The PS2’s Backwards Compatibility from the Engineer Who Built It
medium.com
medium.com
Individual games were recompiled for the x86-64 architecture of the xbox one.
If you insert an xbox 360 game disc into an xbox one it simply uses it as a token to prove that you own the physical game, and downloads the xbox-one-native version from Microsoft.
It's worth pointing out that there is an "emulator" but as you noted, it's not for the CPU (it's for the GPU)
Ew.
One thing that stood out to me:
> when I entered the team...I had no real electrical engineering skills to speak of whatsoever and I didn’t even know how to boot up Windows 3.1, let alone how to write any programs...I got the chance to learn how to program computers thanks to a training program that the company ran.
I don't know if that's a function of the 90s, or of Japanese companies, but I almost never hear of companies nowadays taking in completely unskilled employees and training them up.
I also found it quite amusing that the engineer went through all that effort to emulate the PSX sound chip in software, only to have the decision reversed and the hardware chip included in the PS2.
You were brought in, trained up and expected to stay with the company through good and bad times until the day you retire/die.
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Japanese folks consider at-will employment to be an alien institution, much like you might be thinking about the salaryman system. [...] If you hire full-time employees in Japan, you can only dismiss for cause, and the bar is relatively high.
Imagine having the following conversation with the relevant authority: “Incompetence at one’s job is only a reasonable cause for termination if you’ve dutifully discharged your duty to retrain the employee, documented several months of poor performance subsequent to the retraining, and explored options for other jobs they could do for you. After all, everyone starts out at incompetent, right? If we let any company just up and fire anyone merely for not being able to do their job, that would contravene the social purpose of employment.”
If one wants to terminate an employee for poor performance in Japan, the most efficient way is dealing with them like an unwanted New York or San Francisco tenant: offer to buy them out. If they don’t take the buyout and don’t wish to leave, your escalation options are limited and fairly high-stress.