XBOX 360 to NOT be backwards compatible!!

This is, in short, completely and utterly incorrect.

The 360 will support the original Xbox games. No re-buying anything.

The promise of ensuring all top games at lauch, but possibly not 100% of games is simply a CYA move so that joe blow who bought super value game Cheese Shooters for $15 at Wal-Mart can't complain when it doesn't work on the new system because the developers used undocumented system calls that weren't in the original API.

Promising 100% compatibility would open Microsoft up to a lawsuit claim.


And as far as keeping hardware compatibility being such an "easy" task as some in here have claimed, you all seem to forget that it was SONY that broke compatibility with some ofthe original PS2 games in Japan when it revised the hardware.

There are a handful of Japanese launch titles that will ONLY run on the original PS2 hardware and will not run on later revisions. The discs had to be remastered to run on the new hardware. Oops.

-hl718

 

Many many game .xbe's already run from hdd, which indeed allow a "backdoor". This is a very feasible path for them if new .xbe's are needed.

 

If they go for the .xbe off the hdd option, I can see them implementing that like the Trainers on the Xbox now.