Xbox 360 to be backwards compatible

The questionnaire deals with Xbox Live and says subscribers through the original Xbox will be able to play against gamers on Xbox 2 -- as long as they are playing a current generation Xbox game.

"Xbox Live is an online gaming service that works across both the current Xbox system and the future Xbox 2. You will be able to play online and compete against others across both consoles. If you are playing an Xbox game on Live you will be able to compete against people playing that same game on Xbox 2".

So XBox games will run on "XBox 2".

The hard drive comes in because the original Xbox had one and the games are written to use one.

INQUIRER reader, Epobirs suggests that the hard drive could be used to house an optimisation library of Xbox 360 native binaries to run the first-generation games, thus increasing performance.

This sounds like a pretty good idea to us, and one that has had some use previously, with FX!32 on the DEC Alpha, utilising translations of code it produced previously to optimise the next time an application ran.

It is unlikely that Xbox games running on the Xbox 360 will look any better, although it's possible that they could be anti-aliased using spare graphics power.