Snotnarok said:
Genesis is compatible to Master System actually, you just needed to buy a extra bit that fit the cartriges, because the Genesis literally has a master system processor for a sound card.
Lots of systems featured BC, Gameboy Color, DS, Atari 7800, Colecovison let you play Atari 2600 games and they were working on one for Intelevision, Playstation 2, Wii.
I don't give a hoot if it saves them money, it's not helping their systems in the long run. Because lets' be realistic here, rumor has it Sony is going to start selling PS2 games on the PSN, hmm, that sounds like what 360 is doing. Oh man they're doing it so they can sell old games! GASP. I get companies have to make money but taking out BC is bullshit and the fact that they did it is pretty lame to me.
And it's not hard to emulate xbox, hell they have the Wii, Gamecube and PS2 (probably xbox at this point) emulated on PC, if a bunch of pirates can do it then the people who MADE THE STUPID CONSOLE should be able to make it work on their system.
Thanks for the info on the SMS, my first sega console was the Dreamcast, so I pretty much missed all that. The Colecovision emulating the 2600 was partly because the 2600 was an obsolete piece of junk whose hardware could be fit in a tiny box when it was first released. That was more cross-compatibility anyway. I mentioned the others...
PCs are much faster on general purpose code than the Xbox360 and PS3. There's no branch prediction (AT ALL) on the new consoles for one thing. They tried for over a year to get the EE and GS to be emulated all on the Cell, but in the end it was just too much. A rule of thumb is that you need 10x as many Flops and Mips on your newer system to emulate the older one. The Xbox360 is only about 5x as fast as the Xbox's processor for a single core on the 360, and only 15x as fast using all cores... then the Pentium 3 had far superior branch prediction. The PS3 has a clock that is 10x as fast, so they could emulate the EE chip even with it's 3 cores, 2 of which are SPE style vector processors, but the GS chip is just so different than anything else, and it's a GPU, rather than a CPU, so emulating it isn't as simple as emulating a processor. Not to mention that the memory bus on the PS2 is very unusual...
I always liken the GS to the Matrox Parhelia. It's really powerful, but doesn't push many triangles. It just layers tons of effects on simple models to make it look good. The Parhelia was the same, very powerful, but its power was used for quadruple layered textures rather than raw triangle pushing. Thus, it got trounced in all of the benchmarks and games that didn't use 4-layer textures... Both really shine when you optimize for them, both are going to be hard to simulate on different architectures even though it seems like they're weaker cards.
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