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Comment by primigenus | Hacker News Reader

You know what else is younger than the Xbox 360? 7 year olds, a huge part of the incoming audience for this console generation which will probably last another 10 years, so until they're nearly adults.

Today's 7 year olds grew up in a world where Xbox, Playstation, Wii, Facebook, Android and iPad are a normal part of their universe. There's nothing novel or special about them. If this generation of consoles finds its audience with this age group like the Super NES did for me when I was growing up, the Xbox One, PS4 and Wii U will be much-loved despite their strategies, flaws, cloud computing, DRM or achievements. They will just be loved if they have good games.

We're all cynics who can look back and compare now to then, exclaiming how Facebook and Apple have stolen the market. But for 7 year olds, the world is the world, and they're only getting started. I envy them for the ability to be naive about this stuff. :-)

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Except we can still play our SNES and NES. Due to the fragility of the systems and supposed rumors it is most likely today's 7 year olds won't be able to play their Xbox or Playstation when they are our age, sadly.

They sure don't make games and systems like they used to.

It's not just the fragility of the hardware, but also the increasingly firm stance against backwards compatibility.

No doubt this is driven by publishers, who'd rather focus on big topline profits on new releases than double-dip (or triple-dip) old titles. There's less and less ROI in investing the time, resources, and manpower to build emulation for old console hardware, or to get developers to do the same for their old games.

That being said, I predict we'll see a golden age of backwards compatibility and cross-platform titling within a few console generations. Not for folks like you and me, whose old (by now, ancient!) games are evolutionary dead-ends. But for the 7-year-olds of today, whose consoles are basically just fancy PCs in shiny shells -- and whose games are going to be built very similarly, regardless of platform, and distributed digitally.

There was no backwards compatibility in the 8-bit era. Backwards compatibility was a novel invention of the PS2 and the GBC.

Although, in fairness, complaining about the lack of backwards compatibility has been with us since the SNES. I remember every single console generation brought a predictable chorus of "What?! You mean I'm not going to be able to play other systems' games on this new system? What kind of racket are these guys running?"

False. There was backwards compatibility long before the PS2. Just not in market-leading Nintendo's systems.

Way back even before the 8-bit NES, the Atari 7800 was backwards compatible with Atari 2600 games. So was the ColecoVision, although through a hardware adapter that basically was an entire 2600 on a chip outputting raw video to the ColecoVision.

And the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive had an adapter to play 8-bit Sega Master System games, running the SMS code on an auxiliary sound Z80 in the Genesis, so slightly hardware assisted but mostly built into the console.

I think I should clarify my point about backwards compatibility. I brought it up not to suggest that it was a hallmark of the 8-bit era, but rather, to suggest that backwards compatibility (via emulation, via hardware, etc.) is the only thing that'll allow us to keep playing today's games when today's consoles become obsolete.

This was a supplementary point to the parent post about how old hardware can still be played today, while today's hardware won't be playable in 10 years.

I can see how my comment, as phrased, led to a lot of misinterpretation. My apologies on that.

Yeah, I loved playing NES games on my SNES. Wait.

In all honesty, the digital era could well be a boon for backwards compatibility if anyone tried enough. Nintendo are a great example, packaging up old games to be sold on the Wii Store.

People don't want to pay for the backward compatibility, there is no publisher pressure or other conspiracy.

PS2 had it for free from the design that used the PSX-on-chip as I/O processor. Later consoles had been more integrated and the BC hardware had been additional cost. This is why BC has been removed from PS3 and Wii during cost reducing revisions.

Also, I wonder if emulation of these newer systems, which is a special kind of retrocompability, will be feasible. It seems that the PS3 and XBox360 are already hard to emulate, not only because of complex hardware but because of all the annoying (from an emulator developer's point of view) non-gaming capabilities interfering with the third party software (achievements, online capabilities, etc). Another sad consequence of the consoles who want to be more than consoles. The Wii, on the other hand, has been emulated for a while, despite its unusual controllers.

I can't play my SNES. My N64 only turns on about 1 time out of 10, too.

Thank goodness for emulators.

This is exactly what I thought the article would be about, based on the title.

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