Since long before the unveiling of Microsoft's Xbox 360 at E3, questions have been asked concerning backwards compatibility with regular Xbox games. At E3, Microsoft confirmed the "best selling" Xbox titles will be compatible with the Xbox 360. That was a far cry from Sony's promise of total backwards compatibility with its PS3, as far back as the 1st PlayStation.The incompatibility stems from the fact that today's Xbox runs on an Nvidia graphics chip, where as the 360 will have an ATI powered GPU. In a bold move, Microsoft has signed a deal with Nvidia to license their technology in order to provide backwards compatibility in the Xbox 360.
Some reports suggest that backwards compatibility was not even part of the original Xbox 360 specifications. Only this year at E3 did potential consumers get the word about some small (some might say misleading) backwards compatibility. 1up.com are now reporting that Microsoft has indeed licensed parts of Nvidia's technology from the original Xbox in order to allow its emulation in the Xbox 360, this deal means Nvidia will be seeing lots of Microsoft Dollars for many years to come.
The company apparently plans to emulate the Xbox' Intel CPU on the 360's multiple IBM PowerPC cores, and will now be able to emulate the NVIDIA chip to some extent on the ATI graphics chip in the 360 - but it would appear that many games will still not work without some modification.
Patches for some popular games - or "emulation profiles" - will ship on the Xbox hard drive, and those games will as a result work out of the box. Microsoft is expected to work to get emulation working for other games over time, and will distribute further emulation profiles over the Xbox Live service.
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