Do you know how Switch 2 backwards compatibility works?

[Pemalite]

Wman1996 said:

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. 

Xbox One's backwards compatibility required a ton of software engineering and resources... They couldn't just brute force backwards compatibility like you would get on PC as the Jaguar CPU cores were comparatively garbage... Keep in mind that Xenon could use 40-bit floating point extended math, Jaguar was limited to 32-bit or 64-bit, so down-sampling 40-bit to 32-bit would cause all sorts of precision issues especially dealing with things like collision detection... And upsampling to 64-bit was slow and a waste of resources.
So Microsoft had to get clever with how they approached it, hence the hybrid approach of recompiling code, repackaging, native hardware support, emulation, virtualization and more to make it work.

...Microsoft obviously had plans for Xbox 360 backwards compatibility on Xbox One while they were designing the console due to having hardware support for Xbox 360 texture and audio formats in hardware natively, rather than just using an off-the-shelf Radeon GCN part... So I would hazard a guess that the delayed rollout was trying to get the best performance and compatibility they could on the Xbox One's anemic hardware before they announced it, takes time to build this stuff unfortunately.

Honestly, I was always impressed with what Microsoft managed to achieve on Xbox One in terms of backwards compatibility... Many new games got a new-lease on life with the Xbox One X enhancements as well, some resulting in the best/definitive versions of those games being 4k, 60fps with better texture filtering.

The Achilles heel was always the licensing though, the Xbox 360 ironically has better backwards compatibility in terms of number of games for OG Xbox titles... And there are many amazing Xbox 360 games that are stuck on the Xbox 360... Which is unfortunate.

Thankfully in 2025 backwards compatibility is now an expectation.