physical Xbox 360 titles as you move on to Xbox One."

Now backwards compatibility is often oversold by some people. It's pro-consumer and convenient, but usually not a big selling point. But it would've absolutely helped Xbox as a whole earlier than later, especially if Kinect wasn't forced with Xbox One in the package and Xbox One was the same price as PS4.