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Comment by lelandfe | Hacker News Reader

This is about selling older games in their digital store, not about ensuring your old disks can still run, right?

Microsoft's strategy is somewhere between the two, you can put an Xbox 360 disc into a newer Xbox system but what it actually does is download a recompiled version of the game and just uses the original disc as a DRM key to run it. Alternatively you can buy the game digitally and play the recompiled version without a disc, if you want.

Perhaps I'm speaking out of ignorance, but that just seems... excessive. The game's on the disc, why not just play it instead of downloading the whole damn thing?

Can someone explain why this option is preferable to just playing what's on the disc?

Edit: Three immediate, simultaneous, and helpful responses - thank you! :)

The version it downloads isn't the version on the disk. The disc version is compiled for the Xbox 360, not the One/Series.

Xbox games are all VM images so im not it’s even sure it’s recompiled as much as emulated. All they are probably doing is ensuring compatibility . Dave Cutler said XBox is a variant of hyper-v.

Yep and each game comes with a weird windows os it runs the game with. XB360 was the power PC one so it has to do something to emulate it -- since hyperv doesn't emulate it may swap the OS or something

I guess it could still use the assets on the disk, in theory.

you'd have to emulate the 360 arch in software so just probably just easier to download a recompiled game than to solve all emulation challenges and edge cases

I believe that Microsoft actually does emulate the 360 [0] [1]. But compiling the game allows them to deal with some subtleties and also provide upscaled assets where possible.

[0] https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Fission

[1] https://www.ign.com/articles/2017/10/23/the-untold-story-of-...

So one can buy a bunch of cheap Xbox 360/one disks from eBay and they’ll work on a modern Xbox?

Yep, as long as the 360 games are in the 1/3rd or so of the library which got backwards compatibility support.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_backward-compatible_ga...

All Xbox One games will run on the current Xbox Series systems.

That’s pretty neat. And none of that account creation or signup stuff that plagues all modern games?

EDIT: whoa that has original Xbox games too? Like classic Halo?

Some original Xbox games also work but the library is much more limited, only 63 titles are supported, while the 360 has 633.

Halo 1 isn't one of them but they did do a remaster of that for newer systems at least.

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