At E3 2015, Phil Spencer, the chief of Xbox, took to the stage to announce that the Xbox One would be getting a brand new feature: backwards compatibility with original Xbox games through emulation. Xbox then spent the years since then adding more and more to their backwards compatibility lineup, culminating with this month's recent, and final, addition of original Xbox and 360 titles, emulated and enhanced on the Xbox Series X|S. There are currently no plans for further releases, as Xbox has been unable to acquire further rights to older games beyond what they already have.

In an interview with Axios, Phil Spencer said due to some older games being harder to track down and play, as opposed to how it is with more accessible content like music or movies, that he hopes, "as an industry we'd work on legal emulation that allowed modern hardware to run any (within reason) older executable allowing someone to play any game", advocating for other companies to make use of "legal" video game emulation.

"I think in the end, if we said, ‘Hey, anybody should be able to buy any game, or own any game and continue to play,' that seems like a great North Star for us as an industry"

Source

 

[64bitmodels]

I bet his definition of "legal" emulation means emulating on a current generation console and re-buying your library.

nah that's nintendo's idea

 

[FAST6191]

No, because engineering a console that can play say Nintendo games without Nintendo's permission is illegal. Souljaboy tried to come out with a console that played older roms and was quickly sued and was no longer able to sell it. The same would apply even if you made the console to play original games you need the company's permission. Nintendo does not agree to let it's games on any other console or even PC. Sony is the same deal, despite allowing a few of it's games on PC.

It is not. A console is an arrangement of chips, most of which Nintendo do not own either, and you can usually work around any BIOS concerns as well. This is one of the major things underpinning the viability of emulation, along with preservation/cross compatibility, disability access and homebrew development.

I imagine Nintendo and Sony would throw nuisance lawsuits in the "my wallet is bigger" (mainly because they have on multiple occasions) for the smaller guys. Would love to see a knock down and drag out fight between them and Microsoft though a la Apple and Samsung, Google and Oracle and all the others.

Key part of the Souljaboy saga was it coming with ROMs too.

Can they not just release a generic emulator with a few options that will play old games from disk and wouldnt therefore involve distributing licensed content. Sure not everything would run perfectly but it would be something.

Possible, especially with the increasing power of consoles and thus not needing the potentially murkier world of game specific emulation hacks (though I am not sure of the basis upon which such things get challenged).
The only concern* would be how accurate they make it and whether that fulfils customer requirements, possibly legal ones (if you sell a product then it is presumed to do what it claims sort of thing, though there is "without expressed warranty and implied warranty of merchantability" type setups aka most open source)

*maybe they could face all the remaining industry being arseholes and turning their back on them (because emulation Unreal says no Microsoft builds, Valve says Steam is Linux/steambox only, ID says no more, EA says no more, Ubisoft says no more...). I would love to see that as well even if only because I would probably be able to gather enough salt for the rest of my days.

 

[Kopimist]

No, because engineering a console that can play say Nintendo games without Nintendo's permission is illegal. Souljaboy tried to come out with a console that played older roms and was quickly sued and was no longer able to sell it. The same would apply even if you made the console to play original games you need the company's permission. Nintendo does not agree to let it's games on any other console or even PC. Sony is the same deal, despite allowing a few of it's games on PC.

The problem with Souljaboy's consoles were they came preloaded with pirated roms. Emulation within itself isn't illegal. Clone consoles of old systems no longer protected by patents is also legal.

 

[Deleted member 534570]

Nintendo: Look at all those lawsuits!

 

[Kwyjor]

Anyway roll on MS or someone making a nice USB dumping tool for cartridges for everything (or at least the big three/four of any given generation) and having that feed emulation. Would not even be that much of a mess (GBA covers all GB stuff, 3ds does most of the rest, NES, SNES, megadrive, at least base master system, floppy, N64, tape maybe, maybe suitable neo geo, everything else is optical really). Make it modular and it probably goes low, an all in one would probably still even sell and actually not be that large and also be the first addon that was not a controller anybody cared about in the history of games.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrode

 

[FAST6191]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrode

Familiar with it. Someone with MS' clout, distribution and manufacturing base however doing that would be what I want to see.

 

[Kwyjor]

Someone with MS' clout, distribution and manufacturing base however doing that would be what I want to see.

I would say the fact that it's been done and someone with "clout, distribution, and manufacturing base" didn't step up would suggest there is no profitable way to manufacture and market such a device.

After all, there's nothing you could really do with such a device that you couldn't accomplish just as easy with five minutes on Google, aside from getting warm fuzzy feelings about knowing that you generated your data yourself.

 

[FAST6191]

I would say the fact that it's been done and someone with "clout, distribution, and manufacturing base" didn't step up would suggest there is no profitable way to manufacture and market such a device.

After all, there's nothing you could really do with such a device that you couldn't accomplish just as easy with five minutes on Google, aside from getting warm fuzzy feelings about knowing that you generated your data yourself.

I imagine it would be something of a loss leader, or loss leader in the eyes of accountants (that much effort vs what could be gained doing many other jobs). Wouldn't be surprised if there is a bit of a moratorium on it after the lawyer gained a nice heart murmur the last time it was brought up.

Saves and backup thereof would probably be an exception though.

Equally plenty of things in controller world only really happened after the big players stepped in, this despite third party controllers being a thing for years otherwise.

 

[ChibiMofo]

By legal emulation he's basically saying people shouldn't need to resort to piracy in order to access old games which is illegal emulation, not that emulators are illegal.

Gee, thanks Captain Obvious.

 

[tech3475]

Sega has sold and re-sold their library so many times over that they can barely give the games away anymore (i.e. Sega Forever).

That's the thing here: it doesn't really matter so much what Nintendo lets you do; if you want, you can get almost any old Nintendo game running on your PC in minutes. But you can't do anything like that with XBox games because no one really figured out how to make the relevant emulators.

I’ve heard that there has been some effort relatively recently to make a working Xbox emulator on Modern Vintage Gamer’s Youtube channel.

But still, I think you missed my point which is that it would be nice if companies took the same approach as opposed to the MD games specifically, including MS.

 

[Lather]

There is no economic benefit, and it is completely unnecessary. Not everyone likes to play old games, and not everyone can play all platforms and old games.

 

[boot3]

Phil Spencer is actually based.

 

[ZeroT21]

With legal, he meant ''pay to play'' only

 

[dsdavis6]

No, because engineering a console that can play say Nintendo games without Nintendo's permission is illegal. Souljaboy tried to come out with a console that played older roms and was quickly sued and was no longer able to sell it. The same would apply even if you made the console to play original games you need the company's permission. Nintendo does not agree to let it's games on any other console or even PC. Sony is the same deal, despite allowing a few of it's games on PC.

I,m talking about older xbox titles

 

[AkikoKumagara]

I bet his definition of "legal" emulation means emulating on a current generation console and re-buying your library.

That doesn't seem to be what this implies:

"I think in the end, if we said, ‘Hey, anybody should be able to buy any game, or own any game and continue to play,' that seems like a great North Star for us as an industry"

 

[Codemastershock]

But emulation is legal. So I guess he approves of all emulation? Didn't know big wigs at Microsoft would approve.

as said before: emulators are legal, the process of emulating a game is not.

 

[sarkwalvein]

I bet his definition of "legal" emulation means emulating on a current generation console and re-buying your library.

Please, I have been playing emulated Xbox 360 games since a long time ago by just putting my old X360 disk in the XBone. If any of the big companies cannot be accused of forcing you to rebuying your library, it is Microsoft.

 

[SG854]

I will only support Emulators if they have 4k DLSS. Until then I won't bother. DLSS is the way of life.

 

[megabug7]

PS2 Classics on PS4 was a great initiative but sadly it had no staying power.
49 titles I believe were ported via official emulation.
Whether it was Sony who gave up or whether gamers weren't interested - we might never know

 

[gudenau]

as said before: emulators are legal, the process of emulating a game is not.

Nah the process is legal. :V