Microsoft says gamers run the risk of bricking their consoles.

Microsoft's Major Nelson warned Xbox One owners against trying to make their consoles backwards compatible.

A guide making its way around the internet claims you can use the Xbox One's developer tools to let Microsoft's new console play Xbox 360 games. People falling for this trick risk bricking their machines.

"To be clear, there is no way to make your Xbox One backwards compatible & performing steps to attempt this could make your console inoperable," Major Nelson wrote on Twitter.

Earlier this week, a Reddit user discovered Xbox One consoles purchased at retail can access developer settings. However, just because you can activate these settings doesn't mean you should.

"We strongly advise consumers against changing these settings as it could result in their Xbox One becoming unusable," Microsoft said. "Customers who have put their consoles into this developer setting can revert by restoring factory defaults under Settings / System, select Restore Factory Defaults."

If people want to play their 360 games just use a 360 It's a hella lot cheaper than trying to break a Xbox One.

But people want to sell their last console to make some money towards buying the new one.

Ya'll need Super Nintendo  

Do they mean "breaking" the Xbox-One? Or is "bricking" something legit?

"Bricking" is a term meaning it's broke and the console just sits there like a brick, doing jackshit.

I believe the console will still turn on when "bricked", but does nothing ie. red ring for the 360 or the PS4 does that pulsing thing.

No, it literally turns your plastic XBox into a cobblestone brick. Alchemy and all that shit.

bu-dum tshhhhh

Law if equivalent exahange TJ.... it could not turn into a cobblestone brick.

Stinger8 wrote:

Do they mean "breaking" the Xbox-One? Or is "bricking" something legit?

If you do something you arent supposed to (ex: modding or hacking) it can render your console useless.

It's stupid how they don't make the next gens backward compatible

^ It has to do with the way the system was made, it's a lot more advanced.

Meh, shoulda made it another way Then people wouldn't fuck their Xbox up.

Speed Racer wrote:

^ It has to do with the way the system was made, it's a lot more advanced.

No, they just want you to buy the digital downloads of the old games you have instead of playing the copy you already have.

Anti-Diva wrote:

It's stupid how they don't make the next gens backward compatible

Its the same way with computers. Older PC games cant be played on Windows 8 or whatever because the software is too advanced for it to be run.

Dead wrote:

Anti-Diva wrote:

It's stupid how they don't make the next gens backward compatible

Its the same way with computers. Older PC games cant be played on Windows 8 or whatever because the software is too advanced for it to be run.

Ahh I see.

Yeah, another example would be why PS1 discs wouldnt be able to run on PS4s, the software used to run those games is incredibly outdated.

Yet still PS1 discs work on PS3s.

I think a major reason consoles aren't being made backwards capable is so that you'll have to buy and download old titles onto your new console.

That Fuckin' Guy wrote:

Yet still PS1 discs work on PS3s.

and only some Xbox games work on 360

lol more like they want you to re-buy those same games over PSN and Xbox live. The very early PS3's played PS2 and PS1 games, until Sony realised they made a dumb mistake because the PS2 was still making them money. So the next batches got rid of the PS2 compatibility. They would have done the same with the PS2 when that came out, but the online stuff hadn't taken off yet, so PS1 games just worked on that from the get go and it stayed. That was becoming the trend.

Jackall to do with technology. They could do it if they wanted.

From The Guardian:

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/dec/12/ps4-and-xbox-one-so-why-arent-they-backwards-compatible

Quote :

Once upon a time, when you bought a new games console, it was often possible to play most of the games designed for the previous machine. This was a handy feature for people who didn't want to have multiple plastic boxes under their television sets, or for those who didn't own the previous device, but did want access to its inevitably much larger and cheaper array of games. Now however, it seems that for Sony and Microsoft, backwards compatibility, is itself a relic. Unless you have a Wii U, which steadfastly supports its successful predecessor, the present doesn't want anything to do with the past.

Take a look at the sleek new PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles – neither is backwards compatible with their predecessors. You can't put a PS2 game into PS4 and expect it to work, just as your Xbox One will shrug indifferently if you slot in, say, the original Halo: Combat Evolved. There are plenty of gamers who don't care about this – they'll keep their old machines anyway. But there are clearly enough consumers who do want backwards compatibility to become the targets of an internet hoax. A recent post on the notorious 4Chan forum encouraged gamers to access the developer mode on their new Xbox Ones and then enter a code that would ostensibly "unlock" the machine's hidden ability to play Xbox 360 titles. It didn't do that, however, it instead locked the machine into an endless reboot cycle, effectively rendering it useless. What japes!

So if there's enough desire out there for backwards compatibility to warrant a hilarious internet trick, why don't the manufacturers supply it? These are expensive, technically advanced consoles, after all. How hard can it be? Well, the answer is, "very hard and getting harder with every successive generation".

Implement or emulate

There are effectively two ways to provide compatibility with previous consoles: through hardware implementation, or via software emulation of the old machine. In the former case, it involves actually including some of the chips from the old machine in the new machine. The Nintendo Wii, for example, was in many ways just a more powerful version of the older GameCube, so backwards compatibility was reasonably straightforward – indeed the Wii originally had GameCube controller sockets and two memory card slots. It was like a GameCube in disguise. The PlayStation 2, meanwhile, had the original PlayStation chipset built in, so it ran pretty much any PSone title – and when that chip wasn't being used for backwards compatibility it doubled as an input/output processor, which was pretty canny.

"What's different now is the increased complexity in hardware and software, and heat issues," says veteran coder and game designer Martin Hollis. "The best way to support your old console, in terms of broadest support of all old games, is to actually include the hardware of the old system inside the new one. CPU, GPU, sound chips, ideally the whole caboodle.

"This works well enough when you look at the price list for components, as the old chips have become cheap enough to include without bumping the cost of the new system. Sadly though, with the high frequency clock rates (GHz), designing your board to incorporate the entire old machine is not easy or cheap, and worse, it will emit just as much heat as the old system did on it's own. Heat is a big factor with modern system designs and you do not want to add 100 watts to your output, and another jet turbine style fan."

So as new hardware becomes more complex, the inclusion of older chips and processors becomes more expensive, and with margins so tight (manufacturers often make a loss on new machines anyway), it's an easy feature to jettison. Indeed, although both the original versions of the Wii and the PS3 included old feature-sets in the architecture, later versions ripped these out to cut down on costs and allow for price drops.

Virtual boy

So what about emulation? This involves running a program on the new console that effectively pretends to be the old machine so that it can play classic games. Nintendo, for example, offers its Virtual Console service for the Wii and 3DS which allows owners to download and play classic Super Nintendo, Game Boy and even Sega Mega Drive titles in their original form.

Once again, however, the problem with emulating more recent consoles is technological advance. "It was when the PS3 tried to emulate the PS2 that the increase in technology began to present problems," says developer Byron Atkinson-Jones, whose new game Blast 'Em has just been released. "Like the PS1, the PS2 had a single processor but the graphics system was a lot more complex, allowing for parallel processing, which meant it could run more than one bit of code at a time. You can emulate this on the more modern processors but you have to get the timing between the true hardware-based parallel processing and the software emulated version exactly right. And that timing would also have to take into account the differences between the territory versions, i.e. a game running on PAL or NTSC. Along with other factors that might be enough to break a game."

And timing is not the only issue – the increasing adaptability of the hardware itself is also causing problems. "It's complexity versus schedule," says Hollis. "If your emulated graphics processor is programmable (as PS3 and Xbox 360 are) that creates a huge explosion of possibilities to emulate and test – easily trillions of cases. We are talking large possibility spaces here. No way you are going to be able to emulate all the games, and do the job in a rush. If you had ten years, well maybe.

"The second piece of bad news is performance headroom. To emulate an old system's hardware in software you need a system which is significantly more powerful, I'd say ten times more powerful is a good rule of thumb. This current generation is simply not that much more powerful than the last, especially in terms of general purpose compute. Moore's law is basically over for CPUs, and has been for around five years. That means new machines do not have the power to emulate last generation in software."

Cloud saves the day?

So does this mean we'll never see old games on new consoles? Of course not. Nostalgia sells, after all. Next year we'll see the launch of the Gaikai service on PlayStation 4, which will allow gamers to live stream games over the internet from a central server. Sony has already promised to make key PlayStation 3 titles playable via this platform, which removes the need for the console itself to perform the emulation. Of course, this won't let you play your old PS3 discs on your PS4, but it will at least let you re-discover (and of course, re-pay for) old classics. Meanwhile, Xbox One could theoretically perform the same service via cloud computing, but the company has expressed doubts that current broadband speeds would be able to provide a playable experience.

In short, backwards compatibility is becoming a complex problem for manufacturers and one they would rather push to one side, especially as only a minority of gamers seem interested. The incredibly successful launches of both the PS4 and Xbox One this November have shown that there is still huge demand for new hardware, whether it plays old games or not. And for those who don't want to let go of favourite games and treasured machines, it's likely there will be enough support for the PS3 and Xbox 360 to keep these old-timers going for at least a year.

But for modern machines it seems, the past is very much a Foreign country; people do things way too differently there.