Then why bother?

Posted Jan 5, 2009 11:39 UTC (Mon) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)
In reply to: Then why bother? by Kit
Parent article: Android netbook is a possibility (Inquirer)

It's important to look beyond the headlines.

There's a difference between the marketing bullet point "backward compatible" and actual backward compatibility. After all, the Linux kernel's continued support for early ELF binaries with the original system calls means in theory you can run a 13 year old Linux program on today's Fedora, but no-one pretends (as the grandparent poster does for consoles) that means 99% compatibility.

The Wii plays Gamecube games, mostly. I'd buy the idea that it could even be 99% of them (not that anyone can think of more than ten decent Gamecube games). The 360 plays /some/ Xbox titles, but notably not several best selling ones that people are most likely to own (it's all very well having a big list of titles like "Barbie Horse Adventures" and various movie tie-in generic platformers, but no-one actually owns those, they're shelf-filler). Microsoft claims that overall "more than 50%" work, but they count a game as "working" even if it's noticeably slower and has visual defects.

The PS3 is even worse - some models, those released early in Japan and North America, had expensive compatible hardware to run most of the GTA games (with "some issues" ie you'll probably still wish you were using a real PS2) but those released later (e.g. in Europe) rely purely on software emulation. Which basically isn't adequate for any of the top-selling games on the PS2. This means even if a game works on your friend's PS3, it may not work on yours. You have to compare the model of hardware you have to a compatibility list...

The console makers know that back compat is mostly a marketing bullet point, customers (particularly the most profitable ones who buy lots of new games) don't really use the back compat. So it's important to have some sort of offering, but you can't afford to spend much R&D money on it. If it falls out naturally from evolving hardware, great. Otherwise, too bad.

I think the "enterprise" Linux distributions can do a pretty good job of supporting the same binaries for 10 years or so, via compat packages, configuration of the environment (with judicious symlinks etc.) and so on. It shouldn't be a huge surprise if the same isn't true in Fedora 11 where the OS itself has a life of only 12-13 months.

Bullet point?

Posted Jan 5, 2009 13:11 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

The console makers know that back compat is mostly a marketing bullet point, customers (particularly the most profitable ones who buy lots of new games) don't really use the back compat. So it's important to have some sort of offering, but you can't afford to spend much R&D money on it. If it falls out naturally from evolving hardware, great. Otherwise, too bad.

Sorry but the fact that XBox360 and PlayStation3 (both with radical changes in hardware from predeccessors) support any backward compatibility means developers spend millions and millions of dollars to achieve that. Backward compatibility is easy way to solve checken and egg problem: nobody buys your console because there are no games for it - and game developers don't create games because there are no buyers for said games! Microsoft decided to solve the problem by other means: just give money to game deveopers directly - this should be incentive enough. SONY decided that "it's not so important" - and PlayStation3 became a pariah.

Linux developers don't have money to solve the problem "Microsoft way" so the fact that they ignore compatibility problem and talk about "Linux on consumer desktop" is puzzling. There are no way to achieve it - at least with LSB/GNOME/KDE/etc => Linux on consumer desktop is a non- starter. With Android... there are a chance. Small chance to be sure, but a chance...

I think the "enterprise" Linux distributions can do a pretty good job of supporting the same binaries for 10 years or so, via compat packages, configuration of the environment (with judicious symlinks etc.) and so on. It shouldn't be a huge surprise if the same isn't true in Fedora 11 where the OS itself has a life of only 12-13 months.

I don't fault Fedora at all - it's not the system for a consumer desktop, so this level of compatibility is not a requirement.

Then why bother?

Posted Jan 8, 2009 12:45 UTC (Thu) by rwmj (subscriber, #5474) [Link]

The console makers know that back compat is mostly a marketing bullet point, customers (particularly the most profitable ones who buy lots of new games) don't really use the back compat.

That's a joke right? The Wii has backwards compatibility with about a half-dozen consoles. Nintendo sell the older games by the bucketload through their online service.

Rich.