Microsoft announce European Xbox 360 compatibility list.

[Nick]

It looks like us European gamers are going to get less of a deal than our American chums who’ve got a 212 game list of compatible games… We only get 156 and even though the US has more, that’s still less than 25% of the Xbox’s back catalogue.

Check out the full list in this HEXUS.gaming Headline.

[directhex]

as has been pointed out previously, the decisions were made by sales rank, not by actual worth - so utter **** like "bmx xxx" makes the grade, but shenmue 2 and jet set radio future fail it.

[XA04]

"It’s also worth noting that other than Halo and Halo 2, you’ll need to connect to Xbox LIVE to be able to play any of these games in emulation mode."

What is emulation mode?

[TheBuZZard]

Its a mode which emulates an Xbox, its all in the name really. They are planning updating the emulator ever so often to add support for more games and improved function like the HDTV with FSAA mode you can use for Halo/Halo2.

[TiG]

Its the fact they run on PowerPC chips rather than x86 chips like the Xbox does.

Means the instructions will mean nothing to the IBM processor hence you need a x86 decoder to take this instruction and turn it into the X360 one.

TiG

[XA04]

Fair enough, makes sense.

[eloquence]

It's one area where the PS3 is going to make headway... I've checked the list and over half of the games I've got won't run on the 360... the PS3 is planning backwards compatibility with both the PS2 and PS1 games.
It's daft, really, because if they've got a suitable amount of emulation to get most running you'd have thought they'd be able to put in the work to get full backwards compatibility... you can't help but wonder whether it's suffering because of the launch time frame rather than it not being practical to do.

[herulach]

no pgr 1 or2? thats crazy