Back before Christmas, I had pondered getting an XBox 360. Hey, it would let me play the new Pacman, and that Braid game sounds really good.
Then I discovered according to Wikipedia and Microsoft, there are a number of XBox games we have at home that can't be played on the 360.
So I’d have to keep the old XBox going to play them. That sucks.
And at least one of them is a Microsoft game.
- Midtown Madness 3
- Shrek 2
- Wallace and Gromit
- Midway Arcade Classics
- Pro Evolution Soccer 4
Evidently each game needs an emulation profile. Which means I suppose that alas the XBox 360 is not sufficiently advanced as to be able to fully and properly emulate the original XBox, which is why each game needs to be made compatible individually.
We ended up getting a Wii for Christmas. Admittedly the old XBox hasn't been switched-on since.
At least Nintendo do their backward compatibility properly. Having seen how Microsoft's dealt half-heartedly with the old XBox, I wouldn't have wanted to buy into another technological dead-end.
I might see what's out there to turn it into a Media Centre instead.
I have an Xbox that I was using as a media center for a while. It was on the LAN and accessed the media from a separate machine.
Pros:
– Awesome interface
– Easy to control using the controllers
Cons:
– Noisy
– Limited outputs – couldn’t do HDMI or surround sound
– Couldn’t play large files smoothly
I’m now using a Vista Media Center PC. It cost a bit to set up but has better outputs and will play high quality media. However it’s much more flaky than the good old XBMC. It also has horrible functionality out of the box and you have to mess around with lots of plugins to make it flexible enough.
If you want to build a PC, check out http://xbmc.org/. It runs on windows, linux and mac os x. Using it on a linux box might be a good, cheap way out (although you’ll still have the issue of noise to deal with if you don’t have a quiet PC.
Very true about the noise from the Xbox… probably the noisiest computer-type device I have.