After the Halo 360 'upgrades' yesterday, Next Generation went looking for more information on other Xbox titles. What we found out was less than conclusive but Microsoft will be making announcements about it in the next 24 hours.
Having spoken to sources at a few major publishers and developers (unfortunately none of which would go on the record) there seems to be some frustration from these parties on issues of backwards compatibility for Xbox 360.
A few of these developers and publishers had thrown source code over the wall to Microsoft under the auspices of having backward compatibility profiles and/or optimizations done for them. Unfortunately, most of these sources complained that once they had done delivered the code to Microsoft, they'd had very few updates (and in one case, no updates) on the status of their games.
One of the sources confirmed that he knew his game was getting a similar anti-aliasing treatment to Halo (he hadn't heard about 720p upscaling) and he thought that some sort of color improvement would come due to the rendering differences on 360 versus the original Xbox.
Based upon this info and the Halo upgrades, anti-aliasing seems to be the "flick a swich" improvement being given to many titles. Given that ATI's architecture emphasizes low cost anti-aliasing, this shouldn't be terribly surprising.
So in light of these findings, Next Generation went to Microsoft to see if we couldn't get more of the story straight from them, both with regard to what's happening with backward compatibility and why third parties seemed out of the loop on their own product's status.
The only thing a Microsoft spokesperson was willing to tell us is that announcements on exactly these issues were coming tomorrow (Friday, November 11).
So stay tuned.