Microsoft Working on Official 360 Emulator?

It appears Microsoft are looking into ways of getting Xbox 360 titles back onto the Xbox One. How far along they are through that process is unknown, and many doubt an emulator is even possible in the first place, but the console manufacturer is, at the very least, trying to work things out.

At Microsoft’s Build conference, an audience member asked partner development lead Frank Savage whether it would one day be possible to play, say, Halo 4 on the Xbox One.

There are [plans for a 360 emulator], but we’re not done thinking them through yet, unfortunately. It turns out to be hard to emulate the PowerPC stuff on the X86 stuff. So there’s nothing to announce, but I would love to see it myself.

As we’ve touched on a few times before, it would be incredibly difficult for either console maker to put last-gen backwards compatibility via an emulator into their new machines because of the huge difference in hardware. Emulating a console takes far more ‘power’ than just playing a game on the original device, which is why there are still SNES emulators that require high end PCs to run. There’s not going a day any time soon where you’ll be able to play a Xbox 360 game anywhere but on a 360, or on a very powerful PC, but, perhaps on a game-by-game basis, Microsoft will find a way.

Via: Kotaku AU