Years ago, some of us on the team started calling backwards compatibility “witchcraft” since no one in the industry expected it to be possible. Only Microsoft’s almost infinite money could pull off that feat on an Xbox One in 2015. Sure, Xbox Series hardware now has an easier time, it was born with that in mind, but imagine being a software engineer at Microsoft and getting keep busy Xbox 360 games on Xbox One FAT. Even Digital Foundry tipped its hat to Microsoft.
With the launch of the Xbox Series, we saw that sorcery in action again. Not for loading games from other generations, but also because the FPS BOOST program added improvements such as increased resolution and frames per second to games that weren’t even designed for it. I insist, if there was anyone who could do that, it was Microsoft.
Microsoft keeps giving up with the FPS BOOST
Unfortunately for us, the company froze the FPS BOOST program. I don’t like to say he canceled it because they never really closed the door, it’s just on hold. The Redmond folks pointed out that the reason for this is the cost and the high number of issues that need to be addressed, and that the technique has some limitations.
Jason Ronald himself commented in a recent interview with TechRadar, that the biggest problem is that they don’t have access to the original code, so in some games it just won’t work.
One of the challenges we have with some of the upgrades and abilities is that we’re doing all of this without modifying the original game code. Therefore, as we identify new techniques to improve and optimize titles, we often know that it won’t work for all games.
Often we try to find solutions and see if we can solve these problems. But since we treat it as a black box, we don’t have the ability to modify the game code directly.
Everything would be much easier if some studios shared some code, which won’t happen and we have proof of that in Xbox 360 backwards compatibility. Fortunately, the good thing about these statements is that It seems that they don’t throw in the towel and maybe in a few years we can see how new games are added to the list.
